True to tradition?

not in good taste – and that’s the point. The Nutcracker is not just a show for the polite and pretty.

10. The Pas de Deux. The big Act II pas de deux has to be danced by the Sugarplum Fairy and her cavalier. If your cavalier doesn’t get his solo, you’re probably watching Balanchine’s version (which takes his “ballet is woman” policy one degree too far). If you see Clara and her Nutcracker dance the Sugarplum numbers, you’re probably watching a production by someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, and you’re far into a mindset light years from the vision of 1892.

There are other points to consider in Nutcracker tradition. After all, no production is completely faithful to the original. How, for example, does it end? In 1892 it was with a vision of bees dancing around a hive – something nobody has staged for over a century. Can we therefore say that any one ending is better than another?

I think so. Listen to how the score ends – with flowing music that implies travel, echoing the start of Act II. It does not take us back (as many productions do) to the start of Act I. Clara and the little Prince are, as in the original ETA Hoffmann story, departing to yet other realms; they aren’t going back to her native Nuremberg.

The best productions of classics aren’t about puzzlesolving or filling in some 19thcentury prescription. They’re about discovery and imagination, the very things at the heart of the Nutcracker story.