Dazzling circus, polished spectacle and flashes of genuine wonder.e
Fiona Hallenan-Barker
4.5 cups of tea!
Venue: Lyric Theatre
Sydney
Dates: Until 11th October 2026
There is an obvious theatrical logic to turning Alice in Wonderland into a circus. Lewis Carroll‘s world is already populated by impossible bodies, elastic realities and creatures seemingly designed to defy gravity. Cirque Alice, at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre for the school holidays, embraces that logic with considerable technical skill. Its 22-strong international cast delivers aerial work, balancing, skating, live music and physical feats that repeatedly leave the audience gasping.
The production is calibrated to within an inch of its life. Entrances, musical cues, lighting states and acrobatic reveals arrive with clockwork precision. It is glossy, muscular and relentlessly efficient. What it sometimes lacks is the eccentricity or artistic curiosity that might turn spectacular circus into something genuinely transporting.
Newcastle local Layla Schillert makes a striking Alice, combining aerial skill with an appealing sense of youthful wonder and an impressive operatic voice. Her opening sequence suspended high above the stage is spectacular, and recalls Kate Miller-Heidke’s Eurovision performance so strongly that it feels exciting to be in the same room.
The international ensemble is formidable. The Caterpillars create a beautiful balancing sequence, while the Tweedles throw one another through the air with astonishing ease. Raphael Papo‘s violin playing as the White Rabbit is so precise that it takes a moment to register that it is live. Vladislav Tsarov appears to run vertically at his pole as Snap Dragonfly with an almost confrontational disregard for gravity.
The second half continues to impress with the White King and Queen skating through their sequences with elegant precision; the Flamingos scatter clouds of pink feathers and confetti into the auditorium; and the Ramadhani Brothers, as the Knights, deliver balancing work in which athleticism and mortal danger seem separated by almost nothing.
Daniel Onofre‘s extreme rola bola work as the Doormouse is similarly nerve-racking. For the audience seated onstage, sometimes directly beneath or beside the performers, the trust involved is particularly palpable.
Simon Painter and Tim Lawson understand how to package spectacle, while Alice in Wonderland provides an instantly recognisable framework. We already know the White Rabbit, Caterpillar, Tweedles and Queen of Hearts. The production can therefore devote itself to making them spectacular rather than reinventing them. The result is highly entertaining; this is showbiz built around extraordinary bodies and considerable technical expertise. But it does occasionally feel like an extravagant version of a world we already know rather than a particularly fresh way of seeing it.
There is little of the anarchic quality of circus at its most inventive, or the sensual transgression of adult circus cabaret. Cirque Alice occupies a more commercially legible space: family spectacle with enough danger, comedy and sex appeal in the skimpy costumes to keep adults interested.
Throughout, Paul Dabek‘s Mad Hatter provides a welcome counterweight to the production’s precision. Present from the beginning, he threads old-school vaudeville, magic and audience interaction through the spectacle. The jokes are deliberately corny and the tricks seemingly low-tech, but his timing is impeccable. He knows how to work a large room, drawing the audience into his world and bringing a looseness that allows the audience to see the performer behind the performance, someone who is enjoying the business of entertaining us.
My 10-year-old co reviewer reached much the same conclusion, albeit more succinctly: the Mad Hatter was “very, very funny”, with the bread-card trick singled out as the most hilarious scene of the evening. The youth verdict was unequivocal: “They need More Mad Hatter in the show.” It is difficult to disagree. The aerialists make you gasp; Dabek makes you laugh. Both require extraordinary skill, but his ability to create that immediate human connection gives the production its personality.
For all its technical brilliance, Cirque Alice uses the narrative arc of Alice as a vehicle for circus. This is polished international entertainment: accessible to children, sufficiently sophisticated for adults, and packed with physical feats that genuinely astonish. What it occasionally shows in the less polished moments is the thing Wonderland promises most: the sense that anything might happen. And when those performers are flying, balancing, skating or throwing one another into the air, the production makes a compelling argument for the enduring power of live circus.
Take the whole family and go for the fun and the wonder.
Fiona Hallenan-Barker, Theatre Now
