ALICE VS. WONDERLAND
Sooo, like, I went out and got me some Cambridge Culture, and it was awesome! I saw this:
That's the preview for Alice Vs. Wonderland! The production was put on by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), as part of Harvard University's advanced drama studies. The actors and playwright were all Harvard students, but IMO, they exercised their craft at a very professional level. For the most part, the production did not have a "studenty" or amateur feel, though I can't say it was quite at a Broadway level. I hope they leave that preview up long enough so that you guys can see how fun it was, unfortunately it looks like they pull stuff down pretty quickly to make way for new productions. Go here:
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/alice-vs-wonderland
...to see 14 images of the production, again, only as long as they have them up. You can get a good idea of the costuming from those shots, though they were a little toned down in the production I saw--the Alices were dressed a bit less costume party and a little more like something you might actually see someone wearing on the street... well, in Manhattan's fashion district. Let's call the look "vintage chic"!
Notice I referenced "the Alices"--that's because there were six Alices; because it was an interracial cast, three Alices were played by actors of color. There was a half-hour chat-with-the-creatives after the play, and the playwright said the idea came about as a way to give more of the company speaking roles (it's essentially a class, so everyone needs to get a role), but early-on he realized that, since Alice was searching for herself, multiple actors playing Alice was actually quite fitting. It's in the classic text that she isn't sure she's herself anymore, she's not sure who she might be! I really liked that Alice kept getting swapped out, and they did it in very clever ways. The rule was this: the girl with the ugly orange backpack and the skateboard was Alice!
The set was comprised of a nearly bare stage with long movable benches that created everything from the table for the Mad Tea Party to the forest, with long black lines drawn from the top front of the stage to the mid back in a forced perspective. They staged a lot with very little, plus inventive lighting and evocative sounds (eg, scary forest noises) to suggest more than what we were looking at. A glittering disco ball spun to give us the sea of saltwater tears, but the most creative use of light was during the scene at the White Rabbit's house, where Alice has grown huge. Alice, the White Rabbit, and Bill the Lizard stood near the front of the stage miming the action of Alice tossing Bill or swatting at the rabbit, with our attention on the back of the stage, where Alice's monstrous shadow performed the same action on the other characters' much smaller shadows very convincingly.
Oddly, the Overture consisted of the entire cast s-l-o-w-l-y coming to life on the stage to a recording of the song "Creep" by Radiohead. I haven't been that mystified at the start of a show since that time in 1982 when I went to an avant-garde theater piece from Japan wherein twelve Samurai began to leap around the stage to "Das Rheingold" (never did figure out what that was about), but hey, it was "Alice", so I was happy to stay tuned to see what other surreal stuff they'd come up with.
The action starts with Alice blathering away on youtube, whining about her mom, her sister, and about how this is the worst, *worst!*, day of her life, in typical teenager-on-teh-youtubes fashion. Maryann is avidly watching on a laptop downstage, and as Alice finishes her rant, the White Rabbit comes hopping/stomping downstage, aggressively calling Maryann out for not being busy at work, looming over her threateningly. He tells her she'd better find his white gloves, or heads will roll, and he makes it obvious that he means to do her some physical violence if she doesn't find the gloves. He finishes up by waving his watch in her face, telling her it's her fault that he's now late, then stomps/hops off, yelling that time's a-wasting, "Tick-tock! Tick-tock!"
Terrified, Maryann brings Alice over into Wonderland to a dance sequence using Gwen Stefani's What You Waiting For, which you can see in the preview, above.
Tick-tock, tick-tock
Tick-tock, tick-tock
Like a cat in heat stuck in a moving car
A scary conversation, shut my eyes, can't find the brake
What if they say that you're a climber
Naturally, I worried if I do it alone
Who really cares, causes it's your life
You never know it because it really could be great
Take a chance cause you might grow
A very confused Alice comes across Maryann, who tells her that when she's not busy being the White Rabbit's much-abused servant, she's Alice's reflection--whenever Alice looks in the mirror, she's seeing Maryann. She brought Alice over to Wonderland because Alice didn't seem very happy in her youtube rant, so she wanted to try out being Alice for a little while and thought Alice might like to be someone else, too. Maryann begins to sing "Creep"--thankfully, not a sing-a-long with the record, but a live song to a guitar. She sings, "When you were here before, couldn't look you in the eye. You're just like an angel! Your skin makes me cry. You float like a feather in a beautiful world. You're so very special! I wish I was special." And Alice replies, "But I'm a creep! I'm a weirdo!" Then she looks around and sings, "What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here!" This worked really well in terms of using the pop song to further the plot--it transformed the song to make it something bigger. Unfortunately, not all the pop songs were used so well.
