Résumé: Nearly twenty years on from his first staging of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet in 1967, the great ballet star and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-93) staged this, his final choreography of, and radically re-imagined revision of, this greatest of all ballets – the Paris version – in 1985 as director of the Paris ballet, a position he had ascended to two years earlier. Mr. Nureyev’s version enjoys a particular standing in the history of this ballet in that it was the first to incorporate the...