A magical evening at the ballet

What a fabulous evening we had last night seeing the Nutcracker ballet in the beautifully restored Angela Peralta Theatre.  The photo above is the open-air lobby with Doris and Harry ready to go in and find their seats. This theatre is in the old part of town where there are buildings from the 1800s.  It’s the cultural centre of Mazatlan and forms part of the historic Plazuela Machado. It seems to be a Mazatlan tradition to perform the Nutcracker Ballet (called Cascanueces in Spanish) at the theatre.  This year it was performed by the Mazatlan School of Ballet with the Cuban National Ballet School, and what an incredible group of young dancers, many of them children.

We bought tickets a week ago to the 5:30 performance and managed to get three of the very last seats in the orchestra.  We wondered what kind of view we'd have from the last row but it was excellent.  Here's what we saw before the perfomance started.  Isn't that lovely?

The early perfomance was the one to go to because it featured the Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra, whereas the 8:00 performance used recorded music.  Plus this performance drew a crowd that included families with children.  People gathered outside the theatre from about 5:00 pm, dressed in a variety of styles.

There were two little girls, both under five, sitting in front of us with their sweet dresses and their hair done up in tight ponytails. They were entranced by the dancing, the music and the incredibly beautiful set--as were we.  The choreography was excellent and the dancers and the costumes blew us away.  None of us are experts in ballet but we were thrilled by this performance.  Harry, who had never previously seen a ballet, says he's now an afficionado.  Here's a photo taken at the end when the whole troupe was on stage.

We ended the evening with dinner outdoors on the plaza under the palm trees twined with twinkling lights, and then took an open air taxi ride along the water to our casa.  My dreams last night were filled with sugar plum fairies and tiny dancing mice.