Man, that is one crazy trip Alice takes when she falls down the rabbit hole, in slow motion past a tunnel of bookcases, and finds herself growing to 9 feet tall and shrinking to 2 feet and swimming in a deep pool of her own tears. But that’s what she gets when she drinks a bottle of elixir and eats a pie with “Eat Me” spelled out in berries and nibbles at the psychedelic mushroom. Curiouser and curiouser.
As our confused (and always demure) heroine observes in Georgia Shakespeare’s hour-long adaptation of the Lewis Carroll children’s classic “Alice in Wonderland,” “It was much pleasanter at home, when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.”
Tim Conley and Allen O’Reilly had the difficult task of directing and adapting the dream story — fantastical but not especially humorous — for the stage and a quartet of actors. In a book, magical scenes can be left to the reader’s imagination. On film, special effects or cartoon characters can faithfully depict every physics-defying episode.
Here the creative team struggled to convey the extraordinary hallucinations. The production felt talky, the rhythms dragged. Bold lighting might have been the key to altering the wild swings of scene and mood. Katy Munroe’s costumes met every expectation, but Katie McCreary’s lighting designs felt timid. The small unit set featured an oversized book, each turned page a new background. It, too, was a nice but underwhelming effort.
Thus it was for the actors to step up as compelling storytellers, shifting between their fairy-tale character and straight narration directed at the audience. The four young actors are part of GaShakes’ summer season, here as players under the name The Will Powers Ensemble. They had only mixed success.
Michael Bradley Cohen, who is also Puck in GaShakes’ “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” chewed the “Alice” scenery with relish. He brought his many roles to vivid life, each receiving a distinct silly voice, from the outrageous Mad Hatter to a snarky caterpillar. He can do voices, and he’s got stage presence. Whenever he spoke, we paid attention. Cohen’s program bio credits him as a stand-up comic. One might guess he’s got a manic act that Robin Williams might admire.
The other three were less effective as communicators. Allison Leigh Corke, also a young lover from “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” played all her characters as severe, humorless adults. Her March Hare and Queen of Hearts were appropriately scolding — “Off with her head!” she shouts several times as the surly queen — but Corke’s bits of narration were dour and off-putting, too.
Brian Harrison’s roles include the (completely unintelligible) White Rabbit, an amusing drag Duchess — who calls her baby “Pig!” — and somewhat less than half of the Tweedledee-Tweedledum duo.
As Alice, Sarah M. Johnson — another young lover in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the ravished Lavinia in “Titus Andronicus” — is lovely to behold, with an expressive face. But she’s got poor diction and can’t help us make sense of Carroll’s clever word-play. And her befuddlement at the material mirrored our own, where even the 5-year-old theater-goer seated next to me squirmed in her seat for much of the hour.
THEATER REVIEW
"Alice in Wonderland" at Georgia Shakespeare.
Grade: B-
10 a.m. through Saturday. $13. Conant Performing Arts Center, 4484 Peachtree Road, on the Oglethorpe University campus. 404-264-0020, www.gashakespeare.org
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