The Nutcracker Suite

Is there a place where you can step inside a secret snow globe? Where you can taste sweets as they dance before you? If there is, it can only exist in dreams. Or can it?

American Contemporary Ballet has created a Nutcracker Suite for this generation that has become a tradition for so many Southern California families that tickets sell out earlier each season, despite the company’s addition of more performance dates each year. With its immersive, snow-shrouded staging in a skyscraper and visual motifs drawn from candy wrappers to anime, the company also inadvertently created the most Instagrammable holiday event in Los Angeles.

The one-hour retelling of the Tchaikovsky classic brings the original score to life with some of the city’s finest musicians (many ‘Nutcrackers’ today are staged to recorded music), and is designed to surprise and captivate children and adults alike.

“There is no reason to watch the dream of The Nutcracker secondhand, at a remove, when you can be the one to actually experience it,” says ACB Director Lincoln Jones. “It’s like going inside the music, inside the imagination itself.”

This show is an immersive ballet that transports you into the world of the Nutcracker. Enjoy surprises as toys come to life and snow falls from office building ceilings–all as a world-class ballet unfolds before an intimate audience.