The Nutcracker is a Russian ballet originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with the score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The story of the The Nutcracker originally comes from the E.T.A.Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and an adaptation of Hoffmann’s story called The Tale of the Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas. The Nutcracker was commissioned by the director of Moscow’s Imperial Theatres and got it’s premiere at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in December of 1892. It was part of a double billing with Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta. The San Fransisco Ballet was the American company to produce the show in 1944.
