A year ago, our family had tickets to see Bad Hats Theatre’s Alice in Wonderland at Soulpepper. The creative, Dora Award-winning show was part of Soulpepper’s December Family Festival.
The day of the show felt like an icy trip down the rabbit hole. We fought snowy streets and epic traffic, only to encounter the weather-intensified challenge of parking. And when that hurdle was overcome, we inched across ice-covered sidewalks while leaning into howling, breath-stealing winds. Half-frozen, we allowed ourselves a quick moment of celebration when we arrived in the empty lobby just 12 minutes late.
An usher emerged to tell us that she would seat us soon, at an appropriate point in the action. In the meantime, we peered at a black-and-white television monitor . . . where the unfolding story of Alice appeared surprisingly well-advanced.
A quick question to the usher yielded an explanation. We weren’t 12 minutes late. We were 42 minutes late, having failed to pick up on the family-friendly 7:00 pm start time.
After a quick confab, we made the difficult but pragmatic decision to abandon the already half-finished show. We pulled on our hats, zipped up our coats, and exited. We climbed back up the inclement rabbit hole we had descended, and returned to our lives.
Fast forward a year almost to the day.
After its acclaimed run in 2022, Alice in Wonderland has returned to Soulpepper’s Family Festival 2023. No, it’s not a holiday show, but it has a super-playful, not-of-the-madding-crowd vibe that does suit the otherness of the holidays.
It’s back, so we got new tickets.
We triple-checked the 7 pm start, and set out with lots of time. This time, we found parking with ease. And it was a calm, warm six degrees out, with no trace of snow, ice or even wind. We had been chilling in our seats for 15 minutes, when this whimsical whirlwind of a musical scooped us up and carried us down the real rabbit hole to Wonderland.
The trip was well worth the year-long wait. Alice in Wonderland is a full-contact, imagination-intensive and thematically-rich marvel. Families should give themselves the treat of experiencing it together.
The show, of course, is based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, novellas which recount two feverish dreams experienced by Alice, the young protagonist. The dreams are psychedelic explorations of the inconsistencies and contradictions at the core of adult life. In each, Alice confronts a succession of fantastic creatures who espouse the organizing constructs, maxims, morals and norms that adults aggressively assert . . . but which do not hold up under scrutiny. These stories document the challenge of resistance – especially for a young girl like Alice – and how we assert our agency in a world of demands that defy understanding.
In her smart script, writer and Bad Hats Theatre Artistic Director Fiona Sauder has leaned into the interrogative stance adopted by Alice, but has streamlined the story by selecting certain elements from the two novellas and simply dropping others. You’ll find no White Queen or White Knight here, and no King or Jack of Hearts . . . but you won’t miss them for even a moment. In their place, you will find challenging yet memorable songs by Victor Pokinko and Landon Doak and a snappy story with fewer side paths, incidental riddles and ancillary wordplay.
All of the fun of Wonderland remains. But that fun is focused on one of the original novel’s multiple adult preoccupations: the idea of time. Sauder’s Alice in Wonderland explores in depth what time is, how we experience it, and how it changes us (or is changed by us) — especially when, like Alice, we enter liminal times of “growing and unknowing”. This urgent focus, magnified by Sue Miner’s kinetic direction, turns Carroll’s diffuse pair of stories into a single turbocharged tale where Alice, on the cusp of growing up, wrestles down insistent, time-boxed demands that she declare who she is and who she wants to be.
The way Sauder’s Alice explores time is shaped by the setting, which — in a stroke of genius — is Alice’s school classroom. Alice is played by the delightfully wide-eyed Tess Benger, who incarnates the idea of childhood curiosity. (Not the annoying water torture version of curiosity – the thoughtful, gears-are-turning desire of an earnest child to make meaning.) Most of Alice’s questions center around time: the two clocks in the classroom which show different times, or how it is that we can variously lose time, find time . . . or even make time. And thanks to the classroom setting, this Alice is not going to awaken on a riverbank or in an armchair with her cat, only to realize it was just a dream. No, she’s going to experience a real-time waking daydream, in which Wonderland’s denizens will spring to life as alt-versions of the classroom personalities around her.
Thus, Matt Pilipiak starts out as teacher Mr. Charles, concerned with keeping his students task-focused and on a tight leash . . . then transforms into the fastidious, fretting, fearful (and delightfully over-the-top) White Rabbit. A pair of dimwitted, ball-capped students named Todd and Tod become Tweedledum and Tweedledee . . . and then the two-peas-in-a-pod Mad Hatter and March Hare (Landon Doak and Fiona Sauder). And Shakura Dickson’s know-it-all student Ruby becomes the know-it all (and direct-it-all) Red Queen. The other cast members play less direct analogues for their student personas, but they, too, are uniformly energetic and arresting: Jessica Gallant (Nicola, Duck, Rose, Unicorn), Ben Page (Buddy, Owl, Buttercup, Caterpillar),Haneul Yi (Douggie, Dodo & Lily).
Aisha Jarvis’ mysterious Cheshire Cat is the show’s one constant. We see her smiling, soothing presence from the start – first in a corner of the real world classroom, then again in the daydream world of Wonderland. She alerts us to these two worlds’ oneness . . . and more and more, helps Alice to navigate the pressure to grow up and become something other than a wide-eyed, curious and free-spirited child. In this way, the show elevates the wistful, elegiac quality of the original stories, and laser-focuses it through the prism of the educational context.
Since school is where those societal expectations are codified and enacted, it’s the site and source of Wonderland, which is less a fixed location than an atmosphere . . . an imaginative energy, if you will. The timely message is that this subversive and ultimately empowering energy resides beneath the required behaviors, assigned tasks and binary right-wrong answers of the everyday classroom. The genius set reinforces this by turning classroom objects into an engine of transformation. In seconds, the classroom’s wheeled chairs and desks become a train, or even a passageway. Simple modular frames become windows to look through . . . then walls to restrict movement . . . then both. One of the few fixed elements is a piano at one end of the stage that various actors will play . . . but all the other musical instruments – bass guitar, clarinet, melodica – will intermittently appear from nowhere, be played by the actors (who happen also to be the band) . . . then magically disappear again.
Think of this Alice in Wonderland like a comic book. As we watch, the lines are being pencilled in by the actors, Ming Wong’s bright costumes, Cameron Carver and David Ball’s dynamic choreography, and Bad Hats Theatre’s constantly shifting set. But our soaring imaginations do the inking and colouring. We fill the gaps between the lines . . . by visualizing Alice as huge or small after she drinks the “Drink me” bottle . . . or envisioning an expanded geography of gameboard squares that she must cross . . . or embracing the Caterpillar’s costumed transformation into a butterfly. (And like an old-school comic book, the show comes stuffed with allusive footnotes and panto-style asides for older audience members – be ready, Bon Jovi fans!)
So when you head down to Soulpepper to travel down the Bad Hats rabbit hole, don’t expect literal fidelity to the Alice in Wonderland you may already be familiar with.
Expect something richer. More vital. More modern.
Expect big questions and big songs, powered by curiosity, energy and movement.
And – befitting of a show about time — expect a laser focus on maximizing your surprise and delight within the show’s tight 90-minute run time.
So don’t be late.
Bad Hats’ Alice in Wonderland runs until January 7, 2024. Reserve tickets at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023
