Back in Brooklyn at BAM’s Harvey Gilman Opera House, the Mark Morris Dance Group is performing “The Hard Nut” through Sunday.  In a complete retro romp, Adrianne Lobel’s fabulous black and white, mid-century set and Martin Pakledinaz’s maximalist costume design provide an ideal world for Morris’s choreographic wit to inhabit. Rather than the over-long scene setting the first act usually entails, this party makes you grateful you were invited. The guests arrive in a sublime explosion of color and pattern where stripes and dots mix with checks and plaids. The absence of children—save for Marie and Fritz who are played by adults Mica Bernas and Christina Sahaida—is unfelt amidst all the teenage vamping from the elder sister Louise, Drosselmeier’s quirky dance party, Brandon Randolph’s swan star antics in the role of the housekeeper, a grabby tango-ing couple that gets the whole party bumping butts, and Mrs. Stahlbaum, who imbibes until she wrecks the bar cart. 

And while Morris’s particular musicality and the visual feast of his design collaborators breathes new life and yes, even more associations, into the party scene, his choice to dispense with the usual gender roles that dominate the big corps de ballet dances of snow and flowers adds its own magic. By the end of act one there is no need for a blizzard to fall from the rafters because the ensemble is flying so high and flinging those tiny flakes in timed flourishes. Near the end of the high impact dance, it is breathtaking to watch the snow drift lightly from their fingertips as the dancers slow to a walk. 

Rather than dispense with the culturally insensitive international dances in the second act, Morris doubles down and pokes fun at the tropes. Instead of allowing herself to be bent into a scantily clad pretzel, the Arabian princess, fully covered, manipulates her entourage. The flowers slouch over and sway, looking more like earthbound cabbage in Mrs. Stahlbaum’s dream garden than a traditional bouquet. The production also brings back a story from within the story by E.T.A. Hoffman, resulting in a scene that lends this version its name, where a Rat Queen maims a baby princess and only a young man cracking a hard golden nut between his teeth can restore her face. Around a sofa the whole Stahlbaum family waits, literally pulsing with anxiety, to be saved by Domingo Estrada Jr.’s Nutcracker prince chomping successfully into the nut. (Denby, eat your heart out.)

In a giddy pas de deux, Bernas and Estrada Jr. offer themselves to each other but rather than partner each other, the cast returns to lift them up in dreamy sequences. In another inversion of form, the coda becomes a showcase for the group, with the piqué turns in a circle and the grande pirouettes, typical reserved for the star couple, performed en masse. They leave the finale to Bernas and Estrada Jr., where the music acts as their mistletoe, initiating a series of kisses that carries over to the resetting of the living room, where Fritz and Louise catch them at it on their own television before the curtain falls. 

But still there is the question: is anything more fun than getting to join the party?