Anyone going to see Wonderland this week? — Page 3

Here we go...

looooooved the TOTO CAM.... and the guy who played TOTO...

night!

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Anyone care to post a song list?

Wow!!! I was not in attendance tonight, and while with any Frank show you expect the worse, but ... I can't imagine it being worse than what I saw in Tampa this past January.

Seems to me that the Tampa/general audiences appreciate different things than the NY audiences, which is always a gamble. Ie: "Welcome to Wonderland" which I thought was a funny idea.

Some other things strike me weird about these reviews: Dacal/Ritchie have always had chemistry, but the material this past year anyway had 0 moments for them. The two are I mean.. a couple in real life.

The universal opinion is that The Writer/ "I Am My Own Invention" scene needs to be cut, from the first go around but it is still in there.

Also on a different topic, this is one of Wonderland's weakest sets... With DRACULA, the musical the stage was beautiful and doused with special effects... not the case here unless that has also been changed (I can't imagine where the $15 MIL went into besides the half-of-the-time cheesy projections).

I don't think it'd be realistic for a child to have such a room, but I did once live in an apartment on wall street that had two doors to the outside, and one was from the main bedroom... literally right next to the main door.

I can't believe they made Karen Mason's character a grandmom... can legitimately say I never saw that happen! I officially cannot wait to see what else has happened to WONDERLAND!

frank wildhorn you did it again! COngrats!

Oh dear.

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Is anyone else hearing the obvious plagiarizing of musical motifs from "One Boy" in "One Knight."

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I'd be really curious to see what the first drafts of this material were because so much of what is on stage right now just defies basic elementary script writing 101 that I find it hard to believe they could have gone through readings, workshops, and two productions in Florida and ended up with whats on stage.

I don't know if its really salvagable at this point - unless they threw out about 2/3 of the story and started over but there are at least things they could do to improve it:

1. Cut about 75 percent of the bad jokes. They are painful. They are cheap rips on anything that the creative team could find to throw in there - most have nothing to do with the story don't have anything to do with Alice in Wonderland (where's the real Lewis Carroll who's puns were masterful when you need him).

2. Introduce conflict immediately. The conflict we have so far is that Alice and her daughter have 'had a bad day' and that Chloe is going to have to eat her grandmother's soup. Alice and Chloe despite all this have a loving relationship and as thus there is absolutely no where for the story to go. Yes its aimed at being a family musical, but the creative team shouldn't be afraid of addressing some real issues - divorice, turning your back on your dreams, not feeling like you are a good parent, not feeling like your mother loves or pays attention to you -- these are issues that fuel adventure stories - and 'quests' for personal discovery, that the musical is desperately reaching for straws to try to capture in the rushed last 20 minutes of the show.

3. Alice needs an "I Want Song." For my money, Chloe needs one (perhaps the same one) as well. Didn't the earlier version of this have Alice chasing after Chloe who stumbles into Wonderland? A duel adventure of mother/daugther in a strange world sounds a lot more compelling than what we've got currently.

4. The Mad Hatter needs a real motive. She apparently doesn't like the Queen of Hearts wants to be Queen of Wonderland and thinks Alice is a threat. It's not playing and the conflict arrives about a song before the end of the first act which is also way too late. Shindle, good as she is, could also be a little scarier - especially if we are to ultimately believe she is the dark side of Alice's alter ego.

5. The romantic interest goes nowhere. Wouldn't it be nice if, indeed, the White Knight is supposed to be something of the alter ego of Alice's estranged husband if we saw something in that Wonderland relationship that was actually illuminating for Alice and insightful into her own marriage?

6. The character songs in the first act should be shortened. They introduce character and do nothing else. Again, the problem of musicalizing Alice in Wonderland - those scenes involving the Cheshire Cat, Catapiller etc have no narrative.

7.The LCD projections look cheap. The entire show looks like a 1990 era video game. If they can't be cutting edge and gorgeous, don't use them.

8. Show don't describe things happening off stage. Happens too much in Act 2. We don't see Alice and her chohorts get captured, we don't see Alice find Chloe - precisely the things that would actually be interesting to experience.

9. The last half hour needs to be totally retooled - its rushed, it feels half hearted - and I have no idea what happened. Did the Mad Hatter melt? I felt like I was seeing a 7 minute youtube condensation of castle scene in the Wizard of Oz.

10. Give the little girl more to do. She's great. I actually think if you had to choose one or the other - letting her be the one who falls down the rabbit hole initially, with Alice following later, would actually make most of the 1st act (even as written) a lot more tolerable - because you'd at least see it filtered through the energy of a child. And that would at least remind us of what was endearing about the experience of the book.

Thanks Michael Bennett for the full out review.

The original Tampa concept was:
Chloe overhears her mother (who is late coming home because of a work rooftop party celebrating her) and her father (on the phone) argue and Jack says he's signing the divorce papers. Chloe runs away to Wonderland, leaving Alice a "Alice in Wonderland" book of clues, where the Mad Hatter wants to become Queen. To become Queen one must reach the 8th square... The way for Alice to go home is to become Queen. The Mad Hatter kidnaps Chloe to the Looking Glass world (along with the rest of the gang), where Alice must find herself before she can find her child. She arrives at the 8th Square, and as she is about to be beat by the Mad Hatter, the queen calls reset. She awakes at the rooftop party (in Houston she was "struck by lightning" - no joke), but tells them she's going home, where she is reunited.

^This worked except they felt it focused too much on the Mad Hatter. The divorce just happening works way better than a totally estranged husband.


This past year, Chloe was swept away to Wonderland by the Rabbit, and then the Hatter still kidnaps Chloe but differently, wipes her memory, and then something random happens like Kate Shindle knocking the audience out with her phenomenal "I Will Prevail" and it's over! Very messy... my review of both productions are on this site.

I agree that having Chloe go to Wonderland first would be much more effective. Let her be the one to experience those initial introductory character numbers, and then have Alice come chasing after her. It would create dramatic stakes that are literally non-existent. Similarly, as I was saying earlier, they need to give an explanation as to why Alice's marriage and life is so off-track right away, and how that's damaged her relationship with her daughter. If the conflict is just that Alice and Chloe have "had a bad day," what is she fighting for?

One of the biggest things I thought was missing was a very clear separation of perspective between how a child would see this world and how Alice, as a "jaded" adult, experiences it. We're supposed to believe that Alice needs to go through this entire journey to re-connect with her inner child, and yet she's so quick to buy into everything around her from the get-go. Where is her reluctancy to participate in such a ridiculous circumstance?

Although it's a little Wizard of Oz-ish, I also liked how the previous version established most of the primary characters in Wonderland as having real-life counterparts for Alice (The Queen of Hearts and The Mad Hatter were her skeptical book editors, etc.) It doesn't really make sense to have The Mad Hatter represent part of Alice and The White Knight represent her husband, and yet none of the other characters have any correlation to her at all, especially when you have Karen Mason playing two roles with no correlation between them.

The previous incarnation's plot line of having Alice be a successful writer who can't seem to find the balance between her career and her family was the perfect device to solve many of the problems that are now so apparent and disjointed. For such a talented guy, I'm completely baffled as to why Rupert Holmes would change the groundwork of the story in such a dis-effective way.

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Updated On: 3/22/11 at 09:51 AM

EVERYTHING is salvageable, guys!! COME ON! Didn't the SPIDER MAN apologists teach you anything?? I can't wait for the changes!

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