Hot Chocolate and Captain Kangaroo: My Most Must-See, Trouble-Free Nutcracker Productions

Oh, just sprawling across a bank of institutional chairs and trimming one's pointe shoes with a pocket knife... you know, as one does!

Okay, did you traumatize your children or sprain yourself side-eyeing all of the weird and troubling Nutcracker productions, and now you need to look at something nice?

Yes, I might mostly fixate on the weird ones, but there ARE tons of wholesome Nutcracker productions out there in the world. Some productions are just charming and fun, with all sketchy innuendos and racist and sexist tropes deleted--you can watch these without having have any uncomfortable conversations with your children. Some productions have made especially thoughtful choices that demonstrate true equity and inclusion and mean you get to have GOOD conversations with your children--yay! And some productions stay weird, but also in a thoughtful, empowering, purposeful way--these aren't for children, necessarily, but they're interesting and entertaining for adults.

San Francisco Ballet: The Nutcracker

San Francisco Ballet boasts the first complete US production of The Nutcracker, performed in 1944. So watching any of their Nutcracker productions would be notable, but the 2004 production, in particular, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson, is super wholesome and adorable. For a pleasant change, Drosselmeyer does not give off a single insidious, creepy, villainous or sketch vibe of any sort, and actually manages to successfully play the role of an eccentric artist who's just excited to show off the cool stuff he makes, and then solicitously chaperones Clara on an overnight field trip and gets her back home safely. 

Here's a bootleg of the 2007 production on YouTube right now:

The production's conceit that Clara goes to visit the 1915 World's Fair is cute, and it makes the world showcase of Divertissements make sense. My favorite part is near the end, when the Sugar Plum Fairy briefly turns Clara into an adult ballerina so she can have a proper pas de deux with her Prince, and it's sweet but not romantic, and Clara wakes up as a child back in her bed again in the morning. 

Other fun moments: the Arabian female lead popping up out of a giant genie's bottle, a Prologue slideshow of iconic 1915 San Francisco sights, and ribbon dancing!

New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker (revised 2017)

The Nutcracker choreographed by George Balanchine is iconic, and after you've watched it once, ever afterwards you'll notice in every other production you ever see parts that were "borrowed" from his vision. Ahem.

Unfortunately, part of his iconic production that's often borrowed is more of that stupid racist imagery. Chinese Tea is particularly gross, with all the racist stereotypes and unflattering caricatures that you can imagine all just sort of stuffed into one very short number. For that reason, I don't recommend the pretty widely available 2011 New York City Ballet production, available on DVD and right now via this bootleg on YouTube:

Skim through the bootleg if it's still up, if you want, to check out the bullshit costume on the male lead of Chinese Tea. So unnecessary and offensive.

However, New York City ballet revised Chinese Tea in 2017, so now if you're lucky enough to be able to see it live, it will be uniformly delightful! I've long wanted to see this particular production, and I'm not even going to tell you how often I watch the Candy Cane dance from it:

It's part of the good vibes watchlist that I pull out when I'm bummed, along with Tom Holland lip syncing to Rihanna and the "How Far I'll Go" performance at the 2017 Academy Awards.

This updated Nutcracker, or excerpts from the DVD version, pairs with one of our favorite ballet books for children, A Very Young Dancer:

I read all of the Very Young series when I was a kid, and when my own kid was, herself, a very young dancer, I checked it out for her every year during Nutcracker season. It's about a child in the School of American Ballet who plays the role of Clara in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker. It's written very simply, from the child's perspective, with a lot of black-and-white photos that make one feel like they're really getting a behind-the-scenes look at the school and the production. 

Joffrey Ballet: The Nutcracker

Joffrey Ballet seems to be very diligent about protecting their IP, so this is another production that I'm unable to find a bootleg for, nor can I find the 2017 PBS documentary, "Making a New American Nutcracker," about the Joffrey Ballet's production.

However, seeing this production remains on my bucket list because, as far as I know, the Joffrey Ballet is the only large-scale, prestigious company that includes a role in The Nutcracker deliberately designed for a child in their Adaptive Dance program:

I would LOVE to watch children with different abilities sharing a professional stage and performing a role that respects and includes them. I'd love to see every production behaving so thoughtfully with their casting.

Debbie Allen Dance Academy: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker

One year when we had Netflix for a month so we could catch up on Stranger Things (something that we clearly need to do again so I can watch Season 4!), the kids and I also watched Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, and now we super want to see it live someday. Will also did a biography project on Debbie Allen around that time, and Syd took some of her free online dance classes in the early days of Covid, so we're very much fans of Debbie Allen and her non-profit dance school.

Again, they do a great job protecting their IP (ahem), but they've got some approved clips of various numbers on YouTube.

Here's the Candy Cane dance:

Here's the Bollywood number:

Syd would be SO excited to learn a really fun and exciting genre like step, hip-hop, or Bollywood in concert with her classical ballet classes. It's just so cool what Debbie Allen is doing for the children in her program.

Captain Kangaroo: The Nutcracker Suite

So, if you've got little kids, this is the cutest thing EVER. In 1958, Bob Keeshan made a record in his Captain Kangaroo persona in which he narrated the story of The Nutcracker, including adding lyrics to some of the numbers, and it is charming! 

You can still buy the vinyl--

--but fortunately Archive.org also has the entire record available for streaming and download. 

I didn't discover this album until the kids were too old to appreciate it, but if I'd known about it, I'd have spent every December of their baby through preschool years with it on constant repeat--it's THAT cute!

Somerville Theatre: The Slutcracker

Okay, you know this isn't for kids. But for an adult, what a way to work through the Nutcracker trauma of your youth and/or the Nutcracker trauma of your time parenting a child ballerina!

Somerville Theatre's The Slutcracker gets amazing reviews every year, and it looks like the most fun, lighthearted, irreverent spoof of everything sketch and suss in every Nutcracker production you've ever experienced. 

Once again, I do have a ton more Nutcracker productions that I could drone on and on about genuinely loving, but not only do I have Mouse milkmaid braids to do again in a few minutes, but some MAJOR wig drama went down during last night's dress rehearsal and so I also, as you can imagine, have about fourteen different chat threads to maintain and a lot of roasting to do.

Happy Opening Night, Friends! May the Mouse Army prevail!