When John Neuemeier stepped down from the Hamburg Ballet in 2024, he had been at the helm for 51 years, exceeding Balanchine, at New York City Ballet, by a decade and a half. And Balanchine knew that, to prevent the dancers from turning monopedal, he needed a second in command. (His choice: Jerome Robbins.) Inevitably Neuemeier’s putative successor, the 40-year-old Demis Volpi, lasted less than a year before the rattled old guard ran him out of town. But they couldn’t erase his influence entirely. Among this season’s Neuemeiers, in which choreography is a lumbering excuse to tell a long, predictable tale, is Volpi’s commission of the first full-length from somebody else—in fact, from Alexei Ratmansky, a ballet storyteller of musical and visual wit, dexterous choreographic invention, and constant humanity. With the perfectly cast Hamburg newbie Olivia Betteridge as Alice, Wunderland slides down the rabbit hole to meet—in the kind of frictionless succession that characterizes dream—one comically nonsensical character after another. Finally, the Neumeier yoke is melting. —Apollinaire Scherr