A group of fairytale characters will need to hurry to save Christmas in a new holiday dance production, Christmas at the Castle, premiering on Saturday, Dec. 20.
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| Adrienne Pelletier leads dancers from the Maine Dance Center as they rehearse in Raymond for a production of 'Christmas at the Castle' to be performed on Saturday, Dec. 20 in Auburn. SUBMITTED PHOTO |
Dancers of all ages from the Maine Dance Company and the Maine Dance Center, located on Roosevelt Trail in Raymond, will take the stage to help the Sugar Plum Fairy retrieve her lost wand to ensure Christmas magic will carry Santa Claus across the globe.
“If Sugarplum Fairy doesn’t have her wand, Christmas is in jeopardy,” said Adrienne Pelletier, one of the two authors of the show’s storyline, when detailing the adventures the cast will face.
After gathering at the Sugar Plum Fairy’s Palace to celebrate the season, a mischievous Elks on the Shelf named Tinsel takes the wand before being summoned back to the North Pole. A group of friends then journey through various realms, including the Candy Cane Woods and the Chocolate Falls, to reach the North Pole and retrieve the wand, allowing Sugar Plum Fairy to empower Santa’s sleigh and host of reindeer with magic for their Christmas Eve journey. On the journey, the group will encounter familiar characters, including Rapunzel, Belle and Ariel, along with another unnamed princess who controls the winter winds.
Pelletier, along with her sister and co-author, Rhiannon Pelletier-Guerrette, worked to develop the show for almost two years, after a performance at Windham’s Summerfest in 2023.
“It was the first time we had combined play acting with the dance industry that we were already a part of, and that kind of stuck the idea,” said Pelletier-Guerrette. “We said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this show. What if we turned it into a holiday thing?’”
Once the duo founded the company in 2024, they realized they had talented dancers to fill the roles and develop a full performance. They began writing in January of that year, and spent almost two years in completing a script and patching the music together.
“I searched the bowels of the internet to find all these different, random songs that somehow worked together to tell a story,” Pelletier-Guerrette added.
In addition to a varied musical score, the show also will feature multiple dance styles, from classical ballet to musical theatre and jazz, and even includes acrobatic tricks.
“The Candy Cane dance has all the crazy acrobatic skills, the tumbling, and lifts,” Pelletier said. “That one is very exciting.”
“We work with so many students who are not just ballerinas”, Pelletier-Guerrette said. “They train in many different styles of dance, so we wanted to put together a show that felt like The Nutcracker, in that it is all the themes of Christmas and the holidays, but incorporates those styles of dance that our students spend so much time training in.”
The Nutcracker is a tale both Pelletier and Pelletier-Guerrette are very familiar with, as they are each principal dancers with the Maine State Ballet. Pelletier will be performing in the play again this year, in addition to directing the new show for the company.
The different dance styles will also help those who are unfamiliar with ballet or hesitant to attend a ballet performance become more comfortable with all types of dance.
“Part of our goal with this show is to soft launch into ballet,” Pelletier-Guerrette said. “There is a lot of serious dancing in this show, of a very high caliber, but it’s interspersed with moments of play acting where these characters you know come out and talk and narrate the story.
“What we’re seeing that it’s very approachable,” she said. “Anyone can go see this show and enjoy it and not necessarily need to be in the arts community to get it.”
The show will also hopefully help connect new people to the expression that is found through dancing.
“I think it’s [dance] something that’s human, something that in my opinion is one of the most genuine forms of self-expression,” Pelletier added. “It’s a way of connecting with people and human nature and storytelling that we don’t get in other forms of art.”
The cast of 60 dancers will range in age from four to professional adults, with the duo pulling from the Center’s students to complete the cast. Previous performances have been smaller, but this show has opened the opportunity to involve more children, including Pelletier-Guerrette’s own son as the youngest performer.
Family is very close to the pair, as the sisters work with their mother, Beth, to run both the company and the center.
“This is a family effort,” Pelletier said, explaining how the sisters are able to take care of their personal lives while depending on the other to run the business, something especially helpful as Pelletier-Guerrette is expecting her third child in early spring.
“It’s a constant balance between the two of us, making it all work,” she said. “If she needs someone to lean on, I can be that person, and I know when it is my turn, she’ll be there for me as well.”
The family support will be essential as the center expands in a new location in the North Windham Shopping Center, behind Windham Jewelers. The move is expected to be completed in February 2026.
Tickets for Christmas at the Castle can be found at https://events.eventgroove.com/event/Christmas-At-The-Castle-117940. <
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