The "Nutty" Nutcracker.

Blogs are for personal experiences, ramblings, bragging, and the occasional time to get things that you are upset about into words. Well this is one of those times.

Every Christmas Eve for the past 15 years I have gone to see the Nutcracker with my family. I have seen it in New York, Oakland, and San Francisico. Now that we live in Utah we have the pleasure of seeing Salt Lake's version. And a plus is that my cute ballerina cousin is in it. She is wonderful and does such a great job every year.

This year Ballet West decided to go a different direction with the Christmas Eve performace of the Nutcracker. For some reason they decided to do it on Christmas Eve, which is beyond me. Let me just say that my family paid a lot of money to see this performance and so did everyone else in the theater. We expected to see the same thing we see every year. Magical and wonderful dancing from these amazingly talented ballerinas. I was very dissapointed this year.

The "Nutty" Nutcracker consisted of the traditional performance with spoofs throughout the whole thing. At the beginning it was just a couple different things. One of the little party boys had a black eye, the dancing bear and the doll danced the tango together...but then it got worse. The snow flake fairy and her partner had a scarf and beanie on, which was totally distracting from their beautiful dancing. A "Where's Waldo?" character would pop up in almost every scene randomly. I have no idea why they decided to put him in there. One of the Russian dancers had his tummy stuffed to look like he was fat. There was a dancer dressed as a bee in the flowers dancing scene. I was thinking, "If they ruin the Sugar Plum Fairy dance I might strangle someone." My favorite dance/song is when the Sugar Plum Fairy comes out with her cavalier and performs the best dance of the night. Luckily they didn't ruin any of the dance steps. They just changed it by having three Sugar Plum Fairies and three cavaliers. They all took turns doing the dance on stage.

These are only just some of the jokes they decided to put in the performance. Let me just say that I am very traditional. Most of the people in the theater loved the spoofs and had a great time laughing at all of the jokes. I think it is fine to have a performance dedicated to be "Nutty". Just tell us before hand so I know not to buy tickets to that show. It took out the magic of the Nutcracker that I look forward to every year.

Overall, we had a good time and I enjoyed being with my family on Christmas Eve. I just had to express my feelings. Here are some pics of us after the show.