Talent Time

It’s “Nutcracker” season at San Francisco Ballet—36 performances packed into three weeks—which means that the company is currently serving two distinct audiences. Naturally, you’ve got the fancy-family-outing and school-matinee crowds, who want sparkly costumes, a dancing bear, and a few feats on pointe. But seated among them you can also find the ballet die-hards, there for a first peek at the newly hired and rising talents ahead of the annual repertory season that SFB crams into January through April. Under artistic director Tamara Rojo, the company is even marketing to this talent-scouting audience now, publishing social media alerts about dancers making role debuts.

Performance

San Francisco Ballet: “Nutcracker” by Helgi Tomasson

Place

War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, California, December 11, 17, and 19, 2025

Words

Rachel Howard

Jasmine Jimison and Fernando Carratalá Coloma in Helgi Tomasson's “Nutcracker.” Photograph by Lindsey Rallo

Fortunately, Helgi Tomasson’s “Nutcracker” production, just over two decades old, does an exemplary job of serving both constituencies. The sets and costumes placing us in 1915 San Francisco are tastefully gorgeous and tickle everyone’s nostalgia, while the snow scene, Waltz of the Flowers, and final Grand Pas offer challenging classical dancing that demand top-drawer artistry and technique. By the end of the third show I caught, on a rainy Friday evening, the audience was clapping along with the Russian and Mother Ginger numbers, and hooting and hollering for the curtain calls. Meanwhile I was walking out of the War Memorial Opera House thinking about Madeline Woo.

Born in California, Woo is a new hire straight into principal rank, from the Royal Swedish Ballet. Her internet presence is certainly intriguing: lately she’s been posting clips of herself rehearsing explosive, athletic jumping passages, dressed in punkish black leotards with elaborate straps and rips that highlight her tattoos. (She even has her own clothing line, Madwoo Studios.) If I expected edginess from this Instagram persona, the dancer who stepped out for the Grand Pas instead gave us innocence and wonder.

In Tomasson’s production, just before that thrilling pas de deux music from Tchaikovsky, Clara is transformed (via a magic wardrobe) from an adolescent girl into a grown woman. I’ve long appreciated the dramaturgy here, but for me, the suspension of disbelief usually fades; I watch the ballerina as a dancer, not as Clara. Woo changed this. Even though the adage of the pas de deux is so technically devilish, she remained completely character-driven, an ecstatic 13-year-old in an adult body, an effect created not just through her wide smile, but from the slow, juicy stretch of her leg into that supported arabesque. She turned time into taffy, but never to show off: when her partner Francesco Gabriele Frola let go of her hand she surely had a good balance to stay longer on that leg, but such preening wasn’t part of this Clara.

Sasha De Sola in Helgi Tomasson's “Nutcracker.” Photograph by Lindsey Rallo

As for her fouetté turns in the coda, well, Woo lost control of them, but few in the audience knew. (I’ve seen plenty of SFB ballerinas improvise a final bar for those turns. I think they spend so much mental energy trying to get through arabesque-inside-outside turns in the middle of the variation that the fouettés become a Hail Mary finale.) Meanwhile, Frola—also a new hire as a principal, from the National Ballet of Canada—left a more mixed initial impression. His Act One entrance launched with a thrillingly elevated, clean, soft double saut de basque. But later he seemed willing to distort his upper body for flashy leg effects (those were some weird shoulders on the cabrioles) and when his pirouettes careened into a barely-saved finish on the knee, his face during the bows showed it.

Woo and Frola were the big new hires, but the discovery of this “Nutcracker” season, for me, was someone who’s been hidden in plain sight. Seojeong Yun, born in South Korea, has been in the company since 2022 and was promoted to soloist last year. Her repertoire to this point is miniscule—almost entirely ensemble parts—and I never noticed her in the corps. And then there she was at a matinee packed with school kids, stepping out of that magic wardrobe as the grown Clara. Revelation! She is small, a Tinkerbell, utterly light atop crystalline feet. Her variation to that famous celesta music even rivalled Maria Kochetkova’s, recorded for PBS’s Great Performances, in musicality and crispness. On Friday, I saw Yun again, as Snow Queen, and was even more struck by her star quality—the geometry of her face just shines from the stage, and her eyes dance freely, too.

Luca Ferrò in Helgi Tomasson's “Nutcracker.” Photograph by Lindsey Rallo

Yun’s cavalier for the Grand Pas was fellow soloist Mingxuan Wang, equally soft in his landings (this duo together is pure cashmere), but not yet as dear to my heart as Cavan Conley, whose pirouettes were looking a little janky for this run but whose acting and mime is still unparalleled. For a Thursday evening show, Conley partnered soloist Carmela Mayo, who has always possessed the technical chops but is dancing more expansively and bravely this year. She seemed to channel the swoops and sweeps of gravity effortlessly in both the Grand Pas and as the Sugarplum Fairy (who in Tomasson’s version leads the Waltz of the Flowers in a whirl of killer turning combinations). Corps member Jacey Galliard also took on Sugarplum Fairy in one of the shows I caught, and made a more tentative but very promising showing with her soft feet and luxurious extensions.

This “Nutcracker” run should finish with an award: Best marriage of hamminess with clean virtuoso dancing. The hands-down winner is soloist Luca Ferrò, who danced the Chinese variation as though the dragon chasing him really might induce a heart attack. Here’s another award: Best update on a role for our Tik Tok age. The clear winner is Rubén Cítores Nieto, for a take on Madam Du Cirque (Tomasson’s version of Mother Ginger) that could win Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Kamryn Baldwin made a terrific, hot-as-a-desert-wind Arabian belly dancer. And Fernando Carratalá Coloma slashed through Spanish with a native Spaniard’s sharpness. (I wish I had gotten to see him dance the Grand Pas.) The scouting this “Nutcracker” season was rewarding indeed.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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