“Nicholas Wright’s scenario (or concept of how the dances fit into the larger story) is brilliant, and Christopher Wheeldon’s choreography cannot be excelled! This is all in conjunction with the outstanding projection design by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington. It’s great to see the wild and crazy imagery when Alice descends into the rabbit hole and later when she ascends from it. The animation of the rabbit hole as a tunnel or target gives us the feeling of motion, and Alice’s arrival in Wonderland is signified by an assemblage of jumbled letters in various fonts. So many of the projections are undulating or askew or meaningfully repetitive (such as the motion of millions of doors and millions of playing cards), all of which signify a substantial departure from reality as we know it. I particularly loved when Alice is confronted with multitudes of gray doors in the first act and then squeezes through a deep orange door. There’s also a labyrinth in the third act, representing the journey of life, where you don’t know about its confusion ahead of time, just that you have to plod forward. In addition to the symbolism of the labyrinth, life is also depicted as a card game (where you don’t know what card will turn up next), plus all of this is in the context of a dream (which Alice eventually wakes up from). In fact, the Oxford scene at the beginning and the end can be viewed as two bookends for the tale—considering that’s where Lewis Carroll had once made his mark.”

Around the Town Chicago, Julia W. Rath.