‘One-Man Nutcracker’ in Philly: After 5 years, the ballet spoof has gotten serious about dance

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“One-Man Nutcracker,” a witty and irreverent take on the classic holiday ballet, returns to The Drake theater in Center City this week. Now in its fifth year, the unconventional production is on its way to cementing its place as an offbeat tradition of the holiday season.

Creator and performer Chris Davis deconstructs the classic story into a personal journey, with jokes. Although not the standard “Nutcracker” audiences might see performed by the Philadelphia Ballet two blocks away at the Academy of Music, he says it satisfies the same basic requirements.

“’The Nutcracker’ is very much an American phenomenon,” Davis said. He brought the show to a German festival earlier this year.

“It’s like you must get a stocking and put it over the fireplace and go to ‘The Nutcracker.’ You have eggnog and you must see ‘The Nutcracker.’ It’s on the list,” he added.

When Davis first premiered the show in 2019, part of the humor came from the spectacle of watching a 37-year-old man with little dance experience fumble his way through awkward ballet moves.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Land of Sweets: Five years later, Davis has gotten serious about dance. He takes ballet classes daily, his body is leaner and more lithe, and his movements are more graceful.

“The first one really was about this guy that really can’t do it, but he’s gonna try. Now I have some of the skills,” he said. “This show, honestly, is so much harder than the show I did before because I am trying to make the ballet respectable. When I first did it was more for comedic effect.”

Last fall Davis premiered another ballet-inspired comedy at the Philly Fringe Festival, “The 40 Year-Old Ballerino,” in which he demonstrated how he used a dance discipline to overcome vices such as alcohol, television and a personal roadblock: ageism. Where most great ballet dancers began as very young children, it can seem like a pipe dream to someone rolling up on 40.

“When you start in your late 30s doing a physical art form, you kind of think: ‘Oh, time passed me,’” he said. “But then you realize that’s not true for anything. You always have time to try something and to change.”

In “One-Man Nutcracker,” Davis performs all the main roles of the well-worn tale, making references to the original story by E.T.A. Hoffman and to his own life. In the show he gives a shout-out to Amy Novinski, who runs a ballet studio in the Bok Building in South Philadelphia where Davis takes classes six days a week. Davis credits Novinksi for his ability to get a foothold in ballet.

“It is terrifying to go into a class. You look around, these people are doing these things, like, I can’t do this,” he said. “Amy makes it feel a lot warmer and a lot nicer. She’s an excellent teacher. Her taking me seriously helped me learn to take myself seriously.”

The play had a rocky start. The year after premiering “One-Man Nutcracker,” Davis could only bring it back as a live streaming performance over the internet, due to COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.

The year after that he did not stage it at all, as he contemplated quitting theater altogether.

“It was a really hard time for all performers in the city,” Davis said. “All a lot of us went through a sort of depression. Just like, ‘What do we do with ourselves?’”

Dancing helped Davis rediscover the lure of live theater.

“The human connection, that is what life’s about,” he said. “When I take ballet, I’m in a class with 12 to 15 other dancers and we’re all connected in that moment, we’re all feeling the same things. The music and that connection runs through you. It’s the same thing when I make a play.”

“It sounds crazy but ‘One-Man’ really does celebrate what it means to be alive, and especially celebrates the magic of theater,” he said. “Because it’s live, it’s there, it’s present, it’s connecting.”

“One-Man Nutcracker” runs from Dec. 10–29 at the Louis Bluver Theatre inside The Drake at 321 S. Hicks Street.