Longtime Riverside ‘Nutcracker’ show moving to Moreno Valley

Riverside’s longtime “Nutcracker” show is dancing over to Moreno Valley this Christmas season.

And organizers are hoping audiences will follow the festive performances to the city next door.

David Allan’s “Nutcracker” will start a two-day run at Moreno Valley High School on Saturday, Dec. 21 — after 14 years in Riverside City College’s Landis Performing Arts Center in downtown.

Glenda Carhart, artistic director of the nonprofit BRAVA, which stands for Ballet Resource Active Volunteer Association, stages the ballet performances. Its artists have been training and performing in Riverside for 65 years, she said.

“This year has brought a huge change for the ballet,” Carhart wrote in an email.

Expanded offerings at the RCC center left no room for the “Nutcracker” this December and another suitable site in Riverside could not be found, she wrote. The search led to the Moreno Valley High School Performing Arts Center, but concerns remained.

“There was only one big problem: We moved out of our location in which people had come to see us,” Carhart said in the email.

Also, the production will lose some of its audience capacity because the new site is smaller — with 625 seats — compared to 1,300 at RCC, she wrote. And theater fees jumped by $38,000 without the sponsorship of Performance Riverside, Carhart said.

Now BRAVA, which partners with the Riverside Ballet Arts school, needs to “sell out our houses in order to break even and advertise in a brand new area,” Carhart wrote.

The company is again bringing in two stars from the New York City Ballet, Emma Von Enck and Anthony Huxley while still trying to keep ticket prices low.

Performances are set for Saturday, Dec. 21, and Sunday, Dec. 22, at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. The school is at 23300 Cottonwood Ave., Moreno Valley.

For ticket information, call 800-870-6069, 951-653-0228 or click here