Sara Mearns stepped onto the stage as the Sugarplum Fairy wearing something more precious than a jewel-encrusted tiara. In her ears, invisible to all, were hearing aids.
“I heard every single noise possible,” she said. “Backstage, onstage. The shoes on the stage sounded like cymbals in my ears. The music was so loud. The audience was ridiculously loud. Everything was magnified. It almost sounds artificial. I’m like, is it really like this? Is this real?”
It’s been only three weeks since Mearns, 38, was fitted with semi-permanent hearing aids and one week since she stepped back into the role of Sugarplum in “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” for the first time since 2020. Her first performance, on Dec. 30, was shaky, she said. But on Friday night, her second — sensitive and seamless — “the feelings came back of Oh, you know how to do this,” Mearns said in an interview. “There’s nothing you need to worry about. You just need to go out there and enjoy yourself and be yourself and command the stage, and I really did feel like myself again.”
ImageMearns as the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” on Dec. 30, her first performance with her new hearing aids.Credit...Erin BaianoIn videos posted to Instagram stories before those shows, Mearns, the acclaimed, musically penetrating New York City Ballet principal, spoke about coping with hearing loss for the past 10 years. “I won’t miss entrances anymore or not hear the music,” she said on Instagram, “or have to ask the pianist to play louder or have them turn the monitors up.”
She was able to hear things she hadn’t heard in years. Chirping birds. Wind. Clicking shoes. “I was just bawling walking down the street,” she said of her trek to her Lincoln Center dressing room where she filmed the videos.
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