It Started With One Phone Call

The remarkable story of how North Central Ballet’s Nutcracker became a 32-year tradition.

The Beginning

North Central Ballet was barely a year old when the idea first occurred to me.

It was a beautiful August day in 1994. My friend Debbie—whose daughter was one of my students—had a great deal of production experience, as did I. She was working at Dillard’s when I called her at the store.

“Hey, what do you think about doing a Nutcracker?”

“Give me until five o’clock,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

At five, the phone rang—and that was the beginning.

We had no costumes. No sets. No scenery. No theatre. Nothing.

So naturally, we decided to produce The Nutcracker.

Costumes from Little Rock

We called our friend Kirt Hathaway, who was the director of Ballet Arkansas at the time, and asked whether they had any costumes we could rent.

“Come get them,” he said. “You’re welcome to use them.”

And so our first Nutcracker costumes came home with us from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Scenery from San Francisco

At about the same time, my dear friend Angela Jackson from Houston Dance Theatre called me, very excited.

“There is a Nutcracker set for sale right now. Buy it!”

“Well, what does it look like?” I asked.

“Stop asking questions and buy it!”

So I called the woman selling it in San Francisco. She told me that several other people were interested and that she was speaking with all of them.

A couple of days later, she called me back.

“It’s yours,” she said.

“Wow. What happened to all the other people?”

“You were the nicest person I talked to on the phone, so I wanted you to have it.”

And just like that, we owned the sets and scenery from Berkeley City Ballet in California—sight unseen.

My grandfather, my aunt, and I flew to San Francisco, packed everything into duffel bags and U-Haul boxes, and brought it home.

It was absolutely enormous.
It is still absolutely enormous.

Finding Our First Theatre

With costumes from Little Rock and scenery from San Francisco, we now needed a theatre.

I went to the Arts Council of Northeast Tarrant County and told them what we were trying to do. They became genuinely excited about the idea and partnered with us, securing Carroll High School’s auditorium for our first production.

I cannot even tell you how many performances we presented that year.

Children from school districts throughout the area were bused in to see the production. Because Carroll’s auditorium did not seat very many people, we performed show after show after show after show.

And Then There Was the Fog Machine

No one had remembered to disarm the school’s smoke alarms. At the beginning of Act II, we turned on the fog, set off every fire alarm in the building, and had to evacuate the entire school—during test week.

That went over well.

There was also the small matter of our enormous scenery. When we unfolded the painted drops on the Carroll stage, we discovered they were twice as tall as the theatre could accommodate.

My mentor, Jane Quinton—who remains my mentor to this day—told me to go buy a whole stack of one-by-fours.

My grandfather and I headed to Home Depot.

Jane rolled the tops of those beautiful drops around the boards and drilled straight through them.

I thought I was going to die.

But the drops fit, the fire alarms were eventually silenced, the audience returned to the building, and North Central Ballet’s first Nutcracker came to life.

Needless to say, we were exhausted by the time it was over.

But we also realized that we had created something meaningful—something we could give to the community.

A Tradition Takes Root

Over the years, extraordinary guest artists from some of the world’s great ballet companies—including Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and the Kirov Ballet—have taken our stage as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.

Just as importantly, North Central Ballet has trained its own dancers who grew into artists fully capable of stepping onto that same stage and carrying those roles themselves.

Through our educational outreach program, we have presented The Nutcracker to more than 150,000 elementary school children throughout our area school districts.

A Nutcracker Tradition for Girl Scouts

Education has been part of this production since its beginning in 1994. That first year, we also created a special Girl Scout program. Participating troops receive an educational packet that helps the dancers and the story come alive, and each Girl Scout earns an actual Nutcracker performance patch for her uniform.

I design a new patch every year, making each season—and each patch—a small piece of our history.

Opening the Theatre to More Families

More recently, that commitment to making the arts accessible led us somewhere new.

Last year, I received an email from a woman asking whether we offered a performance for individuals with sensory needs. I realized immediately how necessary this was—and that if anyone was going to do it, it was going to be us.

Our new sensory-friendly production has been a tremendous success. I have received the kindest messages from families thanking us because they had never before been able to take their child to the theatre to enjoy a live performance.

One woman sent me an especially heartfelt email. I asked how old her child was.

“Twenty-eight,” she told me.

If I had not already known we were doing the right thing, that cinched it.

