It's Nutcracker Time: Check Out This Year's New Concept

​If it's the middle of December, it's Nutcracker time! This year, PBS has a new take on the old classic.

Let's start this post with a bit of background. Before I became a writer, I spent a decade working in theater. It was a truth universally acknowledged there that if Thanksgiving was over, and Black Friday was upon us, then it was time for the band in the pit to start tuning up the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky intro known the world over that opens The Nutcracker, and for the next month that music would be driving us all... well, nuts.

Due to this intense overexposure on a yearly basis, I am always looking for something new when it comes to the holiday classic which it sometimes feels was codified in the late 1960s, like Grandmother's vintage Christmas decorations. Not necessarily revisionist productions like Mark Morris' or jazz infused reboots like The Harlem Nutcracker, but at least something that brings a different angle I haven't seen before.