Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (Cornerstone Studios, English National Ballet, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, December 16 PBS showed a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker staged by the English National Ballet in 2024 that was at once fascinating and frustrating. It took me a while to find out information on this program because the PBS Web site is now more aimed at facilitating viewers who want to “stream” the program itself than in publishing information about it, including credits for the cast and crew. I managed to pull together a cast and crew list by transcribing it from the closing credits of the stream, and I also found an online site that gave the history of the English National Ballet’s involvement with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is by far the most popular ballet ever created, and ballet companies all around the world regularly put it on during the December holiday season. They use it as a cash cow and virtually all ballet companies depend on a holiday production of The Nutcracker for at least half of their annual revenue. The Nutcracker started life as an 1816 story by the German fantasy writer and musical composer E. T. A. Hoffmann called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which was first published in a multi-author book called Kinder-Mährchen (“Children’s Stories”) that also featured stories by Carl Wilhelm Contessa and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Hoffmann republished in a collection entirely by him called The Serapion Brethren, published in several volumes between 1819 and 1821. The story was first published in English in London in 1833. In 1892, looking for a follow-up to their successful fairy-tale ballet Sleeping Beauty, Russian composer Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa decided to do a ballet adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale. The original story was about a young girl variously called Marie or Masha Stahlbaum who, along with her siblings, receives a nutcracker as a Christmas present. Alas, one of her brothers breaks it and Marie tries as best she can to mend it with a ribbon. Their home is invaded by an army of mice led by the Mouse King, but the nutcracker magically comes to life and leads an army of toy soldiers, expanded to normal human size, to defeat them. Then the vivified nutcracker takes Marie to a magical country which in this production is called the “Land of Sweets and Delights” (“Land der Süßigkeiten und Köstlichkeiten” in the original German), where they mostly sit and watch while the corps de ballet and various soloists do a succession of national dances.

Most listeners know The Nutcracker from the famous suite Tchaikovsky assembled from the complete ballet, with two selections from act one (the “Miniature Overture” and the children’s march) and six from act two (the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Trepak – Russian Dance – Arabian Dance, Chinese Dance, Dance of the Mirlitons, which means “reed flutes,” and the Waltz of the Flowers), but if you only know the suite you’re missing a lot of the ballet’s best music. A number of later productions changed Marie’s name to “Clara” and made her a teenager so she could dance and do a pas de deux with the Nutcracker. This production did both; Clara was played in the first act by pre-pubescent Delilah Wiggins and in the second act by young adult Ivana Bueno. Likewise they cast two people as the Nutcracker: Rhys Antoni Yeomans as the doll version in act one and Francesco Gabriele Frola as the full-grown version and Clara’s dance partner in act two. This production was choreographed by Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith, and instead of setting the framing sequence either in medieval Germany (as in Hoffmann’s original) or in 19th century Russia (as Tchaikovsky and Petipa had), they staged it in late 19th century London. We can tell it’s late 19th century because there are two suffragists carrying picket signs reading “Votes for Women,” and there are also two chimney sweeps who are costumed identically to the ones in the 1965 film Mary Poppins, which made it ironic that I was watching this just one night after my husband Charles and I had seen a PBS documentary on Dick Van Dyke which featured a clip of the dance he did with a chorus line of chimney sweeps in that movie.

The first act gets more than a bit cutesy-poo, but once the action shifts from late 19th-century London to the Land of Sweets and Delights – transported there on Clara’s bed, which thanks to the Nutcracker’s magic becomes a giant translucent sleigh that flies through the air like Santa’s sled – things get a lot more interesting even though the ballet pretty much abandons the pretense of any kind of plot. One of the most spectacular numbers is the Russian Dance, performed by five male dancers who are costumed in all-over tights with black-and-white spiral designs on them. I also liked the way they staged the Waltz of the Flowers (though my mind has been poisoned about that number by a children’s record I heard in my own childhood, which featured a chorus singing incredibly banal lyrics – the ones I remember go, “Dance, flowers, dance/Dance while the music brings romance”) and the dueling dance duets by Clara and the Nutcracker, and the Sugar Plum Fairy (Emma Hawes, who also played Clara’s mother in act one) and her prince consort (Aitor Arrieta, who also played Clara’s father in act one). In the end, of course, the interlude in fairyland turns out to be just Clara’s dream, and as much as I dislike “it was all a dream!” endings, this one was at least tolerable because of a neat psychedelic effect Watkin and Smith did when the bed Clara is sleeping on returns to her home as she wakes up. As a story ballet The Nutcracker tempts silliness, and this production occasionally went over the line, but a lot of it is quite charming and the dancing qua dancing is beautifully executed. The program was copyrighted in 2024 but it struck me as odd that the closing credits listed the English National Ballet’s royal patron as “Her Majesty the Queen” when Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 and her son Charles, the current reigning British monarch, was crowned as her replacement in 2023.