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A nutcracker nation: an exclusive excerpt from Jennifer Fisher''s new book looks at how a Russian ballet became an American holiday institution.

Article Excerpt
EVERY CHRISTMAS," a critic once wrote, we are all "one more Nutcracker closer to death." This quotation, attributed to critic Richard Buckle, has always been a favorite of mine, because it's funny, it's true, and it masks a deeper meaning, just like The Nutcracker itself. Long a synonym for "obligatory whimsy each December" The Nutcracker is the ballet we love to hate--love for its classical heritage and Tchaikovsky score; hate because it sometimes seems like an inescapable cliche in a world that craves constant innovation. But by labeling the ballet a signpost on life's journey, Buckle inadvertently placed it in the saint category as many other ineluctable and sometimes-feared rituals and rites of passage, the ones that dot everyday life and give it meaning: birthday parties, bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, marriages, funerals, Christmas dinners ... and, in North America at least, The Nutcracker, regular as clockwork, performed anywhere someone has ballet shoes, a Tchaikovsky CD, and a dream. Sometimes the dream is just to survive financially, so traditionally powerful is the ballet's earning potential. But calling attention to the popularity and inevitability of The Nutcracker acknowledges the fact that it matters, like other "performances" that mark a certain time of year as special by echoing revered themes and values.

Still, The Nutcracker is "just a ballet," isn't it? That too. More specifically, it's a classical ballet that premiered in 1892 at the imperial Maryinsky Theater of St. Petersburg in Russia, and has undergone untold alterations on its travels since then. Based ever so loosely on a long short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker enjoyed limited success in Russia, but it has been taken to heart by North Americans--and altered at will, sometimes resulting in a virtual change of citizenship for the good-natured Nutcracker. Never married to the month of December back home, it's a Christmastime phenomenon in the United States and Canada--the annual Nutcracker, praised for its money-making potential and popularity with audiences and young dancers.

Its very availability is what brought The Nutcracker into my life, first as a young performer, then as a dance scholar who wanted to figure out what this phenomenon meant to people who put it on and to those who buy tickets. When I first decided to study it, I found myself face-to-face...

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