We’re done for now— just finished setting almost all the children’s roles to a group of Korean kids who not only speak no English but have no previous exposure to Balanchine’s Nutcracker.

This week has been an adventure and a whirlwind, and all of it has been facilitated by our incredibly generous hosts, New Venture Entertainment, the presenting agent for OBT’s appearance here in August. This is a group of people that provided so much more than mere hospitality— they became our friends and guardians over the past few days. Sam and Paul also were our translators in rehearsals, and let me say that if they hadn’t been such incredibly attentive, conscientious, sensitive and humorous interpreters, we would not have gotten this job done.

To celebrate our last day of work here, they took us out to a traditional Korean bar for “makguli”— or something like that—- a sort of fermented rice wine that looks like milk but sure doesn’t like it. Here’s the gang of us afterwards:


And this is some of what we ate— seafood and vegetable “pizza”, Korean-style.

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