Drama, dance and music were whipped together in an even more crazy-quilt way in “Invisible Cities,” a colossal production inspired by Italo Calvino’s classic novel of the same name. It was directed by Leo Warner, who seems to have been given an unlimited budget for this cosmic romp of sensory overload.

Imposingly staged inside Mayfield, a former railway station, the elaborate production felt as exhausting as a two-hour Disneyland ride. And with its CGI projections and adventure-film soundtrack, it better captured the spirit of a video game than the poetic wit of the innovative Italian fabulist.

Calvino’s slim novel is a travelogue through 55 imaginary cities conjured up by Marco Polo, presented in a dialogue between the Venetian explorer and the emperor Kublai Khan.

At Mayfield, the audience watches their exchange from stadium bleachers on four sides of a massive set. Dizzying projections continually light it up to depict both Khan’s palace and the chimerical metropolises conjured by the explorer. An endless assortment of computer-animated landscapes — caverns, deserts, tropical forests and so on — are projected onto curtains that ring the entire set during scene changes.

When the second-act curtain rises on an actual waterway built through the stage to depict a Venetian canal , the effect is momentarily staggering — until the real water begins to move and overflow by means of digital trickery. Why does an onstage pool need to be digitally enhanced?

The production’s bulwark against this CGI frenzy is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a prolific Flemish-Moroccan choreographer, who here directs the London-based modern dance company Rambert. Flamboyant, sweaty, virtuosic and precise, the evocative choreography provides the lion’s share of the evening’s artistic excellence.

With dazzling inventiveness, the 22 dancers assemble themselves as ferocious beasts, tangle themselves up in elastic bands in an elaborate game of cat’s cradle and walk nimbly on stilts. They evoke the invisible cities far more effectively than any amount of expensive technology.