As the play progressed, I began to see that the best use of these pop songs was when the actors sang a cover version with a live instrument, rather than those times when we heard a recording of the original, famous song. The worst was when the actors tried to SING ALONG TO THE ORIGINAL SONG, which reminded me of the late and unlamented Viva McLaughlin. Viva McLaughlin was a short-lived TV show that wasted talent like Hugh Jackman by having him sing along to, for instance, a recording of Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" as he danced all over the landscape--as if Elton's song was playing on the radio and Jackman just happened to hear it and start singing along to it. ::shudder:: Those in the know in Hollywood predicted that Glee would never get off the ground because the American audience doesn't liked TV musicals. They never reckoned with the fact that Glee transforms songs and makes them new and vital with interesting new arrangements. I say that if they'd just had the actors on Viva McLaughlin do interesting cover versions using real orchestras or bands rather than having the actors (embarrassingly) sing-along to a recording of the original song, the show would have been a big success. Same thing applies here!
Drugs is drugs in this version of Alice--whenever she drank that or ate this, there was much giggling on her part and on the part of everyone around her. In the Hall of Many Doors, the doorknobs talk to Alice (they jeer at her and make fun of her), and it feels a lot like they're Alice's hallucinations rather than talking doorknobs in a magical wonderland. Alice transitions into a new Alice during a couple of the drug trips. When she eats the cakes to get small at the White Rabbit's house, the entire cast looms up around her and overwhelms her (Dogpile on the Alice! Dogpile on the Alice!), and when she crawls out from under everyone, she's a completely different actor.
Speaking of drugs, everyone at the Mad Tea Party was a completely wasted stoner, too cool for school. The Alice of the Tea Party was a tiny Asian girl in a black mini with knee socks and maryjanes, with a man's tie around her neck, and I wondered if the costumer was playing off of the anime trope of the Japanese school girl. After some amusing chatter that was mostly classic dialogue from the story (though the March Hare answers the Hatter's riddle with "Because Poe wrote on both", which is not in the story--and the Hatter throws a temper tantrum that he answered!), the March Hare jumps on a table to the opening strains of the Beatle's I Am The Walrus, and I thought, "If he starts rapping the song, I'm going to have to fall out of my seat and start doing that 'we are not worthy' bow-and-scrap," but no fear, they completely wasted the opportunity and just had him sing along. I mean, how hard would it have been to find the karaoke version of this song, so the guy could have sung it by himself?! Instead, the March Hare lost any tough, cool appeal he might have had by singing along with a Beatles 45 like any nebbish since 1967. I mean, we're talking a loss of several thousand cool points. Oh, man; if they'd just sampled the song and done a rap... I might have died in admiration right there. It was a really good song choice--the Walrus is, of course, a reference to The Walrus and the Carpenter. (Amusingly, Lennon was shocked when it was pointed out to him later that the Walrus is a villain in the poem. Oh, John!)
As in the Disney version, both the Tweedle Twins and the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass managed to find their way into Alice in Wonderland, but whatever, everyone does that and I'm inured to it at this point. I found out later during the Creatives Chat that during the first meeting where they met to decide who played what character, everyone came to the table doing their best cartoon-voiced Disney impressions, and the director just looked at them all with a narrowed eye and said, "NO." :D
The Tweedles were played by two girls in large frilly skirts and a lot of blonde hair and makeup--apparently they were doing a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen impression (in retrospect, I realized it was a good one.) They play tug-of-war using Alice as the rope, then throw her to the ground and tell her they aren't going to invite her into their club, she's going to have to face the Garden of Living Flowers all by herself, and good luck with that. The Garden turns out to be a garden of shall we say "earthly delights"--all the flowers are Twylla-Tharping around in slow-motion simulated sex (basically just doing undulating dance-moves into one another), and a few of them get Alice in a neck-lock that made me think they were referencing auto-erotic strangulation, but the White Knight jumps into the scene, the only character moving in real time, smiting everyone in mime. When he hits the flowers molesting Alice with his invisible sword, he yells, "CHECKMATE!"--after all, he is meant to be a knight on a chessboard!--and they all fall away from her.
The playwright said that he called it Alice vs. Wonderland because he noticed that almost nobody helps Alice as she tries to navigate a course from teenager to adult--quite the reverse, everyone gets in her face in an adversarial manner! I noted that the White Knight actually did help her, and then later on the Cheshire Cat tries to help, though he doesn't show up until 3/4 of the way through. At any rate: the White Knight shows her his back-pack, cleverly turned upside-down so that the rain won't get into his sandwiches, and she points out that everything's fallen out of it, and he has a tantrum--kinda scary for her, but she calms him down. He grabs her and throws her behind him on his invisible horse, and off they go, gallumphing all over the forest. It was some pretty hilarious mime-age, with Alice hanging on for dear life, and the Knight being all noble and heroic!
