From a version with tap shoes and a Duke Ellington score, to the good ol’ Balanchine one, it’s ‘Nutcracker’ season in Philly

Like many kids who dream of becoming dancers, Michelle Dorrance listened to The Nutcracker music a lot growing up.

Yet it wasn’t the Tchaikovsky classic but the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn version that captured her imagination.

“The reason I fell in love with this score at like age 11 is that my mom — who was a professional ballet dancer and probably did her handful of Nutcrackers — she and some of her colleagues in Chapel Hill, N.C., created a sort of cocktail party rendition for adults. A Nutcracker [set] to this score. I fell in love with the score.”

But it wasn’t until 2019 that the MacArthur “Genius Grant”-winning tap dancer and choreographer decided to make a Nutcracker of her own. And now, it’s coming to Philly for the first time.

Dorrance Dance’s Nutcracker Suite is coming to the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Dec. 8-9.

“This was the last new thing that we did before COVID,” Dorrance said. “And we were touring some older work when COVID hit and the company actually was in California on tour and I was in the creative process for my first Broadway show.”

That show, Flying Over Sunset, wound up opening for a short run in late 2021. The New York Times called Dorrance’s choreography “sublime.”

Dorrance’s Nutcracker features a cast of 22 dancers and musicians, most of whom both dance and play. (”Every tap dancer is a musician unto themselves because we’re percussive dancers.”)

She created it with two collaborators, both of whom dance in the show. “Josette Wiggan is like literally one of the most singular vernacular and tap dancers on the planet,” she said. “And Hannah Heller was a dear friend of mine as a teenager. We’d both danced for Savion Glover together in our late teens, early 20s.”

In the reboot, Dorrance dances with Aaron Marcellus, a singer who was in the top 24 in season 11 of American Idol. Marcellus, who Dorrance met 10 to 15 years ago in tap class (she later realized he was a singer), opens the show singing some holiday classics and acts as the narrator for the Nutcracker Suite.

The Ellington-Strayhorn score is not long, so the performance is “a perfect hour,” Dorrance says. ”It’s also a challenge, telling the whole story so quickly.

“Maybe Drosselmeyer’s magic is a little off this year. Maybe Clara is kind of an outcast in her family. ... We have some some eccentricities to the way we tell this story. And then, almost before you’re halfway through, you’re in the land of sweets. We have to knock things out quickly.”

Those holiday songs fill out a section Dorrance calls “an Ella’quent holiday swing,” as a nod to Ella Fitzgerald.

Dorrance never performed in a Nutcracker as a child.

“I was terrible [at ballet.] I had flat feet and like, I’m very inflexible, like my dad,” she said. Anson Dorrance is the women’s soccer coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; he plays drums on the side. “And my mom [M’Liss Dorrance] would be like, ‘But honey you are always on the music.’

“And so tap as a musical language made so much more sense to me.”

Dorrance Dance. ‘The Nutcracker Suite.’ Dec. 8-9. Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St., $29-$70. https://pennlivearts.org/event/dorrancedancenutcracker