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In truth, it is its theatricality more than its dancicality that captivates, for North had to create movement that could be performed from beneath his dancers’ heavy costumes. Steps are therefore of classroom simplicity, though there is a notably good pas de deux for the snowman and an Ice Princess, and it is a shame to see such a fine dancer as David Paul Kierce (lately with Northern Ballet Theatre) galumphing around as a Snowman-clad Fred Astaire, with very little to exercise his talents. Yet in spite of these wastes, the show remains as triumphant as it ever was, its childish spirit never relinquishing its potent adult themes.

In the programme booklet the composer, Howard Blake, writes of how a music critic recently compared its musical structure to that of The Nutcracker. I think the comparison might be taken further: its architectural pattern, its narrative ideas, each look back, in their way, to those of The Nutcracker. The first act opens in this world, the childish hero and his Snowman companion turning the everyday ornaments of life into illusions of fantasy, just as before Clara’s eyes, Drosselmeyer transforms the tree and the toy soldiers into objects of mystery. Then at the end of the act, the Snowman guides the child up into the Kingdom of the Snow and its parallel is easy to see in Clara’s own journey to the Kingdom of the Sweets. Therein follow snowy divertissements, before a return to the real world and in the boy’s awakening (and the Snowman’s melting) the realisation of the transience of life.
 

The Snowman has long been praised for its refusal to shirk the adult theme of death and it is this theme, one might easily say, that permeates The Nutcracker too. That ballet’s great musical theme, its long, descending minor scale finds similarities in The Snowman’s famous “Walking in the Air”, and like Clara, the boy here goes to bed a child and awakes having learnt of adult things. Its most striking moment is when that musical theme first appears: the boy and the Snowman are borne aloft on invisible strings and it would take even the most stony hearted of watchers not to be moved at this point. Here, at the work’s heart, as they journey over the mountaintops into the snowy never-never-land, we are shown its magical spirit: that in our yesterdays lie our childhoods, but in our tomorrows lie our dreams.