St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater is staging a new version of The Nutcracker. Music director Valery Gergiyev has a new interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s music, but it’s the choreography that has everyone talking. Mikhail Shemyakin is “focusing on the darker spirit of Ernst Hoffmann’s 19th-century children’s tale in order to bring out more of the story’s inherent fantasy. At the end, [the little girl] rejects the adult world and chooses never to return to reality. At the ballet’s climax she turns into a sugar figure on a giant cake.” The Moscow Times (Reuters)