Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is that rare holiday ballet not meant “for the whole family” but for you, the adult in the room, the lay-about glued to the culture—whichever culture that happens to be—all these years. With help from sets based on work by the creepy comics artist Charles Burns, Morris peoples his Nutcracker with the Ice Storm crowd, for whom the sexual revolution arrives after the fact, in polyester prints and disco moves, though the maid is still Black and the uncle is still merely “weird” when today he would be fabulous. Just the same, in its fidelity to the source material—E. T. A. Hoffmann’s phantasmatic tale—this 1991 version of the Tchaikovsky ballet embodies all sorts of queer dreams and realities. Wise and also clever, moving and ironic, The Hard Nut is an unexpected bildungsroman, an extended-family romance, an ecstatic kitsch wonderland, and first and last a love story, of many kinds of love. —Apollinaire Scherr