‘Gobsmackingly spectacular’
If you’re ready for a deep dive down the rabbit hole into a fantastical, madcap world inhabited by an axewielding queen, an assortment of creatures great and small, plus a pair of young lovers struggling to keep their heads amidst the chaos, the National Ballet of Canada has the ticket for you.
On Wednesday night, for the fourth time on its home stage since the production’s triumphant 2011 Toronto premiere, Canada’s majorleague dance troupe revived its multimillion-dollar, gobsmackingly spectacular, action-packed production of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by British-born A-list choreographer Christopher Wheeldon; a 15-performance run perfectly timed for March break.
Ballet adaptations of the famous 1865 children’s story penned by English author Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. the Reverend Charles Dodgson) abound for the very good reason that its title reads well on a marquee and ballet companies are desperate to put bums on seats.
Wheeldon, a devotee since childhood of Carroll’s Alice books, had already weighed the challenges of adapting an essentially plotless, episodic literary work full of witty wordplay into a coherent ballet. When the opportunity came, Wheeldon prudently sought the assistance of British playwright Nicholas Wright to help fashion a functional narrative to hold the pieces together. He turned to composer Joby Talbot and his orchestrator collaborator Christopher Austin to write a magically evocative, exuberantly symphonic score.
Add to this Bob Crowley’s inventive sets and costumes, Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington’s appropriately scale-shifting projections, and Natasha Katz’s vivid lighting design, and you have all the ingredients for an unforgettable show; and that’s before you throw in the dancing.
The creative team’s masterstroke was to concoct a framing device that juxtaposes the “real” world with Wonderland and populates the above-ground opening gardenparty scene with such characters as Lewis Carroll and his boss at Oxford University, Henry Liddell, upon whose daughter Alice the author particularly doted. Suitably recostumed, these characters subsequently reappear in Wonderland.
Thus, Carroll becomes the White Rabbit, a magician at the party becomes a tap-dancing Mad Hatter and Alice’s father becomes a longsuffering King of Hearts to his neurotic wife’s bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts. In a clever invention, a young gardener in the Liddell household with whom Alice enjoys a budding romance, and who is fired by her mother for allegedly stealing a jam tart, reappears as the Knave of Hearts.
The effect of these devices is to position Wonderland as Alice’s marvellous dream, which turns Alice’s episodic adventures into a brink-of-puberty romance as she does her best to help her beloved Knave escape the Queen’s wrath.
In practical terms, the ballet is Alice’s journey. No longer an observer, Alice is central to the action, with daunting consequences for anyone cast in the role.
Opening night honours fell to Tirion Law, only a second soloist by rank but in practical terms already a star.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a complicated production of many moving parts. The title lead hardly ever leaves the stage and has much to do, not just in terms of dance but also acting. If that is a nerve-wracking prospect, you’d never know from Law’s performance. She took to the role with such confident gusto that you’d think she’d been dancing it forever.
It helped, no doubt, that the role of the gardener boy/Knave fell to a seasoned hand, principal dancer Naoya Ebe. Always an elegant dancer with a clean, reliable and unostentatious technique, Ebe partnered Law in a manner that seemed so natural and effortless that it focused attention on the emotional sweep of their romance.
There were a few less than polished moments on Wednesday, but never enough to detract from the overall effect, particularly with such standout featured performances as Donald Thom’s suitably fussy White Rabbit, Josh Hall’s hilarious pantomime-dame Duchess, Ben Rudisin’s lanky-limbed Mad Hatter and Peng-Fei Jiang’s shamelessly seductive Caterpillar.
As for the Queen of Hearts, veteran principal dancer Svetlana Lunkina continues to refine her interpretation with telling details and knows how to amplify the physical humour of the choreography without hamming it. Unsurprisingly, the now sexagenarian, once dazzling ballet prince Rex Harrington, reprising his relatively minor role as the king, succeeds in stealing virtually every scene in which he appears. It’s called artistry.