The Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is a two-act classical ballet with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreography originally by Marius Petipa, completed with the assistance of Lev Ivanov, first performed on December 18, 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Set on Christmas Eve around a child's nutcracker doll that comes to life in her imagination, the ballet draws on Alexandre Dumas's 1844 retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Its initial reception was modest next to the immediate popularity of the orchestral suite Tchaikovsky drew from the score, but the complete ballet grew steadily in stature over the twentieth century, especially after George Balanchine's 1954 New York staging, and it is now a fixture of the winter season for ballet companies worldwide, with major American companies drawing roughly forty percent of their annual ticket revenue from its performances.