For the past six or so years, my sister’s ballet company has hijacked our Thanksgiving travel plans. The company puts on an annual performance of The Nutcracker that weekend, and my family usually attends all of the five or so showings. This is usually not too unpleasant, as I enjoy both Tchaikovsky and costumes with lots of ruffles.
However, two years ago God started talking to the ballet mistress, who owns the studio. One night, He revealed to her “the miracle that opened the XXI Century [sic]:” Hidden for more than a hundred years, the lyrics to The Nutcracker were revealed to the dance teacher after a long night of prayer. As the program, or more appropriately, testimonial, states, “Only with God’s direction, I recorded or perhaps more accurately I transcribed what I heard … the story of salvation, the grace of God, and the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ. All sung to the most popular ballet music in the world.” And thus was born “The Christian Interpretation of The Nutcracker, Opera-Ballet of Grace and Gracefulness.” This, undoubtedly, is one of God’s poorer ideas, as anyone who has seen it will agree
For the first thing, why Tchaikovsky? He was definitely gay, and probably an atheist. While I’d love to believe God is that progressive, many experts on the subject seem to agree these are not particularly godly attributes. But the family of the ballet mistress, it seems, has plenty. You may be scratching your head, asking “How does one sing to Tchaikovsky?” Well, God was kind enough to tell the ballet mistress which Biblical passages went with which segments of the ballet. Now, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” doesn’t seem to flow, and might be difficult to set to music ordinarily, but as the ballet mistress discovered, if you allow “love” to have as many syllables as you desire, you can make most anything into lyrics. My casual research shows that this method allows me to replace the lyrics of such diverse songs as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Cowboy Take Me Away” with the aforementioned scripture. These are the lyrics for the party scene. In a particularly touching addition, a beggar woman approaches Clara and the dancing girls, who are clad in rags and shaking. Clara then realizes just what the starving beggar woman needs, and scoops the family Bible out from under the tree and hands it to the beggar woman, who weeps with thankfulness. I wish Washington beggars were like that, as I have a few Gideon Bibles to dispose of.
Let’s imagine for a second that this woman, instead of receiving visions from God, had received lyrical advice from aliens, Satan or the neighbor’s dog. Since this music is really, really bad, no doubt somebody would have urged her to talk to a professional counselor. However, since its never wise to take a chance on divine retribution, the ballet parents only whisper behind her back about “that time of life.” So, she successfully turned all her little ballerinas into a heavenly choir, and installed her son as Jesus. Yes, her son. The Son. He’s about 17, and very pretty, if short. He has no ballet training, but he stalks the stage during the performance wearing a Clorox-white tuxedo with tails and bearing a microphone of compensatory size. Did I mention he can’t sing? But the Son is Jesus, so he has to sing the Jesus parts of the songs. Him I am most unhappy with, for surely such an attractive adolescent has friends who could beat him for the way he spoiled the introduction to the Land of Sweets with “keep walkin’ on waaaaater, I am the way!” If there is anything holy, a 17-year-old proclaiming “I am the way!” in his squeaky voice over girls in tights is far from it.
In this way, God has ruined a Christmas tradition. Now, he’s told people to do some pretty unfortunate things before-kill the Muslims, kill the Jews, convert those natives-but surely it is the revelation that The Nutcracker is a vehicle for some of the Bible’s least inspired passages that has disheartened the most little girls, who previously thought The Nutcracker was about furry legwarmers and artificial snow.
But we still have a few things to be grateful for: In a rare act of divine clarification, God put to rest that tiresome Protestant-Catholic debate. During the Sugarplum Fairy’s grand pas-de-deux, the Son sings “For it is by grace you’ve been saved. Not by works. So that none can boast.” While I’m curious to see how this plays at the Spanish-translation performance at the Mexican community center, I suppose I’ll now have to be found at the local Calvinist church. Or the Irving ballet. Whichever.
Laura Becker is a sophomore in the college and a contributing editor of the Georgetown Voice. She still practices the sacred ritual of the snow-turtle.
