A Royal Winnipeg Ballet production. At the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Thursday, March 24. Continues until March 27

Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is packed with warped scene after warped scene. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s decision to cram most if not all of them into its 140-minute adaptation of the children’s tale? Curiouser and curiouser.

The company deserves credit for its efforts to make ballet accessible and relevant—hip, even. Choreographed by RWB alumnus Shawn Hounsell, Wonderland is a hybrid of theatre, dance, and multimedia, with projections of still and video images quite literally framing the classical form that the troupe has rooted in a whole new light.

There are all the favourite characters: White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, Dormouse, Cheshire Cat, and Queen of Hearts. There’s the potion that makes Alice shrink and the cake that makes her grow. There’s the mad tea party and, instead of a croquet game, a round of golf. There are references to silent films, the paparazzi, and sports fans’ obsession with violence. Add visuals to back it all up, as well as costumes that are by turns candy-coloured, striped, and checked, plus bubble gum–chewing pink flamingos and a guy in a gorilla suit chomping on a banana, and this trip down the rabbit hole is more than just fantastical. It’s overwhelming.

There’s just too much distraction from the kind of pure dance that draws people of all ages to the ballet in the first place.

When those moments of fully focused movement happen—too rarely here—they wow. As “birds”, female dancers in sparkly corsets with ruffled tail feathers execute perfect arabesques while being ever so light on their feet; a turn for four “cards” is a full-bodied frenzy, with men lurching from side to side and whipsawing their legs.

The dancers are in top form, but they don’t have enough substantial material to work with. As Alice, Jacelyn Lobay spends much of her time running in circles in a perpetual state of confusion. Yosuke Mino is a striking White Rabbit with precise, sculpted gestures, but his head-tilting motions are repetitive too.

Then there’s Tara Birtwhistle, who’s retiring this year after two decades with the company. She makes the Queen of Hearts—portrayed here as a kind of aging celebrity who doesn’t like being upstaged by young Alice—wonderfully likable. But Birtwhistle doesn’t get the chance to show off her exceptional talent. Instead, she uses a bullhorn to yell orders such as the oft-repeated “Off with her head!”

Jimmy Lakatos’s “video scenography” is crazily cool. The projection of stopwatches, chairs, and other objects getting sucked into a black hole on a screen that takes up the entire stage practically induces vertigo, while images of giant cedars that appear on panels of various sizes create an enchanted forest.

Set to an original score by John Estacio and Brian Current, with pieces by Josef Strauss, Wonderland will appeal to anyone wanting an escape. And with so many warped scenes playing out on the news for real, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.