the nutcracker

the remake of the ballet is the first choreography from WA ballet's new uhm, choreographer (dang). apparently his plan was to modernize it and make it relevant to australians. and so it was.
the ballet opens with clara, a 16/17 year old school girl, chatting online to "the nutcracker", a boy from her class (peter). he secretly loves clara but cannot talk to her in person. clara loves the nutcracker but isn't really aware of peter, clearly. the humour of the chatting worked well for my generation. not sure about the old biddies who went to see it, but i sure thought it was funny.
the computer scenes were done extremely well. there was a very thin screen covering the entire front of stage area. i think i spent about 10 minutes trying to sort out "is there a screen or something. it looks a bit like there is one, but i can't really tell". their conversations were presented on the screen for us to see. a few of the school scenes incorporated the screen as well.
the rest of the ballet is centered around this theme. school kids, in uniform, dancing around stage, telling the story of first love. the music is all the same, but the dancing is entirely different. and the only time you see a rat is when the teacher (a mrs. drosselmeyer) has one in the class, on a stick. seems odd, but worked rather well. and instead of the rats fighting, the "fight" scene is actually a virus taking over the young lovers computers...a battle the nutcracker eventually wins and clara deems him her hero (i will point out here that they were using macs, so i don't know how believable a virus is, but i digress...)
the show wraps up at the end of year ball in school, where peter reveals himself to clara as "the nutcracker". this goes all wrong at first, but in the end, love wins out. naturally.
my friend and i bought the el-cheapo seats: 20$, far left, nose bleed section. lucky for us, the theatre was far from full and we were told to scurry into the middle of the row. some might consider them bad seats, but seeing as we aren't aficionados of the ballet, it worked rather well for us.
overall, i'd recommend this version of the nutcracker. it was incredibly well done. i didn't really see any connection to the old nutcracker, save the music (obviously) but i didn't need to. it was good enough on it's own to be it's own show. i'm not sure if it'll ever leave perth and venture out to the real world, but if it does, you should go see it.
xo
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