Alice in Wonderland
Eva Le Gallienne & Florida Friebus
Adapted from Lewis Carroll
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| The Cast of Alice in Wonderland |
Dreams are often disjointed and full of strange things we
sometimes only slightly recognize while they take us places that range from
fascinating to fearful, from silly to sad, from comforting to frightful. In directing Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Alice in Wonderland (adapted during the
Great Depression from Lewis Carroll’s original by Eva Le Gallienne &
Florida Friebus), Sara Bruner has with
wild, unbounded imagination succeeded in turning the massive Allen Elizabethan
Theatre into a dreamscape where near-countless scenes rapidly toss and turn in
a little girl’s head as she dozes away.
Like in an actual dream, some of those fabulous and fantastical dreamed
scenes are vignettes that make for a moment absolute sense while many others come
and go so fast that the impressions they leave for her and for us may likely be
forgotten upon waking. But what will be
surely remembered by her upon waking and by us upon exiting is that we have
traveled together on a journey in a world populated by strange and wonderful
beings that bear resemblance to pictures we have seen in our childhood books
but when met live, are more whimsical, wild, and wondrous than any past picture
or dream we have ever seen.
Emily Ota immediately convinces us she is in fact a seven-and-a-half-year-old
Alice when she enters stomping about in a mood of childlike tantrum. Kicking
furiously a stump, she collapses crying in a big, blue chair that has
conveniently presented itself for her.
As her subsequent dream begins and proceeds, Alice is often impetuous
and impatient, a know-it-all who is also extremely curious, and someone who
takes everything quite literally but who also cannot help asking time and
again, “Why?” In other words, Emily
Ota’s Alice is a typical little girl who can turn her proneness of being a bit
bratty quickly into the ability to be the most fully charming, immediately
likeable princess one would ever want to meet.
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| Emily Ota & Shyla Lefner |
As she sings to herself in a state of half-awake, half-sleep,
her dream world takes over as a big-eared, smartly dressed White Rabbit with
huge pocket watch (Shyla Lefner) bustles all about worrying about being
late. Motioning for Alice to follow her,
they head together in a most fanciful tumble into Wonderland, with
different-sized hoops that dance all around them becoming their tunneled,
turning, and twisting highway to the world below. A door too small to enter
leads Alice through a sequence of size-altering adventures that lay proof to a director’s
ingenuity as Sara Bruner calls upon the creativity we all once had as children
to create this child’s world of fantasy.
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| Emily Ota & Lauren Modica |
Alice finally enters Wonderland only to fall into a lake made
for us real by the first of many miracles of lighting and sound that Mary Jo
Dondlinger and Richard L. Hay respectively have designed for the evening’s land
of impossible fantasies. Bobbing in and
out of the water, she meets a talkative blue-eared, big-eyed Mouse (Anthony
Heald) who is totally friendly in his rapid conversation until Alice keeps
mentioning her cat, Dinah – something a mouse does not want to discuss at all.
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| Emily Ota & "Birds" |
When on dry land, adventures start coming at Alice in such a
rapid succession that neither she nor we can catch our breaths. Four,giant, feather-losing birds of various
multi-colored, gawky-strutting species (whose origins could very well be Dr.
Seuss) include her in a race and are totally ready to make her part of the
flock until she once again mentions a cat who happens to like eating
birds. A Dormouse (Cristofer Jean) tells
Alice his life story by reading it off his long tail while a puckered-lip,
hippie-donned Caterpillar (Brent Hinkley) smokes his hooka as he offers sage
advice and life-important philosophies.
While we too listen to what he says between his puffs that produce smoke
of floating hoops, we are actually more interested in watching his eight legs
that dangle and dance over the high-above ledge where he pontificates.
A beady-eyed Frog (Miriam A. Laube) with an intriguing
invitation; a Duchess (Kate Mulligan) with the ugliest of babies who sings of
how she abuses and eats her children; and a multi-sectioned, purring, and
appearing/disappearing Cheshire Cat (Lauren Modica) are just some of Alice’s
further encounters – all of which she alternates between wonder-packed
amazement and twenty-question interrogations.
