The Washington Ballet's "Alice (in Wonderland)"

Now that I have your attention.


This Sunday I took First Born to see the Washington Ballet's production of "Alice (In Wonderland)." Given the above promotions for the event, it promised to be a spectacle and a wonder, and we were very enthusiastic about attending the show. I am, admittedly, more familiar with the Disney film than I am the original novel, so from an audience perspective I had few expectations in terms of storyline, and was open to interpretation.

While the costumes are just as glamorous and breathtaking as the advertisements suggest, the wonder of the performance stops there.


Initially, the staging seemed magical, but when Alice falls down the rabbit hole the ballet quickly falls into gimmick. It seems that Septime Weber really wanted to get his money's worth out of the aerial harness, and awkwardly foists Alice (and other dancers) into the air a number of times. The aerial display (while not spectacular) is not itself the problem, but rather the rather awkward amount of time it takes to get each dancer harnessed - on staged - and then unhooked once the piece is over. There is an attempt to mask this by using chorus members in identical costumes to do the actual rigging, but the whole thing came off as rather trite.

In light of the unprofessional effects (and really, dance is magical enough without this, I say), the rest of the ballet took on a likewise unprofessional feel. Many of the dances seemed under-rehersed, and often "forced" as they tried to replicate the sense of wonder a child would experience when seeing the film for the first time. There was little fluidity to many of the dances (specifically those with Alice herself, who was not played by the actress pictured below for my showing), and the whole production felt more like a modern art experiment than a captivating ballet.

I was absolutely gobsmacked by the production of [The Great Gatsby], so I'm holding out hope that this fall's production of [Dracula] will hold some of the same magic of the Fitzgerald piece, and none of the gimmicks of "Alice."