“Have fun. Pace yourself,” were veteran Milwaukee Ballet dancer Parker Brasser-Vos’ sage words of advice to dancers encountering Septime Webre’s ALICE (in wonderland) for the first time.
The company has revived the ballet, which made its Milwaukee premiere a decade ago, for a wild and wacky season finale. And this voyage down the rabbit hole is, indeed, both a marathon and a sprint, testing this capable company’s limits. ALICE opened last Friday and runs another weekend through May 10 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center.
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The ballet is based on Lewis Carroll’s Victorian-era children’s books about a precociously curious little girl who stumbles her way into a mysterious land of mythical creatures and mayhem. In Webre’s version, Alice is (probably) dreaming – and projecting. Family members and other key figures from her annoying, highly privileged reality reappear as the King and Queen of Hearts (on Sunday afternoon, Brasser-Vos and Lizzie Tripp-Molina), March Hare and Dormouse (Garrett Glassman and Lahna Vanderbush).
Ben Zusi is particularly charming as the clever, cunning (if slightly flaky) White Rabbit, who’s Alice’s butler in the opening scene. It’s a terrific breakout role for the South Bend, Indiana, native, who joined the company in 2023. Jennifer Hackbarth, on the other hand, stepped into principal roles from the moment she returned to her hometown. Hackbarth splits the title role with Alana Griffith, who danced the role a decade ago as her first principal character at the Milwaukee Ballet.
A departure from the lush, luxurious aesthetic and slightly muted color palettes artistic director Michael Pink frequently employs in his ballets, ALICE’s look and feel shares more in common with mid-century pop art or Tim Burton’s wacky neo-Gothicism. James Kronzer’s set designs aren’t particularly elaborate, using deliberate drops and a few set pieces with punched-up primary colors to contrast the black-and-white “real world” of Alice’s living room. In fact, much of the heavy lifting in creating this Wonderland is done by Liz Vandal’s spectacularly vibrant, imaginative costumes.
The magic is mostly manual: This ballet was made before projections became the norm (and, frankly, a crutch) for transporting audiences. Here, dancers are hoisted above the stage to create visual effects like Alice’s fall through the rabbit hole, where she encounters (and high-fives, obviously) a suspended Tweedledee and Tweedledum pedaling a bicycle built for two. Puppets, shadow play and literal manual labor create additional sensations of flight, swimming, Alice’s cake-laden growth spurt, and other mythical creatures like a segmented jabberwocky inserted between Alice’s stops at the Mad Hatter’s tea party and the Queen of Heart’s sadistic game of croquet.
To Brasser-Vos’ point, the stamina this ballet requires should not be overlooked, especially for the Milwaukee Ballet’s men – some of whom spend somewhere around half an hour with other humans hoisted above their heads. That’s not to say the women aren’t busy; a corps de flamingos pokes a little fun at Swan Lake, replicating bits and pieces of the canonical ballet’s “white act,” complete with a cross-handed quartet but as frisky flamingoes in place of their more elegant avian counterparts.
It must be exhausting – not that it shows. And for the audience, this ballet clips along at a breakneck pace. The second act especially has a bit of a kitchen-sink approach, plowing through plot points that perhaps aren’t all fully digested. That’s certainly the case in the Queen of Hearts’s final scene. By the time we’d registered those cute, somersaulting kiddos in puffy hedgehog suits were the queen’s croquet balls, it was all over. Alice wakes up, as if from a dream, in the wingback chair she started the ballet in.
Maybe that’s the point: a dizzying, somewhat choppy journey that’s so chock-full of eye candy you’ll need to see it twice to really register everything. Michael Pink described ALICE as a comic book: “POW! CHOOM! BANG! onto the next place.” That seems an apt description, down to these ballet superheroes’ technicolor tights and Milwaukee Ballet’s keen ability to pull off most everything it tries.
ALICE (in wonderland) runs through May 10 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center. Tickets can be found at 414-902-2103 and Milwaukee Ballet’s website.
