"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland": Don't be late for a very important date

Theater Review |

Open Circle Theater's original adaptation of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" runs just about an hour but uses as much of Lewis Carroll's dialogue as can be squeezed in.

The result is a busy but enjoyable plunge down the rabbit hole of Alice's surreal adventure. But add to that ambitiousness a little comic irony in the form of exasperated interruptions from Carroll (Tadd Alexander) himself, sitting in the audience and loudly unhappy about the play's artistic license with his text.

Despite that self-conscious tweak, this "Alice" is faithful to the crazy lurches in the original story. Following the White Rabbit (Colin Fetherstone-Wilkinson) and his watch down the famous hole, Alice (JenRenee Paulson) finds herself shrinking and growing, and then shrinking and growing again. She meets a variety of animal and other characters along the way, including the hookah-smoking caterpillar (Ann-Dee Levine), the Mock Turtle (Emma Hassett), the Mad Hatter (Aaron Allshouse) and Cheshire Cat (Liz Cortez).

Minimal props are used most ingeniously and comically, and the cast throws itself into the hallucinatory action with ample energy and determined nuttiness. The show definitely gets a lift, however, anytime actor Josh Hartvigsen bursts into a scene, first as an outraged stage manager upbraiding Carroll for his noisy interruptions, and then as the ferociously demented Queen.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com