Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comes to Brisbane loaded with accolades including a Helpmann Best New Ballet Award in 2018. Created as a co-production for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada in 2011, Alice has since successfully plunged down the rabbit-hole in various ballet companies around the world.

Collaborating with his The Winter’s Tale composer Joby Talbot, and with dazzling sets and costumes by esteemed Broadway designer Bob Crowley, the production is a fanciful flight of whimsy and colour that makes full use of projections which play with scale, hand-held puppets, and illusions.

Drawing on Broadway, vaudeville, classical dance and end-of-pier amusement parlour games, Wheeldon peoples the stage with a tap-dancing Mad Hatter, an Indian Rajah and his entourage, a vengeful Queen of Hearts, and a giant Cheshire Cat manipulated by puppeteers that dissembles and reassembles in the blink of an eye. There’s a knockabout parody of The Sleeping Beauty which is excruciatingly funny and Nicola Curry as the Queen of Hearts is excruciatingly funny performing it, and it’s all held together by Talbot’s superb score which is percussion-heavy and at times has the feel of Bernstein and at others of a filmic pastoral lyricism.

Ako Kondo whirls through the plot as a sprightly and breezy heroine, with Ty King-Wall partnering her as the persecuted Knave of Hearts. Both come into their own in the final pas de deux, which is a welcome release of classical choreography after all the madcap folly.

Also doing nimble work as a guardian to Alice was Adam Bull as the White Rabbitt. Dance-wise there’s little for the company to get their teeth into until the captivating “Flower Waltz” in the garden, which was resplendent in tales and tutus of pastel and awash with elegance.

The sinister undercurrents of Lewis Carroll’s book come to the fore in the macabre butcher-shop scene, where a pig is being pushed into a mincer which is spewing out sausages as Tristan Message’s Duchess spars with Jacqueline Clark’s cook, who’s brandishing a cleaver, while the ‘cute’ factor is winningly supplied by six junior artists who are a delight as tumbling hedgehogs.

The production has its weaknesses but the Queensland Symphony Orchestra is not one of them. Under Simon Thew’s adroit baton, the realisation of Talbot’s score is incandescent. On their last visit to Queensland the Australian Ballet played to capacity houses with The Sleeping Beauty. I suspect Alice will continue the trend.

Peter Pinne

Photographer: Kate Longely