As longtime readers know, I’ve been following and featuring the work of the Big Muddy Dance Company, which has recently been rechristened St. Louis Dance Theater. I had the opportunity to preview of their next performance, Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker, which features the work of Duke Ellington and a lesser known but critically important composer, Billy Strayhorn, with Josephine Baker as the star, set at the Crystal Palace, an old Gaslight Square mainstay.

As I’ve tried to point out in the past, St. Louis has hosted more than its fair share of important cultural icons, and the Recorder of Deeds actually holds the birth record of Josephine Baker in its logbook for the Female Hospital. Baker grew up in the shadow of a lead smelter, if I remember correctly from some research I did years ago, before leaving St. Louis behind and leading a revolutionary career around the United States and Europe. (I visited her cenotaph in the Pantheon in Paris two years ago.)

The performance takes some artistic liberties by setting the action at the Crystal Palace, which opened after Baker left St. Louis, but it is type of the perfect place she might have performed if she been.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn set out to write a jazz interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which is a famous Christmastime staple, and it is performed by Jazz St. Louis live during the performance.

Billy Strayhorn, whose biography you can read here, was a critical collaborator of Ellington, and his reputation and legacy has been forgotten for much of the last century.

I’ve also been impressed with the new artistic director of St. Louis Dance Theater, Kirven Douthit-Boyd, who took over recently. I encourage my readers to take a look and consider attending one of the performances of this reimagining of a classic.

The performance will be December 20-21 at Chaminade’s Skip Viragh Performing Arts Center out west on Highway 40.