Set amongst the glittering backdrop of London's iconic Savoy hotel, LAST CALL AT THE SAVOY is Brisa Carleton’s debut novel and a Bookreporter.com Bets On selection. In it, a young woman is forced to confront her troubled past as she uncovers the story of the hotel’s first female bartender who has been erased from the history books. In her holiday blog post, Brisa explains how reading THE NUTCRACKER and performing in her town’s ballet production of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s classic tale ignited her passion for the theater and led to an award-winning career as a Broadway producer.
As a child, I spent every December immersed in THE NUTCRACKER. Before I ever pirouetted onstage in our town’s ballet production, I had already lived inside the story through E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale. I read it again and again, letting my imagination set the scene long before the curtain ever rose. The words gave the choreography a wider world to belong to. They made the stage feel larger than our modest sets could ever suggest.
The first notes of Tchaikovsky’s overture became my doorway into that world. Each year that overture signaled the beginning of the season. I still play it at the start of every December. The music carries me back instantly, the same way it did when I was a girl tying my toe shoes in the wings. It brings back the discipline of rehearsal and the quiet anticipation before stepping onstage, but it also brings back the world I first entered in the pages of the book.
That early blend of reading and dance shaped something fundamental in me and likely led me toward a life in the theater. I learned that the page invites the mind to imagine without limits. The stage turns that imagination into something you can see and feel. Together, they create a way of experiencing a story that is both inward and expansive. I did not have the language for it then. I only knew that the story felt different after I had read it and deeper after I had danced it.
Now, even though my little toe shoes no longer fit and that original copy of THE NUTCRACKER is gone, the moment the overture begins, I am there again. Back in the land of sugarplum fairies and princes. Back in the dreamscape that lets THE NUTCRACKER leap off the page for me every year.
