Word: ballets
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Trumpeted as "The Nutcracker With Macaulay Culkin," the new movie prompts dread in fans of the Christmas classic: what have they done to it this time? Rest assured, the ballet has survived intact, Tschaikovsky's score and Balanchine's choreography happily unadulterated...
...staging is faithful to the original throughout, with thankfully little narration (delivered when necessary in the melodious tones of Kevin Kline). Unfortunately, the movie's salvation is also its biggest problem. In preserving the integrity of the ballet, director Emile Ardolino, of "Dirty Dancing" fame, has done little that is terribly filmic. Although the camera's close range lets one see the dancers' facial expressions and the beautiful costumes, the set is surprisingly unimaginative, and fails to take advantage of the medium. The whole movie looks like a well-done stage version on film, and in fact...
Jessica Lynn Cohen is charming as Marie, and Peter Reznick is perfectly pesky as her little brother Fritz. And Mr. Culkin? He holds his own, perhaps thanks to his days as a student at the School of American Ballet, B.H.A. (Before "Home Alone"). However, he's not the most attractive little boy onstage, nor the best dancer, and other than being Macaulay Culkin, it's hard to understand why he's there. It's hard to understand why any of the movie is here, because so little of it is new or innovative. If the real ballet is inaccessible, this...
...Nutcracker. Through Jan. 2. Presented by the Boston Ballet. Wang Center, 270 Tremont St., Boston. $18-$56. Call 931-ARTS for tickets...
...this season of multitudinous musical revivals, even the upcoming "new" musicals derive from the dear dead past. A Grand Night for Singing is a cabaret collage of the 1943-to-1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook. The Red Shoes is so closely based on the 1948 ballet film that it uses footage from it as the basis of TV ads. Cyrano the Musical, an import from Amsterdam, retells a much told romance, written in the 19th century and set in the 17th. Disney's Beauty and the Beast will transpose to the stage the hit songs and scenic devices...