Los Angeles is the North American home-away-from-home for British choreographer/entrepreneur Matthew Bourne and his dance company New Adventures. Over the years, local audiences have flocked to his interpretations of Edward Scissorhands, Sleeping Beauty, The Postman Always Rings Twice with music by Bizet (The Car Man), Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey’s The Servant (Play without Words), and a Swan Lake with male swans.

And the Wallis in Beverly Hills is the only American stop for MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES, a local premiere of three early works, as this most theatrical of dance troupes celebrates thirty years on the boards.

The program includes WATCH WITH MOTHER ( a schooldays romp) and TOWN AND COUNTRY (its first half a 1930s Noël Coward fantasia). Bourne closes the evening with THE INFERNAL GALOP—a mashup of Charles Trenet, rough trade (dancer Tom Clark, a standout), and the can–can. “This is France as seen by the uptight English imagination, an equal mix of ancient hostility and deep affection.”*

This fall, Bourne and company will return to Los Angeles with THE RED SHOES, based on the Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger film, with music by Bernard Herrmann.

Tom Clark, left, set upon by revelers in The Infernal Galop. Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures
Image credit: The Wallis