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The National Ballet of Canada is legitimately trumpeting the popularity of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. During 13 performances in June, much touted British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved story drew 27,180 people to Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre opera house. It amounted to an officially sold-out run that generated the biggest box-office take for a main season production in National Ballet history — $2,236,849. For the final weekend’s shows, avid patrons started lining up at the witching hour to buy rush and standing-room tickets.

In this age of social media, the electronic equivalent of bush telegraph, it’s arguable whether good reviews in the mainstream media have any significant impact on sales. Even so, National Ballet of Canada had little reason to complain about the mostly over-the-top encomiums local critics lavished on Wheeldon’s new ballet. One went so far as to declare it the best Carroll adaptation “on the planet,” vaguely suggesting a familiarity with Alice ballets not only in Moldavia and Uzbekistan, but on other celestial bodies as well.

Yes, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a huge success and a vindication of Artistic Director Karen Kain’s strategic planning. Wheeldon was already in negotiation with Britain’s Royal Ballet to make a popular Alice work. When Kain heard about it, she suggested a co-production deal. In return for a million-dollar investment — little more than a third of the spectacular show’s rumoured but unconfirmed cost — National Ballet of Canada got immediate rights to perform the trans-Atlantic premiere along with an exclusive three-year North American touring licence.

Amidst such a triumph, it might seem churlish to suggest that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can hardly be accounted as National Ballet of Canada’s greatest artistic moment. Taken on its own terms and allowing for its purposeful construction as a crowd-pleaser, Wheeldon’s adaptation is thoroughly enjoyable dance entertainment with a smattering, amidst an inordinate amount of fuss and frenzy, of genuinely engaging choreography. With all its special effects, projections and lavishly detailed costumes, it’s also stunning to look at. Yet, compared with the thoughtful, distinctly adult-oriented Carroll adaptation Glen Tetley fashioned for the National Ballet a quarter century ago, Wheeldon’s comes up short.

His main problem, like that of any choreographer confronted with Carroll’s Alice books, is to find a way to translate a major element of their literary charm, namely their wordplay, into movement. How do you choreograph a pun, let alone “curiouser and curiouser”?

Wheeldon and his estimable design team — Bob Crowley for sets, costumes and props; Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington, projections; Natasha Katz, lighting — cheat here and there with the odd appearance of actual words, but for the most part Wheeldon is left doing what most Alice choreographers do, parading familiar characters through Carroll’s absurdist/surreal and studiously illogical series of episodes.

Considered as episodes, some work well onstage. Alice’s tumble down to Wonderland is marvellously visualized. The famous tea party features a tap-dancing Hatter, performed on opening night with superb polish and appropriate flourishes of character by its Royal Ballet originator, the ever estimable Steven McRae. The caterpillar sequence is given an opulent, oriental treatment and the croquet match adorably features child hedgehogs. Even the topiary get to dance and are fittingly accorded their own curtain call.

However, what could have proved to be Wheeldon’s trump card — no Carroll-type pun intended — he chooses to throw away.

Wheeldon and his dramaturge/scenario writer, playwright Nicholas Wright, are not the first to set Carroll’s tales within a larger framing device, in their case a prologue and epilogue set in the real world, but spaced a century or so apart. They begin with a Victorian garden party at the home of Henry Liddell, Oxford don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll’s boss). A budding romance is here established between one of Liddell’s daughters, Alice, and a garden boy named Jack who, in a cascade of Wonderland alter egos, later becomes the Knave of Hearts.

The parallels between prologue/Wonderland characters abound with, most importantly, Carroll becoming the White Rabbit and Alice’s harridan mother the Queen of Hearts.

Wheeldon seeks to deploy this interpolated teenage Alice/Jack romance as a means to bond Carroll’s episodic account of the girl’s adventures into a thorough narrative; only he does not go far enough. The ballet unfolds at such a pace there’s little opportunity to develop character or portray a convincing and evolving emotional connection.

Not that anyone seemed to mind much. Choreographers have been slicing and dicing literary classics to suit their fancy for centuries and are rarely called to account. According to a National Ballet announcement, Wheeldon’s ballet received a standing ovation at every performance. And the dancers at least deserved it.

Casting highlights included two hysterically funny, alternating Queens of Hearts — Greta Hodgkinson and Tanya Howard — and a riotously scene-stealing but equally welcome return to the stage by Rex Harrington as both the Duchess and King of Hearts, though, of course, not simultaneously. Zdenek Konvalina did all he could to turn Jack/The Knave into a compellingly sympathetic character and Piotr Stanczyk admirably caught the irritable nervousness of the White Rabbit.

As for the heroine, opening night proved a career milestone for then first soloist Jillian Vanstone, picked by Wheeldon as first cast Alice and soon after promoted to principal rank by Kain. Like Konvalina, Vanstone did her utmost to bring true depth to her character and danced with the spontaneous joyfulness that is her hallmark. It’s not Vanstone’s fault that the ballet as a whole tended to undermine her efforts.

            The National Ballet’s orchestra deserved its own ovation for the spirited way it played Joby Talbot’s original, though multiple composer-channelling score. According to a totally independent and disinterested source who saw the ballet both in London and Toronto, National Ballet’s musicians did a far better job of lifting Talbot’s score off the page than the Royal Opera House Orchestra.

 

 

 

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