April 27--They have some competition for the "Alice in Wonderland" title -- Taylor Swift-size competition -- but the new take on the beloved works of Lewis Carroll at Chicago Children's Theatre is certainly a refreshing, rockin' take on the adventures of Ms. Alice, here rendered not as a dainty lady, pop song (Swift's) or a pliant aerialist (a la Lookingglass Theatre), but as an indie-like musician, as cool as the Cheshire Cat.
"Wonderland," aptly subtitled "Alice's Rock Roll Adventure," is an all-new intimately staged musical featuring the songs of Michael Mahler, a most talented Chicago-based composer who, among other credits, penned the score for the promising new musical "Hero" and helped revise the lyrics for the new Cameron Mackintosh production of "Miss Saigon," which now is playing in London. Mahler writes sticky, melodic, smart songs, and the opening number for "Wonderland" (wherein the cast makes up the band) is a smash, mostly for the way it relates Alice to a common state for the contemporary Chicago-area tween: boredom.
"Take a permanent vacation from the boring and the bland," goes one lyric, ultimately noting, "it's much nicer to be here in Wonderland."
No doubt. Certainly, the facsimile thereof at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts was never dull. At the show I saw, a 15-year-old named Ariana D. Burks essayed young Alice with a nicely unsentimental style, variously playing keyboards and the drums and wrestling, both intellectually and emotionally, with Molly Callinan's intimidating Queen of Hearts, quite the power rocker. Burks has another of the show's really great new songs, "Lazy Day," wherein Alice wishes for something, anything, to happen. "But if I had a steed, I would speed from this lazy day," she sings, stuck doing piano practice, "and not return all day." There's lot of fun stuff like that.
Rare is the staging of an "Alice" (and I have sat through many different versions in my time) that so well links the heroine of the story with all her potential peers in the audience. Rachel Rockwell, who directs, who wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics, has given the show the kind of nonprettified staging that Alice herself surely would prefer.
I confess to some resistance to rendering Carroll, whose writing was happily weird, as any kind of moralist or an empowerment guru with a contemporary value system -- but while present here, those themes never overwhelm this show, and the advice offered by the aforementioned kitty from the County of Great Cheese (played by Andrew Mueller) is never over-sentimentalized. And by about halfway through the piece, I started to think that the piece would be improved if it departed yet further from all the familiar Alice iconography and really went more its own, freewheeling way, rather than getting a bit lost in the familiar, when it comes to the Mad Hatter, Caterpillar and all the Jabberwocky. A fresh way through it all would work best. This show has all kinds of potential.
Cool projections from Mike Tutaj notwithstanding, "Wonderland" would, however, be more wondrous to the ear with a better sound system. On Friday night, the mix was under amplified and muddy with many lyrics rendered indistinct. That was frustrating, for these are great lyrics, wholly evocative of a girl who believes in the impossible. Still, if you have a bored one around who follows that creed, she'll have a lot of fun already. So would her brother.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
REVIEW: Wonderland, Alice's Rock Roll Adventure by Chicago Children's Theatre
3 STARS
When: Through May 24
Where: Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Tickets: $10-$38 at 872-222-9555 or chicagochildrenstheatre.org