Wow, that got long! More on the play after breakfast!
Click to viewThat's the preview for Alice Vs. Wonderland! The production was put on by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), as part of Harvard University's advanced drama studies. The actors and playwright were all Harvard students, but IMO, they exercised their craft at a very professional level. For the most part, the production did not have a "studenty" or amateur feel, though I can't say it was quite at a Broadway level. I hope they leave that preview up long enough so that you guys can see how fun it was, unfortunately it looks like they pull stuff down pretty quickly to make way for new productions. Go here:
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/alice-vs-wonderland
...to see 14 images of the production, again, only as long as they have them up. You can get a good idea of the costuming from those shots, though they were a little toned down in the production I saw--the Alices were dressed a bit less costume party and a little more like something you might actually see someone wearing on the street... well, in Manhattan's fashion district. Let's call the look "vintage chic"!
Notice I referenced "the Alices"--that's because there were six Alices; because it was an interracial cast, three Alices were played by actors of color. There was a half-hour chat-with-the-creatives after the play, and the playwright said the idea came about as a way to give more of the company speaking roles (it's essentially a class, so everyone needs to get a role), but early-on he realized that, since Alice was searching for herself, multiple actors playing Alice was actually quite fitting. It's in the classic text that she isn't sure she's herself anymore, she's not sure who she might be! I really liked that Alice kept getting swapped out, and they did it in very clever ways. The rule was this: the girl with the ugly orange backpack and the skateboard was Alice!
The set was comprised of a nearly bare stage with long movable benches that created everything from the table for the Mad Tea Party to the forest, with long black lines drawn from the top front of the stage to the mid back in a forced perspective. They staged a lot with very little, plus inventive lighting and evocative sounds (eg, scary forest noises) to suggest more than what we were looking at. A glittering disco ball spun to give us the sea of saltwater tears, but the most creative use of light was during the scene at the White Rabbit's house, where Alice has grown huge. Alice, the White Rabbit, and Bill the Lizard stood near the front of the stage miming the action of Alice tossing Bill or swatting at the rabbit, with our attention on the back of the stage, where Alice's monstrous shadow performed the same action on the other characters' much smaller shadows very convincingly.
Oddly, the Overture consisted of the entire cast s-l-o-w-l-y coming to life on the stage to a recording of the song "Creep" by Radiohead. I haven't been that mystified at the start of a show since that time in 1982 when I went to an avant-garde theater piece from Japan wherein twelve Samurai began to leap around the stage to "Das Rheingold" (never did figure out what that was about), but hey, it was "Alice", so I was happy to stay tuned to see what other surreal stuff they'd come up with.
The action starts with Alice blathering away on youtube, whining about her mom, her sister, and about how this is the worst, *worst!*, day of her life, in typical teenager-on-teh-youtubes fashion. Maryann is avidly watching on a laptop downstage, and as Alice finishes her rant, the White Rabbit comes hopping/stomping downstage, aggressively calling Maryann out for not being busy at work, looming over her threateningly. He tells her she'd better find his white gloves, or heads will roll, and he makes it obvious that he means to do her some physical violence if she doesn't find the gloves. He finishes up by waving his watch in her face, telling her it's her fault that he's now late, then stomps/hops off, yelling that time's a-wasting, "Tick-tock! Tick-tock!"
Terrified, Maryann brings Alice over into Wonderland to a dance sequence using Gwen Stefani's What You Waiting For, which you can see in the preview, above.
Tick-tock, tick-tock
Tick-tock, tick-tock
Like a cat in heat stuck in a moving car
A scary conversation, shut my eyes, can't find the brake
What if they say that you're a climber
Naturally, I worried if I do it alone
Who really cares, causes it's your life
You never know it because it really could be great
Take a chance cause you might grow
A very confused Alice comes across Maryann, who tells her that when she's not busy being the White Rabbit's much-abused servant, she's Alice's reflection--whenever Alice looks in the mirror, she's seeing Maryann. She brought Alice over to Wonderland because Alice didn't seem very happy in her youtube rant, so she wanted to try out being Alice for a little while and thought Alice might like to be someone else, too. Maryann begins to sing "Creep"--thankfully, not a sing-a-long with the record, but a live song to a guitar. She sings, "When you were here before, couldn't look you in the eye. You're just like an angel! Your skin makes me cry. You float like a feather in a beautiful world. You're so very special! I wish I was special." And Alice replies, "But I'm a creep! I'm a weirdo!" Then she looks around and sings, "What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here!" This worked really well in terms of using the pop song to further the plot--it transformed the song to make it something bigger. Unfortunately, not all the pop songs were used so well.
