#she was introduced to the magic of the 'cat dancer' toy today

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she's a tiny honeybee who would play forever and ever if left to her own devices, but sometimes growing babies need naps

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The Nutcracker

Today is my Mother’s birthday and since my brother and sister-in-law took her and my sister in-law’s mother to The Nutcracker last year, we decided to propose the exact same idea. So that’s what we did. We went to The Nutcracker, the Peasant’s Ballet, as every other peasant family in America does at Christmas. We go and watch a Russian show about a mystic toy maker and rats and candy people at war in which everybody communicates through delicate dance. Very weird tradition but fuck if it isn’t fun. I saw an abridged Nutcracker in LA a couple years ago at The Wiltern that pumped in the music via stereo and featured pretty mediocre dancing, so seeing the Boston Ballet’s balls to the walls, full-tilt version was a trip. Like, really, it was awesome.

Let’s recount the story of The Nutcracker because I never really got it until tonight.

A strange witch doctor of a toymaker beguiles a bunch of street children with cheap magic tricks and reveals to them his favorite toy, a nutcracker, that looks lame as fuck to the raggedy children. Somehow, this shaman parlays disappointing children into an invite to a sick aristocratic party at some Russian oligarch’s house where the adults don’t speak to each other and the children run wild and undisciplined, treating one another like cat litter. Of course, the toy guru is there to play Santa Claus in a culture that doesn’t have any special cultural ties to Santa whatsoever. He distributes toys and saves that special nutcracker for the oligarch’s daughter, Clara, whom he deems the most beguiling of all the pre-teens. The impressionable little girl loves the nutcracker and the special attention from the sorcerer so she dances an incredibly hands-on and deeply inappropriate dance with him that draws no scorn whatsoever from her inexplicably proud father.

That night, Clara places her new toy underneath the Christmas tree and lays down to sleep on the couch because all of the other strange boys and girls called dibs on all the beds in the 26-bedroom mansion. Before (or is it?!) she can fall asleep, a dozen human-sized rats come running from the kitchen where they have seized a cornucopia of sweets and they resolve that the tastiest of morsels would be the flesh of a young girl. Clara is doomed. But wait! The clever little mage has been watching her from the shadows, probably caressing himself, and he emerges just in the nick of time to conjure the nutcracker to life, who promptly raises an army to combat the rats and the villainous Rat King.

The nutcracker army wages glorious war against the humanoid rats, easily overwhelming the beasts with their guns and cannons because they are literal fucking vermin. At one point, a drunk depressive rabbit and an obliterated gingerbread boy wander onto stage because ballet? When the battle is won, the pernicious warlock removes the nutcracker’s ungainly golem head and replaces it with a normal human one, much to the delight of the, again, twelve-year-old girl. This grown ass man again lays his hands liberally on and around the girl’s body as they twirl together in celebration, and as they rejoice in one another’s alarmingly accelerating pre-coitus, the Snow Queen arrives with a gang of fairies and the onset of a blizzard.

But she is a fair Snow Queen who was pulling for the Nutcracker Prince all along and she just brought the snow to party. The whole menagerie — the Snow Queen, her fairy squad, the Nutcracker Prince, Clara, and the goddamn wizard who is for some reason still here — dance through a blizzard and a cloud comes down from on high, inviting Clara and the Nutcracker Prince to run away together. Clara, because she desperately needs more positive male role models, gets on the cloud without hesitation and allows the probably balding Nutcracker Prince to abduct her.

That’s Act One.

After Clara’s been kidnapped by a 35-year-old man in a leotard that she’s convinced herself she’s in love with, the Nutcracker Prince introduces her to the Sugar Plum Fairy, who is his bottom bitch, and the Sugar Plum Fairy is like, “Hey Clara, I’m number one up here and I’m gonna do all the dancing from now on, but you can put this crown on your head and sit in this chair with that voodoo prince you brought and we’ll pretend like you’re important and stuff.” Don’t know how toy man got there but he got there somehow.

Then, because the Nutcracker Prince’s homeland is apparently a melting pot shockingly similar to Eurasia, a bunch of dancers puts on a show. (This part of the show is often considered controversial but I thought they did a good, tasteful job. Tchaikovsky was probably an accidental racist because he was a rich 19th-century Russian but don’t let his latent prejudices hurt every performance of The Nutcracker.) There are Arabian, Chinese, and Spanish dancers; an eight-foot tall, sixteen-foot wide woman who spawns dancing children seemingly at will; and, of course, the crowd pleasers — the Russians. After they’ve all shown Clara what a bad dancer she actually is, the Nutcracker Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy really rub her nose in it. While the necromancer coyly attempts to slip a finger beneath her dress, the Nutcracker Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy gush into the most gorgeous and breathtakingly romantic of numbers, making the finale all about their love while Clara learns a hard lesson.

Then, she wakes up with the nutcracker next to her, the evil clown nowhere to be seen, with a crown on her head. Wait, what?! A crown?! Did it really happen?! It’s a great cliffhanger that I hope will be explored in The Nutcracker 2.

Are we sure The Nutcracker didn’t create Rasputin?