The guests are the mother’s skilled but poor laborer friends, gathering to celebrate the holiday in her humble abode, and this is where an impressive visitor arrives to bestow gifts, including a nutcracker for Marie, whose romantic dream constitutes the rest of this tale.
Tchaikovsky’s sparkling ballet is generally set in an upper-class household of Imperial Russia, but in this twist, the only touch of gold we see is in the hands of the girl’s mother, a sculptress shaping what looks like a model of the Fair’s iconic statue. She lives with her brother and their widowed mother among fellow worker families in a neighborhood of shacks at the foot of a project rising behind them - the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
The girl, known as Clara in the Tchaikovsky original, is now Marie. Bathed in gilding of the freshly refurbished Lyric Opera House, and awash with the Russian romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 music as magnificently played for the Joffrey by the Lyric Opera Orchestra, there is a fairy-tale quality to this uniquely Chicago version of an adolescent girl’s fantasy that her wooden nutcracker comes to life as the prince of her dreams.
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