The closest we can come to the original 1892 Mariinsky production of The Nutcracker is George Balanchine’s production. It was made for the New York City Ballet in 1954, when the six-year-old company was still dancing at New York’s City Center, and then revised 10 years later for a larger stage at Lincoln Center—the brand-new State Theater (since renamed the David H. Koch Theater). In his youth, on the Mariinsky stage, Balanchine had danced the roles of mouse, the Nutcracker/Little Prince, and the Mouse King; later he danced Candy Cane. When Balanchine finally choreographed his own version of the ballet, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. “The Nutcracker,” he said repeatedly, “is the tree.” Balanchine was honoring the 48 bars of music Tchaikovsky wrote for the tree: a theme slowly growing, then climbing, then incandescent, a magical event that dramatizes the story’s rise from cozy domesticity to the primeval reaches of imagination. No Christmas tree in the world rises like the one Balanchine insisted upon when his company moved to the big new space at Lincoln Center, its stage designed with a high fly and a trap especially positioned for the monumental tree—41 feet high, 23 feet wide at the base, and 4.5 feet deep. Talk about a prima ballerina! Her garlands, lights, and bouncing boughs set the N.Y.C.B. Nutcracker rapturously apart. —Laura Jacobs