The Evergreen City Ballet is continuing its holiday tradition of The Nutcracker for its 15th year.

“This is a tradition for us to perform, and it has really become a tradition for our patrons who come to see it every year,” said ballet mistress Andi Bryndza.

The show opened in Auburn last week with a charitable performance for about 700 elementary students. It opens in Renton Friday with four shows this weekend.

The lead roll, the Sugar Plum Fairy, is being played by two different dancers, Erin Stevens and Jackie McConnell.

“They’re doing a beautiful job,” Bryndza said. “They both really got into their character.”

The performance has about 80 dancers this year with most of the major rolls being filled by the company dancers.

“That’s (80 performers) a pretty average year,” Bryndza said.

Many of the roles will be filled by high school dancers. Elementary kids, some as young as 4-years-old, from ECB’s Academy will also have the chance to perform.

“The more kids we can involve in this experience, the better,” Bryndza said. “It’s their last week of school, so they can just focus on dancing and performing. They’ve done a great job.”

The Nutcracker is a fairy-tale ballet composed by Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the late 1890s.

It tells the story of a girl and her dream about a toy nutcracker she receives for Christmas.

“It’s a very high quality performance,” Bryndza said. “It’s much easier for people in the Renton community to have a production in their back yard than going all the way up to Seattle.”