Christopher Wheeldon is a ballet choreographer who doesn’t stay in his lane. Neither did George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille or Jerome Robbins. Ditto Twyla Tharp, still making new work at the age of 82. In the younger generation, New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck has been tapped to make dance for Broadway and film (Carousel, Spielberg’s West Side Story, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro). Crystal Pite is equally at home making pieces for her contemporary outfit Kidd Pivot and for ballet companies with bold-face names.

It’s hard to over-estimate how much traditional classical ballet has benefited from these blurred lines.

Balanchine and de Mille had to go wherever there was work to survive. Wheeldon was doing well, thank you very much, on the world’s ballet stages when he was headhunted for Broadway. Producers putting together a musical version of An American in Paris had seen what he did in 2011 with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and thought he’d be just the person to helm their show.

Wheeldon scored a big success with An American in Paris (Paris 2014, Broadway 2015), which he directed as well as choreographed. He later did double duty for MJ the Musical, the Michael Jackson bio-musical that opened on Broadway in early 2022 and is still running. It comes to Sydney next year. 

There was also a highly praised Brigadoon for New York City Centre’s Encores! series in 2017.

It’s good to get low-art/high-art distinctions out of the way. There was a time when they had a lot less purchase than they do today. Wheeldon grew up at The Royal Ballet, whose founder Ninette de Valois had “experience of the complete range of work open to a performer at the time: ballet, plays, opera, music-hall, revue, musical comedy and pantomime”, writes her biographer Katherine Sorley Walker. “Young, gifted, energetic and purposeful, her world was the theatre, not merely the ballet.” 

That’s what we see in Alice, back on stage at The Australian Ballet. The company premiered the work in 2017 and then, as now, it’s a welcome reminder that classically-based dance doesn’t have to be trapped inside a “serious-art” silo to which only a few have the entry code. This is showbiz, delivered in a theatre usually devoted to musicals, Sydney’s gorgeously ornate, wacky Capitol.

Well, Alice couldn’t fit into TAB’s usual home of the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House anyway. Not unless shrunk with one of Lewis Carroll’s magic potions. It’s a stonkingly big entertainment full of bells, whistles, puppetry, tricks, projections, enchanting sets and costumes to die for. To say Alice is colourful is like saying Taylor Swift is moderately successful. Bob Crowley’s designs are the visual equivalent of sherbet exploding on your tongue. He likes a bold look, mostly. Alice draws the short straw with her girly mauve dress and, yes, Alice band, but otherwise Alice would put a glam-rock concert to shame.

Dance stands in for dialogue and Carroll’s jeux d’esprit come through clearly. Wheeldon is a good story-teller, as is Talbot. His use of unusual percussion and off-kilter rhythms suits this world wonderfully.

Nicholas Wright’s scenario opens and closes in the real world of author Lewis Carroll, his young friend Alice Liddell and her family. A love interest, Jack, is added for Alice, here older than in Carroll’s story, and all the people met in the ballet’s opening scene will become Wonderland characters once Alice falls dramatically down the rabbit hole. 

After that it’s on for young and old. Door loom and shrink, Alice is invited to eat and drink, she enjoys a dip in a pool of her own tears and meets the insinuating Cheshire Cat, tap-dancing Mad Hatter, slinky Caterpillar, a pack of playing cards and the adorable baby hedgehogs who double as croquet balls. Finally she has to rescue Jack, now the Knave of Hearts, from the Queen of Hearts in a madcap climax to her adventures.

Ah, the Queen of Hearts. Alice may be the connecting tissue in this series of vignettes and she’s a sweetheart, but there’s nothing more fun than a self-regarding villain, entirely oblivious to their short-comings. The Queen whizzes about in a large, shiny red carapace (it opens to reveal the King cowering under his wife’s skirts, as twere) which she abandons to offer her audience a ferociously mangled version of Aurora’s Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty. This is to be greatly savoured if you know Beauty but hilarious on its own terms.

Joby Talbot’s score is particularly delicious here as it incorporates familiar Tchaikovsky phrases that act as a kind of life-line to the Queen, who then goes fantastically off-piste. 

Alice is greatly enlivened in Act III by the Queen’s manic energy and needs to be. The evening is a bit too long, really, with a very substantial first act. It’s worth noting that Wheeldon at first made Alice in two acts then divided it into three the following year, presumably to reduce the length of the first half. It must have been massive.

At the Sydney opening on March 20 there was a late change to casting. Benedicte Bemet and Joseph Caley were to have been Alice and Jack with Chengwu Guo as Lewis Carroll/White Rabbit, hence their appearance in the images. On the 20^thprincipal artist Sharni Spencer was a delicately drawn Alice to senior artist Jarryd Madden’s heart-warming Jack. Principal Brett Chynoweth hit all the right notes as Louis Carroll/White Rabbit and Ako Kondo was the rip-snorting Queen. 

Everyone on stage, and there are lots, gets a chance to use their acting chops and a moment to shine but it’s fair to say Kondo walked off with Alice. It really is taking a bottle from a baby. Wheeldon gave the Queen the equivalent of what’s called the 11 o’clock number in musical theatre, a barnstorming song near the end of the evening that puts a rocket up the audience. Kondo definitely came up trumps, if you’ll forgive me.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends in Sydney on March 5; Melbourne March 15-26.