As the play progressed, I began to see that the best use of these pop songs was when the actors sang a cover version with a live instrument, rather than those times when we heard a recording of the original, famous song. The worst was when the actors tried to SING ALONG TO THE ORIGINAL SONG, which reminded me of the late and unlamented Viva McLaughlin. Viva McLaughlin was a short-lived TV show that wasted talent like Hugh Jackman by having him sing along to, for instance, a recording of Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" as he danced all over the landscape--as if Elton's song was playing on the radio and Jackman just happened to hear it and start singing along to it. ::shudder:: Those in the know in Hollywood predicted that Glee would never get off the ground because the American audience doesn't liked TV musicals. They never reckoned with the fact that Glee transforms songs and makes them new and vital with interesting new arrangements. I say that if they'd just had the actors on Viva McLaughlin do interesting cover versions using real orchestras or bands rather than having the actors (embarrassingly) sing-along to a recording of the original song, the show would have been a big success. Same thing applies here!
Drugs is drugs in this version of Alice--whenever she drank that or ate this, there was much giggling on her part and on the part of everyone around her. In the Hall of Many Doors, the doorknobs talk to Alice (they jeer at her and make fun of her), and it feels a lot like they're Alice's hallucinations rather than talking doorknobs in a magical wonderland. Alice transitions into a new Alice during a couple of the drug trips. When she eats the cakes to get small at the White Rabbit's house, the entire cast looms up around her and overwhelms her (Dogpile on the Alice! Dogpile on the Alice!), and when she crawls out from under everyone, she's a completely different actor.
Speaking of drugs, everyone at the Mad Tea Party was a completely wasted stoner, too cool for school. The Alice of the Tea Party was a tiny Asian girl in a black mini with knee socks and maryjanes, with a man's tie around her neck, and I wondered if the costumer was playing off of the anime trope of the Japanese school girl. After some amusing chatter that was mostly classic dialogue from the story (though the March Hare answers the Hatter's riddle with "Because Poe wrote on both", which is not in the story--and the Hatter throws a temper tantrum that he answered!), the March Hare jumps on a table to the opening strains of the Beatle's I Am The Walrus, and I thought, "If he starts rapping the song, I'm going to have to fall out of my seat and start doing that 'we are not worthy' bow-and-scrap," but no fear, they completely wasted the opportunity and just had him sing along. I mean, how hard would it have been to find the karaoke version of this song, so the guy could have sung it by himself?! Instead, the March Hare lost any tough, cool appeal he might have had by singing along with a Beatles 45 like any nebbish since 1967. I mean, we're talking a loss of several thousand cool points. Oh, man; if they'd just sampled the song and done a rap... I might have died in admiration right there. It was a really good song choice--the Walrus is, of course, a reference to The Walrus and the Carpenter. (Amusingly, Lennon was shocked when it was pointed out to him later that the Walrus is a villain in the poem. Oh, John!)
As in the Disney version, both the Tweedle Twins and the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass managed to find their way into Alice in Wonderland, but whatever, everyone does that and I'm inured to it at this point. I found out later during the Creatives Chat that during the first meeting where they met to decide who played what character, everyone came to the table doing their best cartoon-voiced Disney impressions, and the director just looked at them all with a narrowed eye and said, "NO." :D
The Tweedles were played by two girls in large frilly skirts and a lot of blonde hair and makeup--apparently they were doing a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen impression (in retrospect, I realized it was a good one.) They play tug-of-war using Alice as the rope, then throw her to the ground and tell her they aren't going to invite her into their club, she's going to have to face the Garden of Living Flowers all by herself, and good luck with that. The Garden turns out to be a garden of shall we say "earthly delights"--all the flowers are Twylla-Tharping around in slow-motion simulated sex (basically just doing undulating dance-moves into one another), and a few of them get Alice in a neck-lock that made me think they were referencing auto-erotic strangulation, but the White Knight jumps into the scene, the only character moving in real time, smiting everyone in mime. When he hits the flowers molesting Alice with his invisible sword, he yells, "CHECKMATE!"--after all, he is meant to be a knight on a chessboard!--and they all fall away from her.
The playwright said that he called it Alice vs. Wonderland because he noticed that almost nobody helps Alice as she tries to navigate a course from teenager to adult--quite the reverse, everyone gets in her face in an adversarial manner! I noted that the White Knight actually did help her, and then later on the Cheshire Cat tries to help, though he doesn't show up until 3/4 of the way through. At any rate: the White Knight shows her his back-pack, cleverly turned upside-down so that the rain won't get into his sandwiches, and she points out that everything's fallen out of it, and he has a tantrum--kinda scary for her, but she calms him down. He grabs her and throws her behind him on his invisible horse, and off they go, gallumphing all over the forest. It was some pretty hilarious mime-age, with Alice hanging on for dear life, and the Knight being all noble and heroic!
Wow, that got long! More on the play after breakfast!