We are fortunate to partner with MHMR of Tarrant County, which helps us provide a sensory-friendly area in the lobby with the resources and supplies families may need during the performance.

After last year’s performances, I received a letter in the mail filled with drawings the children had made in that space. They were absolutely beautiful.

I sat down and cried.

In that moment, I understood in a completely different way what North Central Ballet can mean in the lives of children and families—and what a difference we are capable of making together.

Twenty-Five Years at Will Rogers

For 25 years, Will Rogers Auditorium was our home. It was the one theatre large enough for us to unfold those original drops completely and show them in all their beauty.

With nearly 3,000 seats, it also allowed us to welcome as many as 6,000 schoolchildren to two educational performances each year.

And Then the Pandemic Happened

Will Rogers called and asked whether I was still going to produce the show.

How? How could that possibly work?

They explained that they could physically remove every other row and every other seat, essentially turning a 3,000-seat auditorium into a 600-seat house.

That was not going to work.

Many of you know that my alter ego is an avid boater. I was sitting on the dock at Grapevine Lake when I received that phone call. I was frustrated and angry, and as I looked across the water, I noticed the park on the opposite shore.

And I thought: That’s how we’ll do it.

We will build a stage in a park. We will bring in a giant screen and project the scenery. We will perform The Nutcracker outside.

I began making phone calls—to the Army Corps of Engineers, the marina staff, and finally the City of Grapevine—to find out what it would take to permit an outdoor production.

As luck would have it, the head of Grapevine Parks and Recreation answered the phone.

We talked for a few minutes. Then, about five minutes after we hung up, he called me back.

“What exactly is it that you want to do?” he asked.

I had not fully considered that Grapevine is the Christmas Capital of Texas. I told him I wanted to produce The Nutcracker and preserve our tradition.

We had several graduating seniors that year. I was not going to allow those dancers to work so hard for so many years only to lose their final Nutcracker.

That simply was not going to happen.

He asked whether I would be interested in partnering with the City of Grapevine Parks and Recreation and presenting the production as part of the Christmas Capital of Texas.

“What does that look like to you?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “What does it look like to you?”

“I have no idea either.”

And off we went.

The Nutcracker Under the Stars

We brought in one of those enormous concert stages that travels on a trailer and rolls open on-site. The City of Grapevine had already marked Meadowmere Park with ten-foot-by-ten-foot squares for an earlier outdoor concert. Each square could hold ten people, with six feet separating it from the next.

At our very first performance, more than 2,000 people filled that park.

We were extraordinarily lucky that first year. December was warm, the weather was beautiful, and everything worked.

The next two years were not quite so kind.

By the third year, it was bitterly cold, and the wind coming off the lake was so powerful that it lifted the pop-up tents we were using as dressing rooms, twisted them into pieces, and deposited them either in the lake or across the field.

This happened two nights in a row.

We replaced every tent twice.

So, if anyone needs a pop-up canopy, please let me know. We have quite a few.

WATCH THE NBC NEWS STORY

Finding Home

Then I attended a performance at I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA. The facility was still fairly new, and very few people seemed to know it existed.

I certainly didn’t.

I walked through the doors, looked around, and immediately thought:

This is home.

I made the call the next day, and the rest is history.

I.M. Terrell is a beautiful, state-of-the-art theatre and one of the finest facilities in which I have worked during my career. It has given our production—and our dancers—a remarkable new home.

Thirty-Two Years in the Making

That is the story of where we began and how far we have come.

I am enormously proud of what North Central Ballet’s Nutcracker has become. But no production of this size belongs to one person.

It takes all of us: the dancers, their parents, our teachers, designers, theatre professionals, guest artists, and the hundreds of volunteers who work behind the scenes.

The Nutcracker is a massive undertaking. Honestly, I begin working on the next production almost as soon as the curtain falls on the final performance of the current one—and some elements must be planned as much as two years in advance. It is difficult to understand just how enormous it truly is until you experience it for the first time.

And then you realize:

This is special.

Nobody else does it quite like this.

It gives me tremendous pride to welcome each of you into the story—and into a tradition that began 32 years ago with one telephone call and a wildly ambitious idea.

Welcome to North Central Ballet’s 2026 production of The Nutcracker.

North Central Ballet
Northeast Tarrant County’s Leading Authority in Classical Ballet Since 1993
BALLET. NOTHING ELSE.