A Holiday Dream Realized

Like many young performers, former dancer Paige D’Ambrosio, BA ’22, longed to be a part of the iconic ballet The Nutcracker. This holiday season, just like in the legendary tale, her dream became a reality as she joined the prestigious Boston Ballet as assistant stage manager.

D’Ambrosio’s interest in a career in stage management was initially sparked during her time at Suffolk. 

“It was important for me to go to a school like Suffolk, because I didn’t even know I wanted to be a stage manager until later on in my studies," she recalls. “The Theatre Department brought in somebody from the Boston Ballet to talk to us about stage management. I’d been a ballet dancer, and I was like, ‘Whoa. I had no idea that ballet had stage managers!’ Since then the Boston Ballet became my goal.” 

Her degree in theatre helped her land positions with regional companies Reagle Music Theatre and Wheelock Family Theatre. When the position with the Boston Ballet presented itself, she leapt at the opportunity. 

“I still have that moment every now and then, when I’m on the Opera House stage and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God! I work here now!’ It’s such a great working atmosphere and environment. And I’m just really happy,” she says.

The Nutcracker runs eight shows a week for five consecutive weeks with a total of 45 shows. To manage the furious pace, D’Ambrosio must stay on her toes at all times and remain supremely organized. “Everything is meticulously timed. The show is very intense. It’s very fast moving, and it can be pretty dangerous. The Opera House looks huge, but it doesn’t have the biggest backstage space. So it’s a lot of moving things around, and The Nutcracker has huge set pieces and really big props.”

Her responsibilities also include cuing the dancers: Not an easy task when managing three rotating casts with 50 kids per show—some as young as 6 years old.

One of her favorite moments in the show is preparing the Mother Ginger character for her entrance. Mother Ginger is a larger-than-life character who performs on stilts and lifts her enormous dress skirts to reveal several child dancers called Polichinelles. Watch a video of the scene.

To get the character ready, the dancer (on stilts) lifts their arms over their head as the massive dress is lowered from the rafters. “Wardrobe is there to strap them in, and help them sidestep into the wing, and then we help the kids get underneath. And the dance itself is just so cute. You watch all the kids come out from underneath. It’s just such a crazy scene, the setup into and out of it, and then the cutest thing on stage. I love it. That one’s really fun.”

You could say that working with the Boston Ballet has D’Ambrosio dancing on air. It is also fueling her aspirations to work in concert stage management, movies, or television. 

“Of course Broadway is always out there, too,” she says brightly. “Who knows what could happen?” She knows better than anyone that holiday dreams can and do come true.

Mikko Nissinen’s The Nutcracker runs until December 29 at the Citizens Opera House. With a score by Tchaikovsky and a libretto adapted from by Alexandre Dumas père, the ballet is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.