Last night, I gladly left reality at the door and stepped onto the buzzing red carpet at the magnificent Coliseum Theatre in Rooty Hill. The air was thick with anticipation, not just for a circus show, but for a return to childhood. We were there for the Sydney premiere of Cirque Alice, and from the moment I arrived, it felt less like entering a theatre and more like tumbling headfirst into a living, breathing storybook.
Lewis Carroll’s original tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has always been a masterclass in dream logic, a world where time is broken, animals speak in riddles, and the laws of physics are polite suggestions rather than rules.
Cirque Alice captures this perfectly. It takes the whimsical absurdity of the 1865 novel and translates it into physical language. Where Carroll used wordplay to twist our minds, this cast uses gravity-defying acrobatics to twist our perspective. The transition from the “real world” to Wonderland was seamless, inviting us to suspend our disbelief just as Alice did when she followed that waist-coated rabbit.
The Guides to the Impossible
The journey through this topsy-turvy world required steady hands at the helm. Our guide through the madness was the Mad Hatter, played with frenetic brilliance by comedian and magician Paul Dabek. He didn’t just host; he commanded the chaos. With sharp wit and mind-bending magic tricks, he broke the fourth wall, pulling the audience into the narrative. His interactions were a highlight, proving that in Wonderland, the audience is just as much a part of the story as the cast.
Providing the heart of the journey was our Alice, the incredible Soprano Layla Schillert. In the original books, Alice is often the voice of reason amidst the nonsense; here, Schillert provided a voice of pure beauty. Her vocals soared to the rafters, adding an ethereal, Broadway-quality layer that grounded the spectacle in genuine emotion.
Driving the frenetic pace was the White Rabbit, played by violinist Darius Thompson. His electric, fast-paced fiddling provided the urgent soundtrack to our descent, a musical reminder that we were late, late, for a very important date with awe.
A Page-Turning Spectacle
As the story unfolded, familiar characters from the book materialized in visceral, shocking ways. The famous Caterpillar, known for his languid, smoky philosophical musings, was reimagined through the Mongolian Contortionists (featuring the fluid talents of Tsetseglen Odgerel, Bayarmaa Ganbat, Baigalmaa Chuluun, and Dolgorsuren Ganbold). They didn’t just bend; they stacked themselves into a living, breathing totem pole. Seeing a human spine fold completely in half as they created the undulations of an insect was a mesmerizing, almost hallucinatory visual that felt exactly like a confusing conversation with a hookah-smoking sage.
The whimsy was kicked into high gear by The TT Boys as a high-flying Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum. Their acrobatic tumbling was as playful as the nursery rhymes they are famous for, launching each other into the air with a kinetic joy. The manic energy continued with the March Hare, brought to dizzying life through the Cyr Wheel performance of Viktor Hladchenko. He spun inside the giant metal hoop, rolling dangerously close to the edge of the stage, spinning like a coin dropped on a table that refuses to fall flat.
The Court of the Queen
As we ventured deeper into the story, the stakes rose physically. The Queen of Hearts, usually terrifying with her shout of “Off with their heads!”, was terrifyingly brilliant here. Munguntsatsrag Naranbaatar commanded the stage upside down on balancing canes, shifting her weight from one hand to another with a regal slowness that made the muscles in my arms ache just watching her.
However, her royal guards, the Red & White Knights, provided the absolute jaw-drop moment of the night. The Ramadhani Brothers performed a head-to-head balancing act that defied belief. Imagine one man walking casually up a set of stairs, while the other man is upside down, balancing purely on his brother’s head, no hands, no harness, just pure neck strength and trust. The entire Coliseum held its breath; you could hear a pin drop until they landed the dismount.
The magical menagerie continued to astound at every turn. The usually sleepy Dormouse was precariously perched on a Rola Bola stack, played with nerve-wracking skill by Estuart Mena Gonzales, rocking back and forth on cylinders that looked ready to slip at any second. We saw Flamingos take flight in a beautiful aerial duo Emilie Odette and Joann Jerome and the Snap-dragon aerial pole act Daniel Schwarz was a breathtaking blend of power and grace high above the stalls.
Just when I thought the energy couldn’t get any higher, the “Roller-Skating Royals” Daniel Monni and Marina Sabetta took to a tiny podium. They spun at speeds that blurred the eyes, performing the terrifying “headbanger” move, where one partner is swung around by the neck, their head skimming mere inches from the floor, a perfect, adrenaline-fueled finale to a whirlwind adventure.
Cirque Alice didn’t just tell us a story; it let us live inside it for two glorious hours. It was a reminder that sometimes, the best way to make sense of the world is to go a little mad.
