The Slutcracker at Somerville Theatre
Ballet-parody masterpiece The Slutcracker has been delivering raunchy, ribald revelry and erotic good vibrations to Somerville Theatre audiences since 2008. Based on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's famed 1890s ballet The Nutcracker, it combines high culture with burlesque tradition and gathers together local ballet dancers, strippers, belly dancers, pole performers, hula-hoopers, acrobats, plus other eccentric and exotic dancers.
In The Slutcracker, sequins and glitter meet fleshy natural beauty with an emphasis on diversity, individuality and an adults-only approach to sexual freedom. "Classic" female-gendered performers share the stage with male and trans performers. Risqué costumes and blush-inducing props assure that this is not a Nutcracker for kids — so 18 and over only, please.
About The Slutcracker
The Slutcracker was created by choreographer-director Vanessa White, a former Nutcracker dancer who still performs as the Sugar Dish Fairy in this saucy adaptation featuring her Lipstick Criminals troupe. "Like all art, people will take away what it means to them," she once explained to The Tufts Daily. "All I ever wanted to do was make a beautiful show — and funny, and sexy." Her work is set to Tchaikovsky's score as recorded by the Czech Republic's Brno Philharmonic Orchestra.
White's major modification of the E. T. A. Hoffmann short story that inspired the original was to transform the ballet's youthful sibling protagonists, Clara and Fritz, into a dissatisfied engaged couple.
Clara and Fritz explore a garden of previously forbidden sexual delights in the work's dreamlike second act, when The Slutcracker cuts loose with a wide variety of titillating capers featuring Russian dominatrixes, the erotic Dance of the Reed Pole, and a troupe of sexually indeterminate clowns. Other set pieces include "Waltz of the Flowers and Wet-Spot Fairy," a Busby Berkeley take-off, and a Bacchanalia involving both the onstage performers and a team of "Fluffers" working among the audience. Suffice to say that The Slutcracker contains everything audiences love about the original holiday perennial – and a whole lot more.