The Hard Nut

About the show

While resetting the ballet in a 1960s-style American town and costuming it garishly and making the characters rather cartoonlike (the toy soldiers are an army of G.I. Joes), the overall plot of The Nutcracker was rather faithfully followed, to the point of including a pantomime version of "The Story of the Hard Nut," the tale-within-a-tale of E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" in Act II, to explain how Drosselmeyer's nephew was turned into the Nutcracker. This section is usually not included, not even in Tchaikovsky's original version. Princess Pirlipat is turned into a pig-snouted creature as a baby by the vengeful Mouse Queen, and Drosselmeyer searches the world for a way to break the spell, thus ushering the famous Danses caracterisques of Act II. The only one able to do so is Drosselmeyer's nephew, who, after biting a hard nut, breaks the spell placed on Princess Pirlipat, but is turned into a Nutcracker. Princess Pirlipat promptly rejects him, whereupon Clara (here called Marie) declares her love for him and the spell on Drosselmeyer's nephew is broken.