The Hip Hop Nutcracker

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Tchaikovsky wrote a party scene, a fight, and a long sequence where everyone shows off in turn, and if that structure sounds familiar it is because a cypher works the same way. Somebody noticed. The score is intact - a violinist plays it live, on stage, not from a pit - and over it a dozen dancers take the Land of Sweets apart and rebuild it as a block party in nineteen-eighties New York. The turn that gets people is the Arabian variation, normally the slow bit you tolerate, reworked into something so controlled the room forgets to breathe. Two audiences show up: parents who have been dragged to a traditional production every December since their kid could sit still, and dancers who came for the choreography and could not care less about the story. They convert each other by the second act. A digital MC opens the show. Balboa Theatre, downtown, the first weekend of December.