The New York Times:" Mr. Tcherniakov’s “Nutcracker” follows the fantasy with the reality of growing up.
It, too, charts a girl’s awakening — to wonder and beauty, but also to mortality and solitude. After her birthday party, Marie, the ballet’s main character, is confronted not by an army of mouse soldiers, but by her family and friends, mysteriously turned against her: What could better express the emotional landscape of adolescence, the period for which this “Nutcracker” is a metaphor?
Her house is destroyed in an avalanche of debris; Vaudémont, for whom she has a budding love, dies. This she refuses to accept, searching for him in a refugee camp in frigid winter (the Waltz of the Snowflakes); a threatening forest; and a creepy assemblage of giant toys, the occasion for Tchaikovsky’s famous divertissements. The end deposits Marie back at home, the mansion undisturbed — but, quivering on the floor, she’s no longer innocent, her postures ones of sex and childbirth.
The spectacle is riveting: The gargantuan toys, executed in scary detail, do particular tribute to the Paris Opera’s design workshops. The over-the-top moments (Marie imagines a meteorite colliding with Earth) seem appropriate explosions of a teenage imagination, and the moodiness is infectious. Alain Altinoglu’s eerily light, detailed conducting meets this moodiness with controlled precision, a vision of Tchaikovsky more Classical than Romantic
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