Oakland ‘Nutcracker’ sweet but uneven

[...] audiences have had the last word and the youthful crowd at the Paramount Theatre Saturday afternoon, expressed their pleasure with the Oakland Ballet’s staging with cheers and, alas, chatter.

The weekend marked the sixth holiday season for Artistic Director Graham Lustig’s “Nutcracker,” and the production has become a part of the Bay Area holiday schedule.

Lustig goes his own way setting the first act in pre-World War 1 Vienna, made concrete with Zack Brown’s appealing Secession-era designs and costumes.

Uncle Drosselmeyer is no old geezer, but a genial young Viennese metrosexual (Scott McMahon) who fancies a walk on stilts (his green formal wear is a mistake).

Lustig makes his own choices and you succumb to the charms, even if, like the air balloon, you’d feel churlish for resisting.

The transformation from toy to human nutcracker (behind a curtain) lacks magic, while Lustig never quite synchronizes the growing Christmas tree with its corresponding place in the Tchaikovsky score.

The Oakland Ballet lists only 20 dancers and they are not enough, especially in the waltz of the flowers, to make the intended effect.

Lustig recruited 40 young Bay Area dancers who appear as everything from peppermints to snowballs and they all seemed disciplined, Among the professionals, Megan Terry’s sugar plum fairy (warm and supple) and her cavalier, Jesse Campbell (good partnering), commanded attention in the grand pas de deux.