You’ve only got a couple more days left to see possibly the most hipster thing in Chicago right now.
This year Christopher Wheeldon was given the task of overhauling the Joffrey’s annual Nutcracker production, and overhaul he did. While some of the opulence of the former Nutcracker remains, this time it opens in a lower class cabin set in the winter before the Chicago World’s Fair opened. No fancy dresses or presents here, just things you’d find in one of the hipster second hand stores in Pilsen and Bridgeport. Pretty sure I saw a girl coming out of Maria’s wearing a similar dress the other day. But anyway…
The opening has some pretty snazzy light effects which reminded me a lot of the moving trees effects from the Morton Arboretum, especially when it came to creating the inside and outside of the cabin. Pretty sure every HGTV addict in the audience was trying to figure out if they could create the cabin look with enough shiplap. While they did a great job with the set, it was hard to focus on that with all the beautiful details of the Auditorium Theater around.
What snapped my attention back to the play were the tons and tons of puppet rats that, at one point, were all over the stage. Pretty cool, sort of gross, definitely gave me flashbacks to living in an infested apartment in Boston and hearing critters running across my floor at night. Gross college living at its finest.
When the heroine, Marie, falls asleep and the dream sequence begins, the Nutcracker prince takes her to a completed World’s Fair which is the complete antithesis of the cabin from the opening. The mother/queen of the fair dancer was exquisite and was easily one of my favorite dancers of the night. Her gorgeous gold dress and hairpiece also gave probably every girl hipster in Chicago inspiration for her NYE look. God I wish I could have taken pictures during the performance.
My favorite new part of the show was the dancers from the World’s Fair pavilions. The Buffalo Bill’s Wild West cowboy dancer was one of my other favorites, and it was fun to see a lasso incorporated into a classical ballet. The real stars were the Arabian dancers though, who looked weightless as they floated across the stage, carrying and twirling each other with effortless ease. They were as beautiful and hypnotic as the music they danced to and definitely an audience favorite (based on the row of people in front of me, all with their jaws nearly to the floor in awe).
The audience was also treated to a performance by dancing walnuts who were chased by dancing nutcrackers, which was very weird and looked like something in a trippy 70’s movie. At first I was definitely wondering if all the drinks I had were catching up to me but nope, there was definitely a stage full of little furry walnuts twirling around and being assaulted by little swords. Definitely one of the more wtf moments of the night, but also pretty sure that next year hundreds of hipster babies will be dressed as walnuts, peanuts, and pistachios next Halloween. Things to look forward to.
Little Marie gets her happy ending when the dream is over and she wakes up to find that the great impresario of the fair is falling in love with her mother, presumably to take them out of the squalor of the cabin and lead them into a life filled with real toys (instead of nutcrackers) and men in top hats and little mustaches (SO MUCH HIPSTER I CANNOT HANDLE IT). Gotta love a good happy ending!
By Way of Chicago 
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