The Nutcracker is a two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child’s imagination, featuring a Nutcracker doll. The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 short story The Nutcracker, itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet’s first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged The Nutcracker ballet was not initially as successful as the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, it became popular in later years.
Since the late 1960s, The Nutcracker has been danced by many ballet companies, especially in North America. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of the ballet. Its score has been used in several film adaptations of Hoffmann’s story. Wikipedia
