“The Nutcracker” is a cherished Holiday staple — one that, for every traditional treatment, inspires a left-field twist toward the contemporary.

There’s a grain of truth in Lisa Simpson’s comment that everybody does “The Nutcracker” “because you don’t have to pay for the music rights.” As the critic Roslyn Sulcas once wrote in The New York Times, “Even less-than-great versions of the ballet exercise a kind of magic through Tchaikovsky’s score, which offers the same infinite potential for choreography as the texts of great plays do for staging.”

That potential, however, can be double-edged. Here are five instances in which light tweaks and heavy rewrites have reframed — and occasionally ruined — Tchaikovsky’s famous music.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: ‘The Nutcracker Suite’