I love the story of The Nutcracker, more specifically the original short story by Eta Hoffman which inspired the ballet. The book is 14 chapters and 58 pages. The ballet is 2 acts, with each act being about an hour. Something to note is that there are other ballets, such as Swan Lake and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty that are more than 2 acts, and are a little over than 2 hours or 2 hours and 30 minutes. The Nutcracker ballet is a good ballet and I do love it. It’s what inspired my love of ballet and dancing ballet in the first place. However, from a story perspective and an adaptation perspective, it isn’t bad, but isn’t good. This ends up hurting some characters, mostly the Nutcracker Prince himself. He does not have much personality in the ballet because there is no room to explore it. In the original story? He is sweet and attentive and devoted and loyal. He cares deeply for the other toys and Marie and wants to protect them. He feels a small disdain towards Drosselmeyer and can get a little cold when Drosselmeyer is mentioned. He is prone to moments of grouchiness and frustration when he feels that the show some citizens in the snowy forest performed for him and Marie was terrible and he apologizes to her. With the ballet version, he is shown to be caring and sweet and a little protective, but that’s really it. In ballets with more than one act, you usually have a few different scenes where the plot progresses. This is where I get into how the ballet as an adaptation of the story isn’t as good as it could be. There are many scenes in Swan Lake, where even in just the first 2 acts, the same length as the entire Nutcracker ballet, there is so much character exploration and emotional and sweet scenes. So the length of the ballet is not really a viable excuse, in my opinion. It even hurts Marie’s character. In the ballet, her big moment is her throwing her slipper at the Mouse King so he turns to her and Nutcracker has a chance to finish him. In the short story, the toys lose the first battle and so the Mouse King makes Marie give up some of her Christmas gifts and other cherished things with the threat that if she doesn’t, he will eat Nutcracker. He then will eat and chew on whatever he makes her give. This distresses her but she does it anyway. She then tells Nutcracker about it after the third night of it happening, and cries about how he may ask to eat her after everything else is gone and then nothing will be there to protect Nutcracker. He then has a short bout of coming to life where he tells her how to help him, which she previously begged him to do while crying. In the story, she’s selfless and she is quiet and a daydreamer and she worries deeply about those she cares about. In the story, after Marie throws her shoe at the Mouse King but the toys must retreat, she ends up fainting after getting a deep cut in her arm from the glass of the toy cabinet which broke and she must rest for a few days. While bedridden, Drosselmeyer tells her a long and mostly not needed backstory about a few things, but he also mentions how the Nutcrackers curse came to be. In the ballet, we don’t get an explanation as to how. It was actually the Mouse Kings mother who cursed him after the Nutcracker, at that point human, stepped on her neck when walking backwards to free someone else from their curse. (This is the needless backstory I briefly touched upon.) Drosselmeyer also gets some depth but it’s mostly how he got from the Land of Sweets where he was in the royal court to Germany, where the story takes place.
To wrap things up, I do not hate the way the ballet shows the story. I really do like it! But when you compare it and really think about it as an adaptation, it lacks in area which other ballets show is possible to be bountiful in.