Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Revision as of 23:44, 7 December 2022 by HeneryVII (talk | contribs) (fixing bullets)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2011) is a full-evening story ballet adapted from Alice in Wonderland, with choreography by Christopher Wheeldon and music by Jody Talbot. The ballet was co-produced by the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, both of which have staged their own productions. It is scheduled to debut in the USA in late 2012, when the NBC plans to tour with it, and will also be aired live in movie theatres for one performance in 2013. Opus Arte released Alice on DVD in 2011.

In the original version, Act I opens with a garden party at the Liddell household, where an adolescent Alice gives one of the young gardeners, Jack, a tart. However, Mrs. Liddell accuses Jack of stealing the tart and fires him, much to Alice's dismay. The party itself includes such local notables as a Rajah, the vicar, the verger, a magician, and Lewis Carroll. When Carroll asks Alice to pose for a photograph, the lighting changes, Carroll's photography bag expands, and Carroll turns into the White Rabbit. Alice falls through the photography bag and winds up in Wonderland. Among other adventures, she encounters Wonderland's version of Jack, the Knave, who is on the run from the Queen of Hearts.

Act II is set at the Court. Besides playing croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs, Alice sees the Knave again. But he is soon arrested and put on trial. Although he and Alice eventually manage to convince almost everyone in the court of his innocence, thanks to The Power of Love, the Queen of Hearts tries to execute him herself. Alice manages to knock over the entire Court before waking up in the twenty-first century, suggesting that this may have been a Dream Within a Dream.

The revised 2012 staging breaks the evening into three acts. Act I now incorporates more dancing for Alice and the Knave, and ends right before Alice's encounter with the Cheshire Cat. The DVD preserves the two-act version.

Tropes used in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland include:
  • Abhorrent Admirer: The Duchess to the Caterpillar.
  • Affectionate Parody: A lot.
    • The Queen's Jam Tart Adagio parodies the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty.
    • There are multiple references to The Nutcracker, including the dance of the flowers that ends Act I (or II, depending on the version). The White Rabbit is also closer to Drosselmeier than to Carroll's original.
    • The final arabesque pose in George Balanchine's Apollo appears in the middle of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
  • All There in the Manual: The synopsis clarifies where the ballet deviates from the original, especially in the trial sequence (where Alice tries to take the blame on herself).
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: There are many, due to the date it was written, along with the nationality of the author:
    • Most modern adaptations have to explain that "treacle" is a word for molasses[1], and that a "cravat" is a piece of menswear that is a forerunner to a man's tie. (One adaptation actually has Alice call it a tie.) Some of the humor might go over the heads of modern readers, like the Hatter claiming Alice's hair "wants cutting" (a comment that would have been incredibly rude in Victorian times) and the Duchess claiming that she was "twice as rich and twice as clever" as Alice. ("Rich" and "clever" were used to describe contradicting concepts, making her comment an impossibility.)
    • Teniel's illustration of the Lion and the Unicorn in the second book depicts the two beasts as caricatures of William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disrael, a depiction that was common among political cartoonists at the time. Whether this was Carroll's intention is impossible to say.
    • Even some British readers may be confused by some references, like the Hatter saying it's always tea time because it's always six o'clock. (Five o'clock tea would not become a tradition in Britain until later.)
  • And You Were There: All of the Wonderland characters appear as their Victorian equivalents in the garden party prologue.
  • Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny: The Mad Hatter's contributions to the Funny Background Events in the courtroom sequence.
  • Author Avatar: In-universe, Lewis Carroll becomes the White Rabbit.
  • Axe Crazy: The Queen of Hearts and the Cook.
  • Billing Displacement: From the promotional materials and Opus Arte's DVD trailer, you'd think that the Mad Hatter was a much bigger role. If this were a musical, he'd qualify as Minor Character, Major Song.
  • Brick Joke:
    • In chapter 7, the Hatter tells Alice how he performed at the Queen's concert (singing a parody of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star") and the Queen ordered him executed for "murdering the time". Later, in chapter 11, when he's called on as a witness at the trial, the Queen looks at him closely, and then asks a servant to bring her a list of the performers from the concert. Clearly, she's remembering the incident he mentioned. The Hatter is noticeably nervous about it.
    • Also, in chapter 6, the Duchess growls, "If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a deal faster than it does." Then, in chapter 9 (when Alice meets her in a much better mood) there's this exchange between them:

Duchess: Tis so. And the moral of that is, "Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"
Alice: Somebody said that it's done by everybody minding their own business!

  • As might be expected, the Duchess doesn't get the hint.
  • The second book combines this with foreshadowing. When Alice sees the living chess pieces in miniature form, she writes in the King's notebook, "The White Knight is sliding down the poker; he balances very badly." Several chapters later, when she meets the white Knight in person, he clearly balances horribly, falling off his horse every few steps it makes.
  • Humpty Dumpty's poem has him taking a corkscrew and going to punish the fish for not obeying him. Several chapters later, the two Queen's relate how he was trying to get into the house the other day with a corkscrew, although in their account, they say he was looking for a hippopotamus.
  1. ↑ Also a case of Separated by a Common Language - it's still called treacle in the UK
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland?oldid=1992834"