'Alice in Wonderland' returns to Royal Opera House in Autumn 2024. This review is from its 2015 run.
The make-believe of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ has enchanted adults and children alike since its 1865 publication. Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 adaptation was the Royal Ballet’s first full-length production in 20 years, and in revival its electric sparkle does not disappoint.
There’s magic throughout the show’s two-and-a-half hours, not least from Joby Talbot’s delightfully whimsical score.
Wheeldon works with designer Bob Crowley – who created the beautiful designs for the Royal Ballet’s recent ‘The Winter’s Tale’ – to ensure that Carroll’s fantasy underground land comes alive in exquisite fairytale sets. The Mad Hatter’s tea party is rendered as a vaudeville concert hall with giant spongy cupcakes. The Duchess’s home has a quaint, homely facade; yet inside, a knife-wielding cook grinds down pigs for sausages, making it much more sinister. And the Cheshire Cat is eerily animated through Japanese puppetry.
Sarah Lamb wonderfully encapsulates the curious, naive and precocious Alice, navigating scenarios that challenge both her physical stamina and storytelling nous. The tricky scene in which Alice shrinks and then grows in size is utterly convincing, as are her duets with Federico Bonelli – as the Knave of Hearts – which beautifully translate Wheeldon’s jaunty emblematic choreography.
The Queen of Hearts is played as a fiendishly funny, brilliantly menacing matriarch by Zenaida Yanowsky, who channels pantomime in all the right ways while still demonstrating her superb talent as a dancer.
It’s a disappointment, then, that Wheeldon feels he has to conclude this trailblazing production by bringing it into the twenty-first century. I didn’t need to witness Alice taking a selfie on her smartphone to realise that the preceding couple of hours were all but a dream. A slightly gauche end to a production that’s otherwise as enrapturing as Lewis Carroll’s writing.
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