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| Eddie Lopez, Cristofer Jean & Danforth Comins |
Her questions particularly spill forth when she lands at a
tea party that never ends (since the March Hare’s clock is stuck permanently at
six). There she is entertained while
drinking from her three-leveled teacup by the hosting hare with pink floppy
ears (Eddie Lopez), a buck-toothed Mad Hatter with his nonsensical riddles
(Danforth Comins), and a sleepy Dormourse who wakes up long enough to tell in
his squeaky voice a tale about sisters who live in a well of treacle (Cristofer
Green).
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| Miriam A. Laube, Emily Ota & Robin Goodrin Nordli |
But so much more is to come for Alice, with the kingdom’s
various royalties still to be met.
Queens abound, including the absolutely short-tempered and very bossy
Queen of Hearts (brilliantly enacted by Amy Kim Waschke); the pompously
strutting Red Queen (Miriam A. Laube) whose every turn elicits its own sound
effect as she runs faster than anyone without ever moving forward; and finally
the White Queen (Robin Goodrin Nordli) who blows in and then out again in a
terrific windstorm that is one of the evening’s best moments of full-stage,
full-cast chaos. But it is hard to top
the fun and fury of the Queen of Heart’s game of croquet that involves the entire
audience in batting around the balls that are sent there way by the night’s
best of all props (thanks to scenic designer Richard L. Hay), pink flamingo
croquet sticks that look as if they could fly away at any minute.
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| Daniel T. Parker & Kate Mulligan |
And how can we overlook a joking Humpty Dumpty (David Kelly)
whose perilous perch high in the heavens leads to an inevitable plop forty or
fifty feet below before he is hilariously put together again by king’s men on
their stick horses (the only kind of stallions we will see all night)? The non-identical, identical twins Tweedledee
and Tweedledum (Kate Mulligan and Daniel T. Parker); a Tom-Edison-aspiring
White Knight (Cristofer Jean) whose inventions include anklets to protect his
“L-shaped” horse from sharks, and a Knave of Hearts (Brent Hinkley) whose trial
for stealing the Queen’s tart (remember that one?) demands Alice be a witness
all become part of the constant parade of storybook characters whose stories
are quick and often nonsensical and/or non-memorable but whose appearances all are
eye-popping visions never to be forgotten.
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| Daniel T, Parker, Vilma Silva & Emily Ota |
And that is because the star of the evening who rivals
Director Sara Bruner in deserving the most applause is Helen Q. Huang whose
scores of designed costumes cannot be described in words but must be seen to be
believed. It is incredible how she is
able to imagine to life all of Lewis Carroll’s wildly weird concoctions – ones
like a Gryphon (Vilma Silva) who is a cross between lion and eagle or a Mock
Turtle (Daniel T. Parker) with his gigantic shell and over-sized paws. What many of us have seen only created by
animators and artists, costume designer Helen Q. Huang and wig designer
Cherelle D. Guyton have now left us with larger-than-life memories of colorful
characters without peers in any other medium.
Frankly, I must admit I have never been a huge fan of Alice in Wonderland – as a kid or now as
an adult. During some parts of this
Oregon Shakespeare Festival extravaganza, I checked in and out of the poems
recited or the songs sung – neither of which added much in my opinion to the
evening’s enjoyment. And as scenes came
and went often in a rather abupt manner, some of them worked better than others
in leaving a mini-story to be later recalled (as said earlier, much like in a
night’s dream). However, from a
production standpoint alone, I heartily recommend that OSF’s over-the-top,
all-bells-and-whistles Alice in
Wonderland is definitely a ticket worth purchasing and a show worth seeing.
Rating: 4 E
Alice in Wonderland
continues through October 12 the
Allen Elizabethan Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Tickets are
available at www.osfashland.org.
Photos
by Jenny Graham
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