Presented by David Carpenter and Gamiotics Studios, Saving Wonderland at the Toronto Fringe’s 2022 Next Stage Festival is an unexpected, energizing antidote to Zoom fatigue. It provides the benefit of a dynamic theatrical performance featuring a variety of endearing, over-the-top performances, plus a direct control over the story’s direction that keeps you on the edge of your seat, as you work with audience members at computers in their houses to solve puzzles in an attempt to save – but with the real possibility your efforts will instead doom – Wonderland.
The premise is simple: as audience members, we play the role of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, having returned to Wonderland after a long time. As the performance opens, we are welcomed by bickering guides: the fast-talking and endearingly wild-eyed White Rabbit (Jacob Thompson) who explains that when we first visited Wonderland, we set in motion a problem that risks destroying Wonderland. He needs our help now to save it. The White Rabbit and the winningly sly Cheshire Cat (Kim Morgan Dean) will serve as our primary on-screen hosts. They guide us through our choices of where to go and what to do – and as an audience, we make those choices as a group, by using the Gamiotics technology accessed through each viewer’s Smartphone. If you’re watching as a family, there’s no need for consensus: each member can vote through their own Smartphone.
These choices have real consequences. They determine the order in which we encounter the denizens of Wonderland: Pooya Mohseni’s mercurial White Queen, Carlina Parker’s “off-with-their-heads”-y Red Queen, Michael Indeglio’s elliptical Mad Hatter (who happens to be a dead ringer for young Elton John), Michael Pilato’s tipsy March Hare, and Lynn Craig’s loquacious Caterpillar. And each of these characters serves up clues (pay attention to these!) and challenges for Alice / the audience to solve. Our success (or failure) in solving these challenges determines whether we gain the remedies needed for the dire Jabberwockian problem plaguing Wonderland.
A word to the wise: the puzzles are genuinely challenging. They can be figured out, but they move fast, and there are no “gimmes”. You will feel the heat as time counts down and you try to enter the best answer . . . then silently curse the collective audience for voting for an answer you know is wrong . . . or silently thank them for outvoting your wrong choice.
Saving Wonderland delivers an immersive, amusing experience that will captivate audiences of all ages. The production is gratifyingly faithful to the spirit – without being bound to the letter – of Lewis Carroll’s beloved source material. And the show wrings impressive dynamism from waist-up-only theatrical performances delivered by the diverse cast against simple but evocative digital sets. And it uses clean story logic and the slick Gamiotics platform to deliver the stakes and logic of gaming. This even includes the chance for rapid “do-overs” (at which my woeful audience proved to be even less successful.) In the hands of this skilled team, wven the Zoom chat becomes an unexpected source of hilarity and fellowship, as audience members joke and kibbitz, led by the deadpan pronouncements of “TO Fringe”, the eponymous (and hilarious) host of the session.
In the Talkback that followed my session, I inquired about the grim result our audience had achieved (sadly, you wouldn’t want to live in Wonderland after our audience got through with it). I learned that there are multiple possible endings: we had achieved the “bad ending”, but there is “an even worse ending” that a future audience might achieve. The report card audience members received afterwards through email told the tale of our audience’s poor success rate on the challenges. It is tempting me to join one of the remaining performance: to help a new audience do better, and experience some of the other 150+ video story snippets that because of our choices, we never got to see.
Can you – working together with your fellow audience members – save Wonderland? If you’ve been missing the theatre, or if you just relish a good challenge and a few laughs, you owe it to yourself to find out. What you’ll discover is that – in the process of challenging us to save Wonderland – David Carpenter, Gamiotics studio and a talented cast may have also figured out one amazing way to save the experience of theatre over Zoom.
Click here to view the trailer. Reserve tickets here.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022
