“Every Christmas we are all one more Nutcracker closer to death.” – Richard Buckle
It is not likely that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut will be included among the slew of family holiday specials that will soon arrive in movie houses and theaters throughout the United States. For those of you who have seen this or any other film by Kubrick, its absence from the holiday entertainment repertoire probably comes as no surprise.
It is not likely that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut will be included among the slew of family holiday specials that will soon arrive in movie houses and theaters throughout the United States. For those of you who have seen this or any other film by Kubrick, its absence from the holiday entertainment repertoire probably comes as no surprise.
But the approach of Christmas is emphasized throughout Kubrick’s last film, starting with the first scene. The pre-teen daughter of a wealthy couple asks her mother if she can stay up to watch “The Nutcracker” on television while they go out to a Christmas party. The mother (Nicole Kidman) of course readily agrees, apparently pleased her daughter voluntarily wants to see the ballet that has been introducing American children (and adults) to this form of art since CBS first presented a New York City Ballet performance on Christmas night in 1957. It in fact seems as though the CBS production team made every effort to present the 1957 television premiere of “The Nutcracker” as the birth of a family-oriented cultural tradition. For instance, the broadcast opened, closed and was occasionally interrupted by none other than June Lockhart (a.k.a., the mother in the Lassie series that began that year), who appeared next to a young girl on a living room sofa with a storybook in her hands.
What may not be commonly known today about the most widely performed of ballets in the U.S., however, is that its origins couldn’t be further removed from the iconic, Norman Rockwell-like status it now commands. The ballet is based upon E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “The Nutcracker and The Mouse King,” a darkly comic, at times graphically violent, ghost story that, like Eyes Wide Shut, has the power to disarm both the reader and the central character of their ability to clearly distinguish fantasy from “reality.” And so we might wonder how and why it happened that a grisly, at times ironic, and in any case highly ambiguous Hoffmann tale evolved (or devolved) into the “Great Russian Nutcracker” that the Moscow Ballet will be performing at the Tennessee Theatre on November 25 as part of its 93-city tour of North America and Canada (significantly, the company will only perform “The Nutcracker in the U.S. In Canada, it will stage Tchaikovsky’s more critically acclaimed “Swann Lake”). This was in fact the question dance critic Jennifer Fisher posed in her recent book, “Nutcracker Nation.”
How is it, she wonders, that the ballet which opened to highly unfavorable reviews at the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg in 1892 (and continues to have comparatively limited success with Russian audiences) has become an unrivalled cultural sensation in the United States? Why did the ballet here “latch on to the Christmas season so securely?” Why, in the words of Mary Talmi, the artistic advisor to the Moscow Ballet in the U.S., is it widely regarded in the U.S. as “the one experience that brings the family together, where [each member] walks out of the theater with a really warm feeling?”
One partial, but by no means complete answer, may lie in the fact that many American companies have added innumerable innovations to their respective productions of the ballet, many of which attempt to tailor the performance to a particular region’s historical- cultural traditions. To cite but one example: Donald Byrd produced a “Harlem Nutcracker” which portrayed Clara as a grandmother who has flashbacks to childhood episodes that take place during the Harlem Renaissance (the flashbacks culminate with dances held at the “Club Sweets” in the ballet’s second act, accompanied by a Duke Ellington arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s score). What all these variations have in common is the extent to which they carefully exclude any direct references to the darker aspects of the Hoffmann short story.
For their 15th annual tour of the U.S., the Moscow Ballet likewise stages a performance punctuated by several unique alterations that keep references to Hoffmann at bay. Perhaps owning to the fact that the company was formed in 1986 by members of the award-winning “Glasnost Festival Tour” (which signaled the beginning of the end of the Cold War), the setting of the second act, for instance, takes place not in the Land of the Sweets but rather in the “Land of Peace and Harmony”, where the Nutcracker Prince and the renamed Masha are escorted by a dove to a utopian world the program notes describe as devoid of “war and suffering.”
The appearance of the dove may perhaps be overshadowed by Valentin Fedorov’s spectacular scenic design, which depicts a backdrop of painted unicorns, elephants, lions and firebirds. While Fedorov cites the late 19th century French “primitive” painter Henri Rousseau as an inspiration for these backdrops, there is no intimation here of the sort of hidden terror and disquieting “artificiality” that distinguishes the latter’s famous jungle paintings.
It may be then, that “The Nutcracker’s” success in America directly stems from the very factors that provoked scorn when it first opened in St. Petersburg. That is, the ballet’s amorphous plot, its decorative figures and props that seem to appeal primarily to children, the way it unequivocally abandons any element of psychological or historical realism, and its joyful granting of an untainted childhood wish all seem to immunize the work from the historical instances of “war and suffering” which never fail to haunt the inimitably American celebration of Christmas.
The Moscow Ballet does depart in one significant respect from most productions, however. At the end of the ballet, Masha awakes from a dream in an epilogue that adds a small dose of realism to the performance. But this too stops short of the sort of effect Hoffmann produces. While his short story also ends with the child protagonist awakening from a dream, neither she nor the reader are sure which parts of the preceding story were part of that dream. In fact, Hoffmann’s narrator invites us to question how certain we can be that dream and reality can, at the end (or at the beginning) of the day, be clearly separated from one another: “The most wonderful things can be seen if you have the right sort of eyes for it.” Such things are particularly hard to see with “eyes wide shut.”
