It’s Christmas. Ballet groups of all sorts, everywhere, are doing The Nutcracker. How many times have you seen it? Well, bet you’ve never seen it done like this!

The Hip Hop Nutcracker is just what it says on the festive holiday cookie tin. It’s Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s original orchestral music, from 1892, but danced in a new way by an athletic and acrobatic ensemble of 1970s-to-80s-style hip-hop break dancers. 

They tell the same story you know and love about Clara and The Nutcracker fighting the Mouse King, but it’s six b-boys and six b-girls who top rock and down rock, pop and lock, freeze, and spin, on the backdrop of the darkened rooftops and streets of New York City.

“The Hip Hop Nutcracker! This is our 11th season, and man, it’s just an amazing journey,” said hip-hop icon Kurtis Blow, the master of ceremonies, who spoke with Whatzup via Zoom. 

The touring show visits Embassy Theatre on Tuesday, Dec. 5. 

Evolution of hip-hop on display

The show, based in New York, has toured all over the country. In 2022, there was a much shorter filmed version presented on Disney+, but at the Embassy we will see the full show, more than two hours worth.

“Incredible to be involved with all of the young talented people, the dancers,” Blow said. “I call ’em the ‘B-Boy, B-Girl Dream Team.’ And just a big shout out to Jennifer Weber, our choreographer, and Eva Price, our producer.

“One of the most incredible things about The Hip Hop Nutcracker is the fusion of classical music and hip-hop,” Blow said. “We have a DJ who plays these remixes of hip-hop grooves and hip-hop funky beats under the classical, timeless music of Tchaikovsky.” 

There’s a live violinist playing over the top, too. 

“And that is incredible to hear and witness,” Blow said. “Now, these kids, these young kids, these talented dancers, they are dancing to classical music! 

“That is one of the incredible developments in hip-hop — because we love to fuse with other genres of music. To see and hear Tchaikovsky’s classical music being remixed and rearranged and remodeled with this hip-hop genre of music, these funky beats, is incredible to hear and see.

“We’ve been traveling around, like I said, for 11 years now, and it is awesome just to see the families come out,” Blow said. “I’m talking about grandparents bringing their children and their children. And that’s amazing to see how hip-hop really has, being from the 50th anniversary, how we have all of these generations. It’s not about age, it’s not about gender, it’s not about race. It’s for everyone. And I see that in the audiences as we travel around.”

Genre pioneer

Now you may ask about music legend Kurtis Blow and how he came to be in this show. 

When he was a youth in the ’70s, “I was what you call a b-boy. Those were some incredible times.”

Life in the Bronx “was very dangerous and scary for a young kid. So what we did was, we practiced and we danced and hung out and listened to music on the rooftops. A lot of people don’t know that, but that’s where b-boy and break dancing started, on the rooftops of the Bronx and Harlem. That was our safe haven, and that’s where we used to rehearse and play our boombox and get our routines together.”

Dancing to the cassette tapes on the boombox led Blow to music production. In 1979, Blow was 20 and a student at City College of New York, when he released “Christmas Rappin’ ” a jazzy, breezy, fast-talking ditty about Santa Claus that just so happened to be the first time a rapper crossed over into the mainstream pop charts. 

The next year, he followed with another chart-buster called “The Breaks,” which was the first rap single ever to be awarded a gold record.

He’s had a prodigious career as a rapper and producer, collaborating with many artists. His pride and joy was incorporating different musical styles into the production of rap. Rapping developed into hip-hop, which spread out and influences so much of our culture today.

Music for the masses

So, it seems natural that when the New York production company of Mike Fitelson, Price, and Weber mounted The Hip Hop Nutcracker, they brought in Blow to open the show. He’s been with them ever since.

“I take the audience back to the old-school hip-hop and have them dancing and singing and throwing their hands in the air and screaming really loud,” Blow said of his role with the production. “And then I sing a song called ‘New Year’s Eve,’ and in the middle of the song I count down from 10 to 1 and I have everyone scream ‘Happy New Year!’ And then the show starts off on New Year’s Eve, 1980.

“I come back after the finale, and I sing ‘The Breaks’ along with the cast and crew. They’re all having fun doing solo dancing, and the audience throwing their hands in the air again. And it just leaves everyone on that good note, feeling good inside and having good, safe, fun. And that’s my job!”

OK, thanks for hanging with us, but the ballet and classical music purists may still be asking: Really? 

Well, why not? Ask this classical music and fine arts journalist (me)! Tchaikovsky’s 1892 Russian ballet, based on an 1816 German fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann, has been choreographed many different ways in 130 years. Tchaikovsky’s themes have been covered and arranged as jazz, pop, prog rock, bluegrass, more ways than anybody knows. 

Tchaikovsky wrote the original music on commission from a ballet company who paid him well. It’s my professional opinion that Tchaikovsky would love to see exuberant dancers from another culture reinterpret his work — especially if there was a royalty check in it. But he passed away a year after he wrote the piece, and now his music belongs to the world.

And 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop. So I say, break it down, bring it on, and be there with bells on!