THE KINGDOM OF SWEETS

The famous Christmas ballet takes a sinister turn in Johansen’s spooky retelling.

All the pieces of the well-known story are here. At the Stahlbaum family Christmas Eve party, darling Clara receives a gift of a magical nutcracker from the mysterious magician, Drosselmeyer. That night, Clara journeys to the magical Kingdom of Sweets, alongside her nutcracker prince, and is welcomed by the Sugar Plum Fairy. But there’s more to this fairytale dream than classical music fans might remember. In Johansen’s telling, Clara is the beautiful and beloved counterpart to her twin sister, the plain and bookish Natasha. Drosselmeyer is a feared sorcerer who blessed (or was it cursed?) the twins as infants, giving Clara a charmed life and Natasha a desolate one. At that fated Christmas party, Drosselmeyer makes the happy announcement that Clara will marry Conrad, a wealthy future duke with whom Natasha is desperately in love. When the evening turns magical, Natasha follows Clara into the Kingdom of Sweets. Seething and resentful of Clara’s unending good fortune, Natasha finds a sympathetic ear in the Sugar Plum Fairy. Natasha can see that the Fairy is not what she seems, but she’s so consumed with envy and heartbreak that she accepts the Fairy’s dark bargain: Natasha can take her revenge against Clara for the small price of helping the Fairy fulfill her own sinister plans for Drosselmeyer. It would be a simple thing to take the outlines of The Nutcracker ballet and make it grim, but Johansen is doing a lot of delicate character work here, primarily around envy, social limitations on women’s choices, and accountability. The world beyond the candy fantasy is satisfyingly creepy but also an effective landscape for exploring what happens when you ignore the rotten core of your deepest desires.

An eerie and sophisticated dark fantasy.