Because the box office benefits from story ballets, choreographers are perennially on the hunt for subjects worthy of three acts. Lately they’ve favored famous dead artists whose lives took a tragic turn. So: Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, and now Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar©, for the Australian Ballet. When a Wilde character boasts, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train,” the brilliant playwright must have been thinking of himself, though “sensational” hardly does justice to his terrible last years, in prison for queer sexual predilections that he forgot to be ashamed of. To an original score by the choreographer’s regular if unexceptional collaborator Joby Talbot, Oscar© is the first full-length ballet that the former A.B.T. star David Hallberg has commissioned since assuming the helm of the Australian Ballet, in 2021. Let’s hope Wheeldon honors Wilde’s aestheticism by translating the dandy’s head-turning aphorisms into steps. With live orchestra—uncommon for a touring show. —Apollinaire Scherr