Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s radically reimagined Nutcracker won’t debut until 2027, but fans can catch an exclusive sneak peek at one of its most demanding dances August 23 at Hartwood Acres. At the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s alfresco Ballet Under the Stars performance Sunday evening, the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Nutcracker Prince will take on a completely reworked Grand Pas de Deux, now a fast-moving duet with acrobatic lifts and intricate steps that keep both dancers in constant motion.

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s Ballet Under the Stars Gives a First Look at the New Nutcracker and More

“Both musically and choreographically, it’s the most difficult dance in the new Nutcracker,” says choreographer Trey McIntyre, who collaborated with PBT artistic director Adam W. McKinney on reconceptualizing the ballet. “It requires the company’s strongest dancers.” 

In May, when PBT revealed the plot of its overhauled Nutcracker, the Pittsburgh-coded details immediately stood out. While still set to Tchaikovsky’s score, PBT’s revamp features dancing pierogies, baseball players, geodes from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and a steelworker who arrives on a girder. Instead of a sleigh, the Duquesne Incline will transport characters to the Cloud Kingdom. True to Pittsburgh’s turn-of-the-century industrial roots, Marie’s father is a Westinghouse engineer and her mother is a physician in the Hill District. 

But for McKinney, the challenge was far bigger than just giving the ballet a Pittsburgh-based identity. It was how to make sense of a ballet that he admits is “very confusing.” 

From the moment the Nutcracker premiered in Russia in 1892, the surreal details and murky plot have left plenty of questions dangling: After a Christmas Eve party, a young girl named Marie falls asleep—or does she?—then wakes up and finds herself battling an army of rats and mice. But why isn’t it the Nutcracker thwarting the vermin? Who was he before he became a wooden soldier? Why do Act I and Act II seem so different? And what’s with all the anthropomorphic sweets? 

Turning a Classic Into Something New

McKinney had already worked with someone who could wrestle with those kinds of questions. In 2024, he paired up with McIntyre to stage the choreographer’s edgy version of Peter Pan, complete with acrobatic flying scenes and punk costumes. “Trey’s such a master of storytelling, and he does that so beautifully through choreography,” says McKinney.

McIntyre was game—he’d dealt with the ballet’s strangeness before, performing in around 42 Nutcracker shows a season at Houston Ballet, and knew intimately that the plot was “kind of odd.” But when he began creating PBT’s version, he deliberately stopped watching other productions. “I didn’t want to see any more Nutcrackers,” he says. “I wanted to get all of that out of my system.”

At PBT, his job wasn’t to explain away the dream logic of the ballet, but to give the audience a way into it. “It’s important to me that the audience isn’t just left scratching their heads and not knowing what’s going on,” he says. “There has to be a doorway through to every moment.”

Remaking the Nutcracker from the Inside Out 

Their first move was to give Marie a past. In PBT’s new production, the ballet opens in the 1950s, with an older Marie sitting with her granddaughter and remembering the Christmas Eve in 1906 when she first encountered the Nutcracker Prince. That shift makes memory part of the plot—and gives McKinney and McIntyre a way to build context around characters who have traditionally appeared with little explanation.

They also found ways to thread Pittsburgh through Marie’s recollections. Triplet sisters—Roberta Bridges, Rachel Bridges, and Andy Bridges—reappear in Act II as dancing bridges, emerging from Marie’s “imagination and re-imagination of self and place,” says McKinney. The siblings’ names are nods to Roberto Clemente, Rachel Carson, and Andy Warhol, as well as to Pittsburgh’s bridges.

But PBT’s new Nutcracker ultimately hinges on something more personal: the idea that the stories we tell about our lives become part of the lives themselves. “We keep rewriting the story every time that we tell it,” McIntyre says.

That idea repositions Marie’s role in the ballet. She is no longer the passive girl who watches strange Christmas-y adventures happening around her—she becomes the person whose perspective helps create them. “With this Nutcracker, we’re trying to answer the question: How do our perceptions create our realities?”says McKinney. McIntyre arrives at the same place. “It’s our point of view that determines our reality,” he says. “It’s the way that we look at things that make it what it is.”

Sunday’s performance at Hartwood Acres offers a glimpse of what that new reality looks like in motion—though the costumes aren’t quite finished. “We haven’t made those yet,” says McKinney. “We’re shopping for fabric this week in New York City.”

Know Before You Go to Ballet Under the Stars

• Ballet Under The Stars will be held Sunday, August 23, at 7:30 p.m. at Hartwood Acres, Middle Road Concert Area, 4000 Middle Road, Allison Park. Admission is free.
• Family fun activities start at 5:30 pm, and include face painting, dance demonstrations, crafts, and balloon art. 
• Bring your own seating.
• Dinner and drinks are available at on-site food and beverage trucks. 
• In addition to the Nutcracker sneak peek, the evening will also include a mix of classical and contemporary works. Performances include a Giselle Pas de Deux, and excerpts from The Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland. 
• For more information and updates, visit Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.

Looking for more to do this weekend? Check out our event calendar to see what’s happening through August 23. Plus while you wait for the new Nutcracker, try these recipes inspired by the ballet.

Story by Kathleen Renda
Photos by Aviana Adams

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