WHAT WOULD YOU do if you were lucky enough find one of five golden tickets that will offer you access to the heart of the best made chocolate in all the land? The premise of Roald Dahl’s classic tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of wonder and excitement. The actuality is a tale where bad children and their disgusting parents are punished and respectful ones are noticed, which is not necessarily the way the world works. Dancer and dance-maker Mario Gaglione has translated this work into dance, onstage in Johannesburg in a world premiere, until 13 October. The season is almost fully booked.

It is rare for the whole weight of a full-scale ballet to rest on the shoulders of a teenager, but 14-year-old Jayden Samuels in the title role carries the whole production with aplomb. Costume designs don’t always make him stand out from the crowd, but staging and lighting do, and he’s lithe and confident and a joy to behold. Pair him with Japanese dancer Ryoko Yagyu who plays the smart and rude Violet Beauregarde, a little girl who boasts the status of being the fearless world record holder in chewing gum, and you have a dance collaboration that is rich and sentient, potentially wicked and wild.

It is, however, a complicated trick to pull off the danced version of a tale that is about schadenfreude and nastiness, as well as almost all of the seven deadly sins – greed, sloth and gluttony, pride and lust (for fame), wrath and envy – and to make it palatable for a very young audience. Charlie is mostly successful in this, but there is a little too much polite ballet which foregrounds things to come, and a lot too much of balletic displays and closing lines at the end of the work. The exhilaration that your youngsters will articulate at the idea of going to the ballet and being there is met in the first bars of the work and its rich chocolate tone, but as the work unfolds, you might notice them yawning like lions.

While there is too much prologue in the first half, the second half has all the gruesome bits which include a fat child, Augustus Gloop (Miguel Franco-Green) drowning in chocolate and another, Mike Teavee (Rhulani Moloi) disappearing into technology, a third, Veruca Salt (Savannah Jacobson) being spirited off by chocolate squirrels as a ‘bad egg’ after showing her penchant for tantrums, and a fourth, Violet Beauregarde, who is changed forever by an experimental gum she was warned not to taste, but did, anyway.

And then, of course, there is the chocolate river itself: beautifully created and lit, this piece of stagecraft should have enjoyed its own credits and dominates the scene in the second half majestically and deliciously. It’s the energy source of the whole work.

There is a lot of chocolate metaphor and members of the company – including very young dancers – play the spirit of chocolate as well as the Oompah Loompahs, the chocolate factory workers, who have an amoral nature that doesn’t allow them to help or hinder the visitors, unless red lines are crossed, that is.

But if you don’t know the story on which this sepia-toned work is based, you may be very lost from the get-go and never really catch up as the work whirls from one scenario to another with movement rather than talk or text and no real clear pointers. The ballet is pretty yet, backed with a slick computer-generated backdrop, rather than a hand-made one, it loses something and becomes bland. Space is conveyed, but somehow that ‘wow’ factor when the curtains rise is muted.

Too much conventional classical ballet tropes steal from the necessary character energy in this work, and while there are bits and pieces of jazzy moves, particularly when it comes to Mike Teavee and his dad (Andrew Gilder), all rigged up in cowboy attire as they are, on the whole, the work takes no sharp creative risks and in doing so, teeters on the brink of forgettable.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is choreographed by Mario Gaglione based on the eponymous 1964 novel by Roald Dahl and features creative input by Mark Cheyne (music), Andrew Botha (design consultant), Glynnis Higgins, Tammy Higgins, Kobus O’Callaghan, Mari Robinson and Yolanda Roos (costumes) and Simon King (lighting). The performance on which this review is premised was danced by Fiona Budd, Anya Carstens, Ivan Domiciano, Albertus Dreyer, Miguel Franco-Green, Darragh Hourrides, Andrew Gilder, Savannah Jacobson, Thando Mgobhozi, Bruno Miranda, Rhulani Moloi, Christopher Montague, Cristina Nakos, Jayden Samuels, Chiara Szabo, Ryoko Yagyu and Revil Yon, with Chad Hendricks conducting the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s onstage at The Mandela, Joburg Theatre in Braamfontein, until 13 October 2024.