The Nutcracker is one of the all-time greats in the ballet genre(all three Tchaikovsky ballets are actually). There are many great productions of the Nutcracker around on DVD, in fact there was only one I disliked and that was the self-indulgent Maurice Bejart production. I thought I'd never see a production worse than that one, but with this one from the Mariinsky I have just found it. The music is phenomenal, and the orchestra do perform it beautifully, and Irina Golub does make an attempt to bring some personal charm and elegance to Masha. Unfortunately, the rest of the dancers are completely wasted, including Leonid Sarafanov as the Prince who has to wear a mask for much of the production. The choreography does not help them at all, it is so weak here that you'd be hard pressed to find anything that resembles choreography really. Much of it is writhing about and flailing arms, actions that are more at place in a horror film and don't gel at all with the style and feeling of the music.
I highly admire Valery Gergiev's Tchaikovsky(and most Russian composers actually) conducting- his Tchaikovsky 5th symphony finale, which you can see on Youtube, is electrifying- but as much as the music is as good as it is and well performed, Gergiev tries very hard to be faithful to the spirit Tchaikovsky's score and to mesh well with the action on stage but for all his efforts it often sounds as too much of a dirge. And then there are the production values, which are just hideous. The first half is ugly, overly-dark, grotesque stuff, and while the second half is not quite as bad it still read of something like Disney on the verge of insanity, too over-saturated, gaudy and cartoonish. We even have a rat dressed as a cardinal and Drosselmeyer looking like Nosferatu resurrected(if you're confused, don't worry, you and I are in the same boat).
Overall, I love The Nutcracker and I don't mind something different once in a while, but this was an example of different done terribly. 3/10 Bethany Cox
