Maurice Bejart's Nutcracker

Maurice Béjart who died last month is the writer and director of this "Nutcracker". I have never been partial to his work and this ballet is not an exception.

Béjart himself hogs this video by inserting himself and his comments into it at considerable length. And this is the probably the most willful and self-indulgent version of the holiday perennial and has almost nothing to do with the holiday or original scenario of Marius Petipa (It is still debated whether Petipa or Lev Ivanov was the original choreographer.).

Things get off to a poignant start when Elle ("She"), the boy Bim's mother, tells him she has to go on a long journey leaving him only a wrapped box with a sculpture in it. This turns out to be the substitute for the "Christmas tree" of the original. For the rest of the ballet we get images of Bim's apparently incestuous love of his mother's memory.

Now Bim (a clown figure probably based on the late Marcel Marceau's Bip.) is a clear representative of Béjart himself and it is true that the real Béjart lost his mother at the age of 7. Initially touching, this relationship gets really icky by the end of the ballet.

Béjart is a good boy at first in his dealings with the original Tchaikovsky score but, during the Snowflakes Waltz, a famous French accordionist, Yvette Horner, is introduced and that's the end of that. I suppose she's a fine artist in her own field, but I don't know what she's doing here.

Later on Maurice introduces, mostly French, popular music into the ballet and though the conductor Edmon Colomer comments on how these are so beautifully integrated with the original score, I can't agree at all and I find the effect jarring.

Gil Roman ably plays the important character of Petipa/Mephisto (Yes, from Goethe's Faust.) but after all Béjart's revisionism, Gil announces that the Pas de Deux will use Petipa's (Ivanov's?) original choreography, one wonders why it wasn't better danced.

At the end of the comments, Juichi Kobayashi, the young man who plays Felix the Cat, name taken from an old comic strip, is shown in an outtake where he gives his real name, then freezes up after and utters the immortal 4-letter "S" word! Now there's something I can agree with!