The Nutcracker has gone nuts.

Bosom friends,

Today is Christmas eve and I am sure not so many of you will have the time to read my fine piece of literature.
So I will keep it light and breezy, that way you can quickly give it a look and then get back to your holiday errands.

This year hubby and I wont' have a white Christmas at all. Here in Miami we will have a sunny one and we will put our presents underneath a decorated palm tree.
Actually this is what our Christmas tree looks like:

Veuve Clicquot Champagne Christmas bottle.

So as you can see we have a Christmas Champagne bottle. Very decadent.

This year hubby and I won't exchange presents either, instead we got each other tickets for a couple of shows.
This afternoon we will watch George Balanchine's Nutcracker at the Adrienne Arsht Center.
How festive!
I have never been inside the Ziff Ballet Opera House so I am as excited as a pig in shit.
We have seen that ballet many (MANY) times but this will be our first American rendition ever.
While we were living in Chile we actually saw the same show done in perfect South American style. It was quite a sight.
The Cascanueces (Spanish for nutcracker) plot was faithful to the original one but the attitude that permeated the whole performance was quite out there, rather gaudy with a touch of tacky (a heavy touch).
The character of Clara Silberhaus (the most important character in the ballet) in the original story is only seven years old but in the South American production the dancer playing her looked like she had long forgotten what pre-puberty was. Her boobs were spread across her chest like peanut butter on toast to make her look like she was still pre-blossom. She was gorgeous but she looked like she belonged to the Jubelee! show in Vegas more than anything else.
In the first and last sequences Clara is awake, but the middle sequences are best understood as dream episodes. Unfortunately, thanks to the flamboyant production choices those dreams looked like they had been generated by a bad indigestion or by some suspicious chemical substances.
The mice battle scene pictured those rodents as very fat comical animals. They were white and covered in glitter and looked like they were ready to disco instead of fighting for their king.
An important character in the ballet is Drosselmeyer the toymaker. As the story moves on, it seems he is actually a sorcerer who creates Clara's dream and the actions of the ballet.
In this very Latin version he looked like a very tired drag queen in search of her lost glory. The toymaker is supposed to be quite ornate and theatrical, but this one was way OTT. He looked like he belonged to the production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
The nutcracker maker indeed went nuts.
The male lead, the Nutcracker himself, looked rather demure compared to the rest of the shebang. He was just wearing his little soldier outfit and even when he transformed into a prince he still looked like a bellboy at best. I suppose they already spent all their money on the glittery huge disco mice so there was very little left for the poor Nutcracker.
Also this production was done in Vina del Mar near Santiago de Chile in an open air arena. It got so windy at some point that the snow flakes costumes kept on blowing right up onto the dancers faces. It looked more like a snow storm than a graceful snow flakes routine.
In the end hubby and I loved it though.
I believe if you stretch bad far enough it can actually transform into divine. Guilty pleasure profusion.

I do hope that this American version will be closer to a Broadway show than to a
Chilean Mardi Gras. Fingers crossed.

As promised I won't keep you any longer.

For the next couple of days I won't be able to write because I do have a life too...Holy Trinity has invited us to have a German Christmas at her place (she is German) so I will be busy stuffing my face with goose and washing it down with the Grey one. For sure I will need a couple of days to recover from that.
Please keep sharing and suggesting my blog to all of your friends and family members. It is the PERFECT Christmas present! Include even the people you don't really like, someone's trash could be my treasure.

In any case I just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
From my bosom to yours!

See you back next Monday!

Ciao for now.