There's a reason why dance companies don't create many new full-length ballets anymore. The cost, the complexity, the uncertainty of finding an audience for something fresh and untested – in this economy, who would dare to roll those dice?
The National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet, that's who. By combining their resources, the principal dance companies of Canada and Great Britain lessened the risk and provided a sufficient budget to bring a visually rich children's classic, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," to full-blooded life.
NBC artistic director Karen Kain was enticed into joining the Royal Ballet's project because one of the dance world's most gifted choreographers was involved: Christopher Wheeldon. He would be collaborating with artists of equal stature, including Tony-winning scenic designer Bob Crowley and rising-star composer Joby Talbot.
The result is a work that could well become a calling card for both companies. At the Music Center on Friday, local audiences got to see an improved form of the ballet, which Wheeldon has altered since its second production in Toronto last year.
Wheeldon's "Alice" is indeed a wonderland – a wildly creative yet largely faithful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's 1865 tale, whose fantastical imagery and anthropomorphic creatures long ago became lodged permanently in the cultural consciousness. It's performed with the right balance of technical brilliance, comedy, acting and élan by Canada's premiere ballet company, an impressively disciplined ensemble that I wish would visit these parts more often.
On Friday we were treated to some of the company's best soloists, including Sonia Rodriguez as Alice and Guillaume Coté (remember him in Kings of the Dance?) as Alice's love interest, Jack, and the Knave of Hearts.
Jack is one of a handful of new elements added by Wheeldon and playwright Nicholas Wright, who wrote the scenario. Jack is introduced to us in the first scene, which takes place at a tea party in the garden of Henry Littell, an Oxford dean.
Lewis Carroll, a mathematics professor, is reading a story and performing simple magic tricks for Littell's three daughters, Alice, Lorina and Edith.
Jack is the son of the Littell's gardener; he and Alice have a mutual infatuation. She steals a jam tart for him. Alice's ambitious and overbearing mother catches him with it and, assuming he has stolen it, banishes him from the home.
That's when things begin to get strange. Carroll, trying to console Alice, takes her picture. When he emerges from behind the camera he has transformed into a white rabbit. He jumps onto the banquet table and disappears into a jelly mold. She follows.
Like Jack and Carroll, the other members of the garden party reappear as characters Alice encounters during her trip through Wonderland. Her persnickety mother becomes the Queen of Hearts, wheeled around by servants in a giant red heart-shaped trolley. The Vicar morphs into the March Hare. Butlers turn into executioners in the Queen's nervous court.
Crowley, a master conjuror, has come up with artful and ingenious ways to bring Wonderland to life that use the latest in technology while paying homage to theater's age-old tricks. There are touches of Venetian opera, notably in the waves of Alice's lake of tears. Her bouts of shrinking and growing are achieved with little more than cleverly moved curtains and painted flats. The Cheshire Cat coalesces magically, thanks to black-clad performers who pull its various parts into unexpected order.
Talbot's music adheres to the rules of traditional ballet. Seamless, stylistically wide-ranging and always perfectly matched to the requirements of each scene, it's one of the best new ballet scores I've encountered. You'll hear strains of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other composers as well as minimalism, pop and non-Western genres. A large orchestra cleanly played Talbot's tricky score under the sure-handed direction of David Briskin.
Wheeldon, too, pays his respects to his choreographic forebears. Watch for a hilarious parody of the Rose Adagio from "Sleeping Beauty."
But the genius of Wheeldon's choreography lies in its fidelity to character, which he achieves without sacrificing the movement's balletic roots. The many pas de deux between Alice and Jack (or his doppelganger, the Knave of Hearts) become progressively less coltish and more tender and sensual as the pair's mutual attraction and determination to be together grows.
The performers manage to make us forget the choreography's technical demands.
Rodriguez is on stage most of the time, and she is often dancing solo or in a pas de deux, yet she never loses Alice's air of youthful exuberance, wonder and occasional terror.
Coté, an elegant and often understated dancer, makes the perfect partner. He has matured in recent years and can now convincingly play either impulsive adolescent or grim world-weariness.
The Queen of Hearts performs an unhinged solo with a group of terrified palace underlings that is pure comic gold. Greta Hodgkinson completely steals the show as the cranky and woefully dance-challenged monarch.
Other standouts include Aleksander Antonijevic as Lewis Carroll/The White Rabbit and Robert Stephen as a tap-dancing Mat Hatter. (Some principal roles change; check the Music Center website for details.)
Wheeldon has lengthened "Alice" slightly and brought the love story into sharper focus since its Toronto run. I think he's gotten everything just about right. It's a perfect show for all audiences, all ages and every nation where Carroll's book has taken root. In other words, this new ballet is no gamble at all.
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