Southampton - The Parrish Art Museum's Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema series will celebrate the holiday season with two screenings of "The Nutcracker" on Saturday December 11 and Saturday, December 18, at 2 p.m. Recorded live at the Royal Opera House, London, in November and December 2009, this production draws on all the imagination and fantasy of the story of young Clara, who creeps downstairs for one of her presents on Christmas Eve but finds herself instead plunged into of a night of magical adventures. Tickets for the 110-minute film are free for children 12 and under, $12 for Parrish members, and $15 for nonmembers.

In 1816, German writer E.T.A. Hoffman published "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," a scary fairy tale intended only for adults. Alexandre Dumas, père rewrote the story in 1844 to make it happier and more appropriate for children. Marius Petipa, chief ballet master of the Russian Imperial Ballet, liked this new story and decided to have it made into a ballet. He commissioned Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky to write the music. Petipa's assistant Lev Ivanov created the choreography.

The ballet premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on December 18, 1892 on a double bill with Tchaikovsky's opera Iolanta. Although Czar Alexander III was delighted with the ballet, critics were less kind, and "The Nutcracker" was not deemed a success at its first performances. Tchaikovsky himself wrote "The opera [Iolanta] was evidently very well liked, the ballet not - the papers, as always, reviled me cruelly."

"The Nutcracker's" first complete United States performance was in December 1944 at the San Francisco Ballet. George Balanchine, who grew up in Russia, danced the role of the Prince in "The Nutcracker" in 1919 when he was 15 years old. Later, after he had moved to America and founded the New York City Ballet, he decided to choreograph his own version. The first performance of "The Nutcracker" at the New York City Ballet took place in 1954. The tradition of performing the complete ballet at Christmas eventually spread to the rest of the United States.

The Museum's programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties, and the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.