Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story of the precisely rational overturned by the absurd. It’s a delightful fantasy fit to charm the young yet satirically entertaining enough for parents seeking to decode its characters and plot.

And so goes Christopher Wheeldon’s adaptation of the 1865 novel. A full-length three-act show that breaks the mold of the romantic story ballet, it was co-commissioned by the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada and premiered on both stages in 2011.

Running throughout March Break, the National Ballet’s latest staging of Alice plays to the max to both sides of our brains, the cerebral and the emotional, with a tremendous cast of dancers supported by David Briskin’s rousing direction of the ballet’s orchestra playing Joby Talbot’s brilliantly innovative score.

Wheeldon had not made a full-length story ballet when he tackled Alice’s Adventures, an audiotape of which he’d listened to repeatedly as a child. Knowing it would be impossible to condense the whole plot into a traditional ballet format, he seized on the vivid characters, the humour and the imagery of Carroll’s book to fashion stunning, often zany dance tableaux. Talbot’s score carries the narrative arc.

Wheeldon chose Talbot as a co-creator, because coming from a background of scoring films, he had transitioned to dance with majestic soundscapes for works by Wheeldon and the Royal Ballet’s Wayne McGregor. “He created these unusual, shimmering orchestral colours that to me felt absolutely like the right direction for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” says Wheeldon.

Talbot’s score illuminates the two worlds that Alice occupies and foregrounds the many transformations that occur in the ballet.

The opening of scene takes us into the upper-class 19^th-century, ordered environment of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, father to daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith. Lewis Carroll, a mathematics professor and friend of the family reads to the girls and performs magic tricks, as tea is served on the lawn amid a game of croquet. Enter Jack, the gardener’s boy, a friend of Alice’s, who offers her a rose clipped from Mrs. Liddell’s sacred rosebushes. Alice in return gives him a jam tart. An enraged Mrs. Liddell pounces on Jack, accusing him of theft and dismissing him from the party.

Talbot describes the musical motif he found for Wonderland as “a strange, shifting bitonal music – a restless ticking clock.” This emphatic tick-tocking percussion also signals the plunge from Alice’s above-ground, secure family life into a dark netherland, where one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.

Bob Crowley’s ingenious graphic projections on the changing scrim take Alice down the black hole, following Caroll, now transformed into the White Rabbit, through a glowing jelly mould on the tea table into Wonderland. As the projections of doors on the scrim grow bigger or smaller, so does Alice with each substance she consumes, appear diminutive or gargantuan, against her graphic background.

The score makes Alice an active protagonist and not just an observer of events. She’s chasing the white rabbit, following the smoky messages of a hookah-smoking caterpillar, keeping up with a manic tap-dancing Mad Hatter (the dramatic Ben Rudisin) and encountering a wild-eyed, puppeteered Chesire cat made up of parts that come together and fall asunder.

Tirion Law, with her quick-silver steps and seamless transitions from sheltered girl to able adventurer, strikes just the right balance between portrayal of a child and a sophisticated guide to her wonderland. She and Naoya Ebe as Jack/the Knave of Hearts make a beautiful pairing, especially in the climactic pas de deux.

Talbot gave several of the main characters a musical signature. Donald Thom, a formidable shapeshifter who doubles as Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit, comes on to the strains of the celesta. Peng-Fei Jiang, in a sinuous solo as the Caterpiller, dances to a middle-eastern-sounding oboe d’amore piece.

Svetlana Lunkina gives an hilarious character portrayal as Alice’s mother, reappearing as The Queen of Hearts. She’s a neurotic, controlling hostess and mistress of ceremonies spoofed by her King, Rex Harrington in one of the campiest, funniest performances of his late career. Talbot gives the queen a tango to perform and themes her with a semi-tone sharpened solo violin to indicate her high-strung nature.

Wheeldon and Talbot pay such attention to the telling detail – the backwards-running hands of a huge pocket watch dangling over Alice’s adventures in a surreal landscape representing many a childhood fear, hangs overhead accompanied by cacophonous, dissonant musical crescendos – that the audience willingly suspends disbelief to enjoy outstanding dancing mixed with a little delirium.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Choreography  Christopher Wheeldon

Music  Joby Talbot

Scenario  Nicholas Wright

Set and costumes  Bob Crowley

Performed by the artists of the National Ballet of Canada

At the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto

March 6 to 17, 2024

Trailer: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | The National Ballet of Canada (youtube.com)

Photos by Kira Kuras, from left: Tirion Law and Naoya Ebe as Alice and the Knave of Hearts; the Dormouse, Alice, The Mad Hatter and the March Hare; Donald Thom as the White Rabbit, with Tirion Law. Courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada