Ageless On The Stage

<p>It's 20 minutes before show time, and Marc Platt is starting to fidget.</p><p>"I love the sound of the orchestra warming up," said Platt, sitting in the front row and waiting to be called backstage Saturday. "It sounds so warm."</p><p>It doesn't matter that Platt, 94, was a child ballet prodigy, was an international ballet star, has danced on Broadway and had prominent roles in several movies.</p><p>The Santa Rosa resident still admits to getting anxious before the performance.</p><p>"It's kind of an inner motor," Platt said. "When you come onstage, it lights up."</p><p>Platt is a guest dancer in "The Nutcracker" being presented by the Santa Rosa Nutcracker this weekend at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts. The final performance is at 2 p.m. today.</p><p>Platt is 88 years older than the youngest performer in "The Nutcracker," a 6-year-old girl.</p><p>"They are stimulating to be around," Platt said of the children. "They are very serious . . . no laughing, no playing around."</p><p>Platt was onstage for about 15 minutes, watching the young dancers, talking to the men and women, gesturing and waving his hand, a woman usually on his arm or trying to coax him to waltz.</p><p>He appeared taller onstage, even while leaning on his cane, taller than when he walked off.</p><p>"I feel good," Platt said afterward, walking briskly through the lobby, obviously still buoyed by performing. "I feel like food; I feel like steak."</p><p>"He is legend, the most charismatic person on that stage," said Shannon Duggan-McConnell, a dancer in the "The Nutcracker" who worked with Platt a decade ago in a Marin County performance of the ballet. "He just lights it up. It's inbred in him."</p><p>"Totally a performer, even at his age," said John DeGaetano of Petaluma, another actor in "The Nutcracker" party scene.</p><p>Platt has been dancing since he was 11 when he began taking ballet lessons in Seattle. He traveled the world as a dancer and choreographer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and then joined the competing Original Ballet Russe.</p><p>Platt appeared on Broadway in the 1943 debut of "Oklahoma!" and toured the country in "Kiss Me Kate." Among his movies was a solo dance in the 1945 musical "Tonight and Every Night" with Rita Hayworth. He portrayed one of the brothers in the 1954 movie "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers."</p><p>He also has been a ballet choreographer and director, the ballet master for Radio City Music Center and had a dance school in Florida.</p><p>"The Nutcracker" is his first performance since a 2001 Marin County ballet, and Platt said it also will be his last. He is going back into retirement.</p><p>"I want to still come and watch the people, a vicarious satisfaction," Platt said. "Once you do your thing, it's done, over."</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob. norberg@pressdemocrat.com.</p>