The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (PBS-TV, filmed. December 7, 2019, aired December 24, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas PBS showed a quite different holiday-themed special, The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King. Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker has become a staple of the holiday season – just about every ballet company in the world mounts a production of it during the Christmas season and makes so much money off it it provides half their income for the year – but John Mauceri, American-born conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, decided to do a new version that would bring the story closer to its original source, the 1816 novel by German writer. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Most classical music fans know of Hoffmann, if at all, as the central figure of Jacques Offenbach’s last opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, which not only draws on three of his stories but presents Hoffmann as an on-stage character, a man routinely victimized by love and relationships that turn out to be grotesquely unworkable and toxic. But he was also a multi-talented artist, including a quite good composer in his own right (I’ve heard one of his piano concerti, a single-movement work strongly reminiscent of his great contemporary, Beethoven.)

Not surprisingly, Hoffmann’s original story is considerably darker than the one we know, including a long prologue about the rivalry between humans and mice for control of a fairy kingdom. The human king and queen hired a man named Christian Drosselmeyer to invent a mousetrap and used it to kill most of the mouse population in their castle, but to get revenge the Mouse Queen put a curse on their daughter, Princess Pirlipat, so the girl, once the most beautiful baby in all the world, became a hideous creature with green eyes, a mouth that extended all the way across her face, and a small beard. (It sounded to me like a prototype of the Joker in Batman.) Drpsselmeyer told the human king and queen that their daughter could be restored to her natural beauty only after 15 years had passed and she was old enough to marry (at least under German law back then), and only by a young man who could crack the world’s hardest nut with his teeth and who had never shaved or worn boots. After searching the world for the nut and the young man (represented by some of the national dances that Tchaikovsky and his choreographer, Marius Petipa, used to fill out the second act of the ballet), Drosselmeyer found both of them while on a visit to his home town, Nuremberg.

The nut belonged to Drosselmeyer’s brother and the young man was his nephew. Drosselmeyer staged the ritual needed to bring Princess Pirlipat’s beauty back, but in the process his nephew stepped on the Mouse Queen and, as she lay dying, she put a curse on him that turned him into a nutcracker. The second half of the story takes place at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum and their two children, Fritz and Marie (named after E. T. A. Hoffmann’s own kids). Drosselmeyer is a traveling clockmaker who periodically shows up with remarkable Christmas gifts, including a batch of toy soldiers that march in formation when they’re wound up (Hoffmann was big on automata and one of the stories in The Tales of Hoffmann depicts him falling in love with one). But Marie only has eyes for the nutcracker that used to be Drosselmeyer’s nephew, and she goes to bed on Christmas Eve and has an elaborate dream in which the nutcracker slays the Mouse Queen’s seven-headed son and is proclaimed the rightful ruler of a candy kingdom. Once the spell on him is lifted and he becomes human again, he proposes marriage to Maria and she accepts, journeying back with him to co-rule the candy kingdom from a giant castle made of marzipan. Then Maria wakes up, tells her parents about her dream, and is upbraided for believing in anything so preposterous. Mauceri decided to present this story asFor his narrator he chose Scottish-born actor Alan Cumming, star of the last Broadway revival of the musical Cabaret, and Cumming added to the charm of the tale even though his Scottish accent got a bit thick at times.

Mauceri made some ill-advised references to some more recent legends, from the Arthurian tales and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to both Wagner’s and Tolkien’s Ring cycles, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. All ini all, it was an engaging tale even though some of it got a bit too “arch” for me. I was amused at how much one of the oboe players in the orchestra looked like the young Mitch Miller (who also got his start as an oboist) and the black-clad woman who played the celesta part in “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and wherever else one was required. Mauceri cobbled together his score from various Tchaikovsky works, including both familiar and unfamiliar numbers from The Nutcracker as well as other works by the Russian master, which he did not name. He also did a commentary in which he referenced the conductor as if they were twi different people named John Maucery – the show was filmed December 7, 2019 at the Royal Scottish National Theatre in Glasgow, at the second performance of Mauceri’s pastiche. It would be interesting to see a modern choreographer use Mauceri’s adaptation to construct a ballet version (and according to various online sourcesn, there ave alreqady been attempts to rework the ballet closer to Hoffmann's story), but until that happens this one will do just fine.