TOKY Branding + Design
During Opera Theatre St. Louis’ American premiere production of Alice in Wonderland, bookcases hide children’s choruses, Alice does cartwheels across the stage, and the Mad Hatter agonizes about murdering time. The opera is based on the famous children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, about a girl who falls asleep and imagines a fantastic land where she grows and shrinks and meets incredible characters.
The opera was written by Unsuk Chin. She took up the project because her mentor, the late composer Gyorgy Ligeti, died before he could write his adaptation. Chin first read the book in adulthood, and recognized her own dreams in it. “To create the soundworld that characterizes Alice’s humor,” she writes in the Note from the Composer in the program, “I play with musical meanings through references to different styles and the parodistic musical underlining of the different characters.”
Chin wrote the score to be performed by about 100 musicians for its Munich premiere in 2007, but OTSL asked her to refigure it for a smaller ensemble. Conductor Michael Christie recalled to the St. Louis Beacon: “I got phone calls from [St. Louis Symphony Orchestra] musicians about the music saying, ‘Is this for real?’” It calls for non-traditional use of instruments, is heavy on percussion, and features an intimidating use of mixed meters and other innovations. (That approach felt too avant-garde to some, including The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who lamented that Chin only gave her singers a handful of "lovely melodic phrases," and went overboard on "sprechstimme, mixed singing and speaking.")
The book is by American librettist David Henry Hwang, who is best known for writing the libretto to M. Butterfly. Hwang kept much from the original story intact, including the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the croquet game played with flamingos and hedgehogs, and the Caterpillar and the Cheshire cat. The prologue and epilogue were also modified. (Unsuk Chin thought that the book's beginning and end were too conventional.) Now, the opening is even dreamier, with Alice meeting a young boy who seems eternally damned. At the end, she struggles to plant a garden in barren earth.
The score aside, critics have good things to say about Allen Moyer’s sets and James Schuette’s wild costumes, styled to resemble John Tenniel’s original wood-engraved illustrations. The performers have also been justifiably praised, especially Alice (Ashley Emerson), David Trudgen’s “loony” March Hare and “pompous” White Rabbit, Tracy Dahl as the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter, Aubrey Allicock. And Dancer Sean Curran, as the “psychedelically striped Caterpillar," brings "terrific subversive humor to his mimed role," as the Post-Dispatch observes.
OTSL has staged 22 world premieres and 23 American premieres, so it's no wonder that the staging was top-notch. Stage director and OTSL artistic director James Robinson had a clear vision for the piece. In the program notes, he writes: “My design collaborators and I have enthusiastically approached this production of Alice through the eyes of a young girl—possibly bored, possibly overly-curious, a hopeless daydreamer. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, the mundane becomes magical.”
Alice in Wonderland (June 21 &23). Ages 10-plus. $25-$120. Time: 8 p.m. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts, 130 Edgar, 314-961-0644, opera-stl.org.
