LONDON certainly loves its Nutcrackers. This year there are no fewer than three productions running concurrently in the capital, and the producers behind them must believe that there is sufficient audience out there to keep them all in festive cheer.
Sadler’s Wells has Matthew Bourne’s droll version, inspired by his childhood love of MGM musicals and visions of Busby Berkeley; the Hammersmith Apollo has English National Ballet’s jokey production, designed in outlandish fashion by the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. But if it’s a traditional Nutcracker you want, head for the Festival Hall.

For a company founded in 1929, the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet look awfully young. The dancers are eager and energetic, but still raw. There isn't the polish or assurance of a company style to hold them together.

The Nutcracker makes few demands on the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet's tradition of psychological excavation. This benign new production has barely a thought in its pretty head, except to sprinkle icing-sugar with a lavish hand.

Designer Vladimir Arefyev surrounds the ballet with snow-white papercuts. It nicely touches base with Russian folk art, but also looks as if he blew the design budget on doilies. His party is set in an Empire-line 19th century, while bright pom-poms cover the fairyland costumes like tiny scoops of sorbet.

Those who love a traditional Nutcracker and who can't be doing with English National Ballet's cartoons at the Hammersmith Apollo, Matthew Bourne's naughtiness at Sadler's Wells or Scottish Ballet's heart of darkness in Edinburgh could do worse than to book up for the Stanislavsky company from Moscow.

For a company founded in 1929, the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet look awfully young. The dancers are eager and energetic, but still raw. There isn't the polish or assurance of a company style to hold them together.

The name suggests a dramatic emphasis, the company's old connection to the Moscow Arts Theatre and Stanislavsky's famous acting "method". In fact, this Nutcracker, credited to Vasily Vainonen, rushes over the ballet's plot, avoiding mime wherever possible. Dancers look adrift in character roles. The grandmother of the party scene is surely no older than the girls playing little-boy guests. Her age is represented by a crinoline, and she moves too lightly inside those heavy skirts.

Perhaps it is the hovering spirit of the author and fantasist ETA Hoffmann, but there is something about The Nutcracker that stubbornly resists all attempts at good taste and moderation. Even the most conservative productions have their moments of blissful insanity, and in the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet’s version at the Festival Hall, these tend to concentrate around the mice: an S&M legion of PVC-armoured, pointy-masked gimps that crawl toward young Masha (the owner of the Nutcracker) as if they would rather have a mistress than a Mouse King. But when their ruler arrives, he combines both functions in one chiffon-caped, feather-crowned entity, swishing his sword, essaying Tiller Girl kicks at his enemies and reeling around like Larry Grayson with the vapours

Sugar plum with aplomb

by JANN PARRY
the Observer

A tried and tested Russian Nutcracker has provided the answer to the South Bank's quest for festive fare (to 9 January). The Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet has brought, for the second year running, Vasily Vainonen's vintage Soviet version, dating back to 1934. Fresh designs by Vladimir Arefyev have been specially adapted for the Festival Hall's makeshift stage.

A cracker with youth on its side

by ZOE ANDERSON
the Independent

What a difference a year can make. Last Christmas, the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet's The Nutcracker was a sellout, on the strength of that name and the promise of a traditional production. The performance that I saw then was decidedly shaky. This is the same company, the same production, but it's now a much livelier show.

The Nutcracker Royal Festival Hall, London

by CLEMENT CRISP
the Financial Times

More an idée reçue than a ballet, and that [/i]idée[i] not worth a second thought, Nutcracker is now a seasonal hazard, like our train and postal services and those numbing letters in which people chronicle the unspeakable activities of their family throughout the past year.

...

It also offers little choreography of interest, and I wish the principals I saw on Tuesday night could have studied how the Kirov's Irina Kolpakova and Vladilen Semyonov once upon a time created crystalline poetry from its workaday duet.