A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

Gregory Maguire is the author of "Hiddensee: A Tale Of The Once And Future Nutcracker."

It's that time of year — Sugar Plum fairies dancing in delight, the Mouse King, a gorgeous Christmas party, a prince, and that instantly recognizable music.

The Nutcracker ballet is a beloved holiday perennial, but Wicked author Gregory Maguire's new novel Hiddensee— which is based on the Nutcracker tale — is not exactly meant for kids. It tells the backstory of the powerful toymaker, Herr Drosselmeier, who gives the Nutcracker to Clara.

"Like most Americans, maybe people around the world, I saw the ballet," Maguire says. "And one of the things that captivated me about it was that scene where the Christmas tree grows 40,50, 60 feet high, and that seemed to be one of the most magical transformations I have ever seen on the stage, even if the rest of the story seemed to me demented. Yes. Well, it's crazy. It's broken. It doesn't make any sense." Maguire describes what  he wanted to accomplish writing the book:

Act 1 is traditional tale that you might find in Grimm, with the small powerless Clara fighting the great King of the Mice, and that makes sense and is dramatically strong. And we're rooting for the small girl, and all that is great.
Act 2 comes - the most gorgeous ballet music in the world, but it's as if we're sitting in an overstuffed living room looking at the photographs of our grandparents' trip around the world. It has nothing to do with the great drama of Act 1. It's all squandered. And I wanted to know what I could do with this story to make the two parts speak to each other.

It tells the story of Dirk Drosselmeier, the powerful toymaker. "Dirk Drosselmeier is a foundling, or that's what he's told. And he lives in the Bavarian Forest. He's born about 1800 or so, so he's about eight years old in 1808. Now, you may know that just about at this time, the Grimm brothers were combing the woods of Bavaria and Baden looking for those stories that would really cement German Romanticism and the German Romantic fairytale in our minds for the next 200 some years.

So Dirk Drosselmeier is born right at the heart of the German fairy tale in a sense. And I decided to take his life story as a small poor boy in the backwoods, as it were, of Europe and see how he grows up to be able to enter the salons of Munich and to be the one person who can stand between the little girl and the great darkness threatening her on Christmas Eve." The rest of the interview with Gregory Maguire can be read on NPR.