Dance review: Nutcracker at the Tuff Nutt Jazz Club

As ever, dance is something I juuuust about feel like I can have an opinion on (as opposed to opera which is usually just me frantically shrugging,) although Drew McOnie's version of The Nutcracker already does the Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase gag so that's half of what I was planning to write already out of the window. Cassie Kinoshi reinterpets Tchaikovsky's music as a jazz score, Soutra Gilmour takes over an old cafe space in the Royal Festival Hall to create a pop-up venue, and McOnie recasts the story of a little girl and her toy soldier into that of a little boy having certain feelings for his Action Man doll. In Nutcracker at the Tuff Nutt Jazz Club, Clive (Sam Salter) struggles to get his father's (Tim Hodges) attention on Christmas Eve, so decorates the tree on his own and plays with the Sugar Plum Fairy that's meant to go on top of it.

When his father does notice him, it's to disapprove of his choice of toy, and give him an Action Man to play with instead. In Clive's dream, the dolls then come to life.

In a suitably rainbow-coloured dream world, Clive is actually pretty comfortable with himself and his masculinity, but Action Man (Amonik Melaco) is the one who could do with some convincing about the world of Sugar Plum (Patricia Zhou.) But once she and the ensemble (Chanelle Anthony & Christie Crosson) turn up in skiwear the soldier starts to enjoy himself more; in the central sequence each of a multicoloured selection of smoothies inspires its own visitation, and by the end of it the toy (and by extension his father) has opened up to what the boy needs from him.

So yeah it's basically a joyfully queer, sexy show (Salter and Melaco's costumes increasingly seem to vanish over the course of the hour to the extent that I think at one point their torsos got their own round of applause,) with a topical message about gender acceptance. What's nice is that, with The Nutcracker being the traditional family Christmas ballet, it seems like quite a few families decided that this message is still one that makes it the the ideal family ballet - the little girl in the row behind me laughed when Clive turned up in a frilly dress, although it was a laugh of excitement as much as anything else.

The other thing this has going for it is the intimacy: I can't give you critiques of every dance step but there's definitely something to be said for seeing a well-known, professional company in a venue where you're never more than five rows from the stage, and it looked like the front row were probably getting doused in sweat every time Salter did a spin and went off like a garden sprinkler. With just six dancers and a 60-minute running time I found this a fun show that's got the pulse of the 2020s. My Mum was in the second she heard there was such a thing as a jazz Nutcracker, and in the end her only complaint was that being so close to the dancers' bodies might have shamed her off the mince pies for the rest of Christmas.

Nutcracker at the Tuff Nutt Jazz Club by Drew McOnie, Cassie Kinoshi and Rio Kai, based on The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is booking until the 6th of January at the Tuff Nut Jazz Club (Southbank Centre.)

Running time: 1 hour straight through.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.