I thought it was odd. I didn't get it at all!

I agree with other reviewers that this is a good play but all of the kinks haven't quite been worked out yet. The first transition between reality and fantasy was not very clear and confused the situation for a minute. The rest of the transitions were seamless. Lewis Carroll's monologue was also a bit hard to follow and oddly placed in the story line.

The acting overall was good. This must be a particularly challenging show for actors as they must play multiple characters without a lot of transition time between. It is hard to criticize a child so I will leave my review of Alice to others. My absolute favorite was the March Hare. His comedic timing and versatility absolutely saved the show. I wish I could join his fan club.

The venue was...odd. It is indeed on the second floor of a church. You have to walk past Sunday school rooms to get to the stage. Car alarms and motorcycle engines could be heard during the show from traffic outside.

done very well, enjoyed the performance

Trouble understanding the accents. A little to much affect by the girl that plays Alice. The adult actors were great...the set and direction very well done.

Though I was very impressed with some of the actors acting skills, the content of the play was not to my liking. Unfortunately, I have an obsession with Alice in Wonderland, so when I see anything linked to it, I jump at the chance to attend. This script gave the weirdest perverse impression on Lewis Carrol so I was a bit taken aback. It made me shudder. That is all.

Not being that familiar with Alice in Wonderland, it was helpful to find out who was who by the character list in the program book. It was a little disjointed. The young girl playing Alice did a wonderful job!

UNDERGROUND WITH MADNESS

Christopher Hampton’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

Mad Hatters and March Hares

City Lit Theater has spent nearly one-third of a century (a very long time indeed) “dedicated to the vitality and accessibility of the literary imagination.” In keeping with that part of its mission statement, City Lit is currently treating us to the Chicago premier of Alice’s Adventures Underground, a romp through the unlikely slapstick world created by Lewis Carroll for his favorite muse, Alice Liddell. Audience looking for a stage adaptation of Carroll’s best-known works for children, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, will be disappointed. The play most certainly does not attempt to recreate the contents of the books. Rather, it is a play about the relationship between Carroll and Liddell and attempts to imagine the creative process that gave us these timeless and charming children’s stories.

The play opens innocently enough with Alice paying a visit on Carroll in his Victorian drawing room. It quickly slips over the edge into fantasy as the unforgettable characters begin to flow from Carroll’s imagination to fill the world of Alice. Alice interacts with the characters as though they were real and in the process invites the audience into the magical world of the White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, The Doormouse and all the others that populate the books. Throughout the play the audience’s conscious is repeatedly escorted from reality to fantasy and back again as Alice experiences the flights of fancy that so entertained and fascinated her. In fact, this technique of “crossing over” between the real world and the imaginary is one that Carroll also employed to great effect in another of his children’s novels, Bruno and Sylvie.

At one point, the eighty-five minute production takes a short detour into some darker material that explores the nineteenth century practice of photographing nude children. While this was common practice for the time, the twentieth century discovery of some photographs taken by Carroll of nude children raised immediate questions regarding the propriety of his relationship with Alice Liddell. Scholars have since debunked such concerns, yet it is evidence that we, as contemporary members of society, have yet to completely understand and accept the intimate relationships of that romantic era that don’t exactly conform to our own notions of sterile morality.

Thus Hampton’s play leaves us with a strangely clouded vision of mid-nineteenth century life which by all accounts was a period of intense emotions and strong personal attachments. At the same time, we feel great nostalgia for those parts of the culture we can accept without effort. This mixture of mild precaution and attractive romanticism accompanies the audience as they leave the performance, perhaps with visions of their own childhoods and what they may have experienced or not experienced during those halcyon days of youth so long ago.

Changing Roles

The entire five-person cast is called upon to play multiple roles. Even Emily Garman, the talented young actress who portrays Alice so effectively, is called upon to become an oyster at one point. The remaining actors all assume a range of Carroll’s book characters ranging from five to eight in number. There are no costume changes, but the acting is at a high level and Carroll’s archetypes leave little doubt as to the identities of the characters as they sweep in and out of Alice’s imagination through a variety of clever entrances and exits built into the set.

Emily Garman’s fine work has already been mentioned. She was required to be sometimes sweet, sometimes frightened and sometimes petulant but always a bright and energetic seven-and-one-half-year-old. Kudos to Emily.

Nick Lake likewise had his hands full as he switched from Lewis Carroll, the clever inventor of Children’s fantasy to a more serious monolog dealing with the photographs of nude children mentioned earlier. In between, he effectively portrayed nine of the Carroll characters for the delight and amusement of the audience.

Likewise, LeeWichman, Edward Kuffert and Morgan McCabe all put forth outstanding performances as they deftly switched from one insane character to another in the twinkling of an eye. Especially noteworthy were McCabes portrayal of the Duchess and her pig baby along with Kuffert’s portrayal of the Cook in the same scene. Lee Wichman’s Mock Turtle was nothing short of brilliant.

Production

Ray Blackburn’s set design, while it may have appeared to be a “normal” Victorian drawing room was anything but. Clever secret entrances allowed the actors to appear and disappear in ways that reinforced the fantasy and magical experience of the world Carroll created in his books. The looking glass over the mantle was a nice touch that permitted us to wonder just how much of all of this was real, and how much might have been imaginary.

