Wheeldon’s account of the beloved Lewis Carroll story is eventful and beautifully designed. But it is curiously light on the human dimension, because the dancing is the least interesting part of it. Who are these eccentric characters who parade by? What emotions move them? These are questions the dancing ought to answer, but though there is plenty of action onstage during the ballet’s two-and-a-half hours, it rarely leads us inside the heart.

Yet while the choreography is workaday, from a theatrical perspective “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” explodes with bright ideas. Author Carroll is woven into the story as a family friend and photographer who transforms into the White Rabbit before our eyes. We’re all sent spinning down his hole — the portal to Wonderland — by means of a dizzying, kaleidoscopic film effect that will either delight you or give you vertigo. Backdrops that loom or shrink help depict Alice’s magical transformations into giantess and pixie. (Bob Crowley composed the designs, drawing artfully on Victorian whimsy, while Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington created the cleverly devised projections.)

Some of the scenic effects spill into the audience: At one point, confetti rains down on the front orchestra section, and ballerinas in floral garb waltz down the aisles. They are meant to represent a vision of the Queen’s garden, launching Alice on a quest to find the real thing and reunite there with Jack, the fired gardener’s boy, on whom she has a crush and who appears in her dream as the Knave of Hearts. In a departure from the book, Wheeldon gives his account a budding-romance theme, nudging it into the realm of a traditional fairy-tale love story.

You can’t blame him. The ballet is full of visual delights inspired by the book: the Caterpillar, a winding line of disembodied ballerina legs; the Cheshire Cat, a jigsaw puzzle of feline parts held aloft by puppeteers; the blood-spattered Duchess and Cook, whose fabulously detailed sausage-grinding operation in a kitchen full of hacked-up hogs is like a scene from “Sweeney Todd.” But as a storyteller Wheeldon is confined to ideas that are choreographically manageable, and love and hate are at the top of that list. Wordplay and philosophy, which were Caroll’s masterstrokes, aren’t on it.

As a result, Wheeldon has an interesting piece of theater — something like a series of music-hall acts — but he doesn’t quite have a great ballet here. Certainly, this sprawling work, created in 2011 as a shared production for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, presented an enormous stretch for him, as he has built his brilliant career on short abstract works.