The Nutcracker has been staged countless times and in millions of ways. In the ballet, her slightly mysterious but entirely good-natured uncle, Drosselmeyer, attends the party and presents her with a special present, a Nutcracker. Giant mice fight life-sized toy soldiers, led by her Nutcracker, who comes to life to protect her. At no point is Marie distressed by the fact that a wooden toy has become alive and her companion! When she wakens from her dream, back home, her Nutcracker is a cherished wooden doll once again.
In doing so she sees a flash of a human face on her wooden doll. She is unworried by this odd occurrence of a doll showing signs of life, and falls asleep with her Nutcracker. But Madam Mouserinks swore revenge and transformed Princess Pirlipat into a wooden figure.
Only by eating the kernel of the Krakatuk nut would she become beautiful again. Years later, Drosselmeyer eventually found the nut and his nephew agreed to crack it. But when the Princess awakened, her saviour took on an ugly form and she rejected him in shock. Madam Mouserinks was killed and once more swore revenge. You guessed correctly, this would be Marie. However, this plotline hardly ever gets told in a Nutcracker production, Christian Spuck's Zurich choreography being one of the few exceptions.
The gentle Christmas story, the use of numerous children and the delayed appearance of the prima ballerina the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Act 2 were unpopular. Like The Nutcracker , the stage libretto deviates β and lightens! The darkest moment in the performance is his discovery of the disarray of his workshop.
This, however, is very easily sorted when the lovers apologise, and the town mayor gives him a large bag of money to recreate as many new dolls as he wishes, in innocent perpetuity. The ballet ends with a joyous communal wedding between Franz and Swanilda. The story bears almost no resemblance to the original, except in small ways that are innocuous on the surface, but unsettling once you have read Der Sandmann.
