The Nutcracker. Royal New Zealand Ballet

30 October 2025. St. James Theatre, Wellington
with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Artistic Director, Ty King-Wall, has created a new production of The Nutcracker, a fun-filled frolicking entertainment set among images of New Zealand landscape, flora and fauna, childhood summer holidays in the bach, games on the beach, with sweets and treats for a major sugar rush and lashings of nostalgia.

The choreography is more than that though, and stitches in themes and sequences from the traditional story and productions as it traces the family context for the coming of age of Clara, the young girl growing to sense and glimpse the adult world. There are poignant undertones as the present is braided with an older family member’s memory of the past, the younger one’s glimpse of the future, and parents’ moment of danger when a child goes missing.  

A key figure is Aunt Drosselmeyer, a famous dancer who returns from abroad with mysterious powers plus gifts for the family, including a Nutcracker doll for Clara, and a snow globe for brother Fritz. She also brings a film projector to show the children a cameo of a Commedia dell’Arte performance, which opens a door away from the everyday and into the faraway, wherever a child’s imagination will take us. The power and colour of Tchaikovsky’s large scale orchestral score, conducted by the invincible Hamish McKeich, feeds these forces and fills the theatre with atmosphere.  

Inventive design by Tracy Grant-Lord and POW studios begins with the overture—a front curtain of a 1950s postcard (you possibly still have one in the attic?) a painting of native flowers and trees—kōwhai, mānuka, pōhutukawa, rātā, harakeke, tī and ponga. But wait, that kōwhai blossom moves in the gentlest of breezes, and then a mānuka flower shimmers. Now from behind a bush, a creature, part honey-bee part buzzy-bee, emerges in search of nectar. Better keep an eye on that as later in the ballet it will become a ski-plane to transport you to a mountainous kingdom of snow in our very own Southern Alps. It’s an inspired visual effect to show the country’s landscape from the plane’s windows as we travel.

There are numerous other design transformations—small tree grows into a giant forest, complete with red-eyed predators, possums, stoats and weasels to be exterminated. Smart soldiers from the Nutcracker army need additional help from Clara as she fires a weapon that exterminates the biggest bully Mouse King (I’d have called him a Rat as he falls into the foundations of the ballroom he was planning to build).

A ruru sounds a convincing call of warning, and gives me the shivers.

There are a number of standout performances on opening night, though it’s noteworthy that several alternative soloist casts are billed for the extended Wellington season and following national tour—testament to the company’s strengths. Caterina Estevez-Collins plays a charming and sensitive Clara. Laurynas Vejalis as the Nutcracker-turned-Prince dances with remarkable virtuosic technique but is able to overlay that with a lyricism that rides the music with meaning. Mayu Tanigaito as the Sugar Plum Fairy makes a most welcome return to the stage, and the pas de deux she and Vejalis dance is of rich quality and harmony, an act of love, and the highpoint of the evening.

Character roles include Kirby Selchow as Aunt Drosselmeyer, carrying that with great style. Shaun James Kelly as a drunken kereru makes an amusing mess of trying to fly. Kihiro Kusukami as the powerful Storm Master dances up an impressive wind in the Land of Snow.  

I have recently read The Dreaming Land—a memoir by Martin Edmond of his childhood in Ohakune in the 1950s. He writes of ‘the existence of a world of Maoridom about which most Pakeha knew nothing … there was simply no awareness among the people I knew that we lived cheek by jowl with a strong, coherent and richly complex culture. It is a lack I profoundly regret.’ This new choreography poignantly encompasses that notion by including the small but noteworthy role of Koro, the Maori grandfather of Clara, with Moana Nepia and Taiaroa Royal alternating in the part. Koro gifts a blanket to his granddaughter, and comforts her when she needs that.  He dances for a fleeting moment with the memory of his late wife, a kind of ghost of Christmases past.

There is much energy in the band of children, and the ensembles of snowflakes, flowers and somewhat over-dressed confectionery, to make this a production that will draw enthusiastic crowds as it tours the country. Haere rā to them all.

Jennifer Shennan, 1 November 2025

Featured image: Characters from The Nutcracker. Royal New Zealand Ballet 2025. Photo: © Stephen A’Court.