The Hard Nut, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

More than most versions of The Nutcracker, Mark Morris’s campy, thoroughly hopeful take is a love story – about how random acts of horniness in a newly liberated yet still ticky-tacky America might inspire a child to something genuine when she grows up (quickly, of course).

Any decent Nutcracker deftly establishes the real-world setting from which its nightmares and dreams will spring. Morris’s 20-year-old tale takes place wherever the defanged Nutcrackers that this Nut fondly despises might tinkle: elevators, supermarkets and at the Stahlbaum Christmas party circa 1970. The guests, in pompadours and polyester disco duds, are already washed up. It makes you want to giggle and moan. The partiers bump and grind and perform other mildly naughty moves on one another – Morris, like Balanchine, has one intrigue tumble after another – but, as Tchaikovsky’s light music (too light on opening night) intimates, they know to keep themselves in hand.

Our heroine Marie (a subtly sincere Lauren Grant) knows nothing. In a world of comic-book black and white, blaring Christmas red and green, and lewd innuendo, the girl wears pink and misses all the jokes. But she intuits what all the grown-ups, except the magnetic Drosselmeier, only grope towards.

From the delirious snow scene that ends Act I to a Technicolor second act that travels the world, via Marie’s TV-saturated imagination, the dances are mainly variations on the theme of desire.

Decked out in Mister Softy helmets, silver lamé tops and stiff little tutus, the unisex snowflakes scamper across the stage flinging feathery fake snow. When Marie finally steps into the story inside a story that Drosselmeier has been narrating, passion is ready for its close-up.

The second act is where Nutcrackers often fall into a treacle well. The story is over but Tchaikovsky is not; hence an hour of dance puffery. In Morris’s version, the story doesn’t end until the ballet does. Marie’s huge extended family ushers her and the Big Bob’s Burger Nutcracker prince (an ardent David Leventhal) into one of the plainest, most beautiful and enviable love dances ever.

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