Worthy of mention is Devon Carroll’s lighting design that gave us a simulated flash powder experience, Tom Kieffer’s costume design that had just the right amount of extravagance to elevate us to the fantasy and yet remain firmly anchored in Victorian England.

Also notable were Richard Peaslee’s original songs that set some of Carroll’s poetry to music. The songs added yet another surreal touch to the entire production that left us wandering between here and now and then and somewhere imaginary.

Do You Remember

If you remember Lewis Carroll’s books fondly; if you read them as a child, or if they were read to you; if you read the books recently as I just happened to do for no apparent reason, then you will probably find great pleasure and satisfaction in this fine production. You will be transported to a land you may have only dreamed of on a long-ago afternoon; you will experience once again the magic of a world that knows little restraint and that celebrates the unexpected and outrageous. You will, in short, become a child again, even if for only about an hour and a half.

This is a recommended production for all ages. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is at City Lit Theater through October 9, 2011.

My aunt and I saw this play together. All 5 actors were superb. The play was a little hard for my aunt to understand because she didn't know they story of Alice in Wonderland. I would recommend reading the short story "Through the Looking Glass” prior to seeing the play. I found the play informative because it went into a little of the biography of Lewis Carroll. The set and costumes were authentic looking to that period of time. The only problem was that this theater is upstairs inside a church and the day we went there was no air conditioning. It felt unbearably hot and the entire audience was fanning themselves with the program. The cast did a great job of making their attempts to cool off look like part of the script. They would occasionally wipe a brow with a handkerchief from their shirt pocket or use a hand fan that was also a prop for the play. I would recommend going to this play when it's not 100 outside. The theater was tiny and there is not a bad seat in the house. The seats were comfortable and plush.

Extraordinary acting, like in the best theaters of the world! It's a very witty and full of pre-Theater of the Absurd material, amazing play!

Very good performances, I enjoyed the play very much. Thanks !

Probably a 3.5, maybe needs a little sharpening, better pacing before the opening. Acting/energy are superb.

The acting was first rate but unless you were a Lewis Carroll/Alice in Wonderland afficianado, the story, while clever, was a struggle.

I was all set to love this revisiting of Alice in Wonderland with biographical notes on Lewis Carroll, who I have long been interested in. But, I was very disappointed. For me, the show was slow and boring and I kept looking at my watch, which is not something I usually do during a play. I did really like the set and enjoyed the actor who played Lewis Carroll and the young girl, who did a great job playing Alice. But, the humor often didn't strike me as being too funny and there really was no plot to this play and so there was no added suspense of wondering how it would resolve. It was said to be a musical but I think there were only two or three songs and they were not very memorable. I am an Anglophile and expected to be entranced. The subject is a good one but for me, the play was not very entertaining.
It lasts 90 minutes and I was glad I parked at a two-hour meter for only $3.00 and got in on a one-day Goldstar special so that attending was only 7.50 plus parking.
Sorry, City Lit.

Think the problem was with the script itself. I realize that City Lit is a literary works theater, but the play was dull and tedious. Part of the tediousness could be attributed to Carol's writing and expected absurdness, but I thought the play was going to give more insight to his life. This was only briefly directly addressed, and the play turned out to be yet another recounting of 'Alice in Wonderland' when it was purported to be more of an autobiography account. The actors did as best a job that they could with what was given them. I left wondering what could have been done to tease out some moments a bit better. The set was lovely, but the realism of the set and direction was contradicted by other pantomime, so there was conflict without explanation.

Although the actors, particularly the two male supporting roles, were quite good, the play itself felt flat and unimaginative. It was essentially a straight re-telling of the Alice in Wonderland story, but without most of the fanciful elements that make it special. The fact that the theatre was about 100 degrees with almost no air conditioning did not help!

As always, a very literate and literary production from City Lit...wonderful acting in general, especially Lee Wichman and the fellow who played Lewis Carroll; effective and interesting set; spectacular "fight" choreography; good costumes and lighting.

Because the language is clever, nuanced and full of double/triple entendres; the pacing is fast; and the script is spoken in English dialects, the actors have to make an effort at very precise articulation and enunciation. The one person whose performance was difficult sometimes to understand was the girl playing Alice. It is always difficult to use a child actor, and it seems that she was extremely well-trained. However, if Alice slowed down a bit, that would make her speech more consistently comprehensible. This would be helpful to the audience.

Please note...this was the third preview performance, so all the bugs haven't been worked out. That said, it was pretty wonderful at that!

Saw first preview --- needs work! Playwright writing furiously at the back. Fervently hope he will eliminate the whole pedophile scene -- very uncomfortable, stopped the action, contrary to the program notes and nothing to do with the story. Also would shortne the play which would be helpful. Started out promisingly. Good voices but didnt sing most of the songs -- why not? The madrigal was wonderful. Queen has to tone down her acting -- she tries to dominate the stage but should remember there are other actors there. Dont mean to be harsh -- we've LOVED that theatre when Paige did all the Wodehouse, so arrived with high expectations. Some serious work on this production could help a promising show.