Last week, I caught the final dress rehearsal of The Slutcracker (@ the Somerville Theatre through the 20th, but basically sold out). Vanessa White (of the burlesque troupe Babes in Boinkland) turns the classic ballet for people who don’t really like ballet into a sprawling campy burlesque striptease show, where Clara is female yuppie whose Auntie Drosselmeyer doesn’t think she’s getting enough sex. So, she gives Clara a dildo for Christmas and, just as the Clara we all know runs off with the Nutcracker Prince to the land of sugarplums and fairies, The Slutcracker’s Clara leaves her boyfriend Fritz for the sex-toy Prince (above), escaping to a land of sexual gratification and stripteases that parody the “international” divertissements of The Nutcracker’s second act.
We get a bacchanalian, Arabian belly dancers, Russian S&M dancers in leather, an acrobatic Dance of the Reed Pole, Mother Ginger and Her Clowns tribbing, and a well choreographed Waltz of the Flowers striptease that plays out like a synchronized swimming routine. Nutcracker becomes dildo. That’s basically it and it’s silly that some people find it controversial. For anybody who gets premium cable, it’s actually pretty tame. Nobody should be shocked by cartoony humping, topless girls with sequins over their nipples, and a giant dildo. A burlesque Nutcracker isn’t a virginal idea anyways and now when I look at the list of divertissements in The Nutcracker’s second act, the ballet seems to be asking for this treatment.
The parallels are obvious to anyone who has seen The Nutcracker once, twice, or thirty times. This is a comic parody, geared towards Davis Square hipsters and women on a girls’ night out who’ve already seenThe Donkey Show. It’s not intended to be anything like Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, which Laci the Dog brought up in discussion of the Slutcracker “controversy.” What I found even more shocking than anything in the actual performance, is all the advance press the show got. Advance write-ups in the Globe, Herald, Phoenix, Improper Bostonian, Huntington News, WMBR, and so on. And they probably didn’t even spend anything on advertising! Take that Boston Ballet. Ms. White seems to be as good at business as she is at scaling a reed pole.
Naughty Aunt Drosselmeyer (Mary Dolan) and the inadequate Fritz (Paolo Piselli)
The entire first act contains no dancing at all and serves a silent film slapstick prelude to the second act (where everything goes down) that sets up the Nutcracker parallel. It drags a bit and I found myself wishing the cast were dancing, but White offers us a comic tableau of a drunken family Christmas party. And how many times do you see a Christmas tree grow, and grow, and grow, and turn into a giant dildo? I did only see the dress rehearsal, but I think it’s safe to say the choreography and dancing are a little rough and, from what I saw, White was the only dancer who really had it. But, what if James Cameron had directed The Toxic Avenger? The Slutcracker revels in camp and its homeliness is as much a part of it as the kinky outfits that end up on the stage floor.
The Slutcracker is about girls getting laid, even if it doesn’t say much about sexual liberation, because I can’t help but see this Clara as a little shallow and selfish; typical of the girlish woman female audiences seem to identify with these days, as men identify with figures like Seth Rogen in Knocked Up (see David Denby’s excellent 2007 New Yorker article). If The Slutcracker does any liberating, it does it by using as many female body types as you can find on Google with the parental control settings turned off. And for this, I applaud White and her collaborators, because if the ballet needs diversity, it’s not in the races of the dancers, but in their physiques.
Obviously it’s a girls’ night out sort of thing. But, I overheard a group of men outside the theater during the intermission saying, “this is some quality shit…hot girls…there are boobs and they serve beer.” So, it does seem to offer something for everyone (who’s over eighteen). In the end, everybody’s happy as not only does Clara receive her sexual awakening, but Fritz gets one too. I’ve already written enough spoilers, so I’ll just say that by the end of the show, Clara and Fritz’s sex-life finds a little spice.
The Chinese Dance (Caleb Cole)
