In Wonderland gives Lewis Carroll classics a fresh spin with vaudeville
Anna Cummer’s whimsical family-centric play unfolds like a variety show
In Wonderland. Photo by Ben Laird
Gateway Theatre presents In Wonderland by Anna Cummer, produced by Alberta Theatre Projects, and based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass from April 7 to 16. April 7 is a Pay What You Will Preview. Opening is April 8.
ANNA CUMMER TOOK on a dare a few years ago that lit a brand-new creative spark. An actor by trade, the Alberta-based artist noticed that opportunities were beginning to dwindle around the time she turned 40. Her husband suggested she give writing a go—or rather challenged her with a commission for an adaptation of a ghost story for his own theatre work.
“It got produced, and it was very, very exciting,” Cummer says on the line from Calgary in an interview with Stir. “I discovered I had a bit of a penchant for this and that I really like adapting literature into plays.”
In June 2021, Cummer got a call from Haysam Kadri of Alberta Theatre Projects, who was seeking a new work for that same year’s holiday season, the company still operating under all the uncertainties of COVID. That gave her eight weeks to come up with an idea and write a script. In Wonderland is the result, a vaudevillian romp based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for just three actors (who play 14 characters) that the Calgary Herald called “wonderful and wondrous”.
Cummer turned to the brilliance of Carroll after insisting that her elementary-school-aged kids carve out some time away from their screens during the long days of the pandemic. They began reading classic children’s literature together. “My daughter in particular was especially intrigued by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the playwright says.
At the time, Cummer had just come off a five-month stint doing puppetry for the reboot of Fraggle Rock. She wanted to incorporate the playful form into the show but still wasn’t quite sure how to package the whole thing, given the constraints of such a small cast amid the colour and craziness the script called for. She alighted upon vaudeville and everything fell into place, with In Wonderland taking on the form of a kind of variety show with so many little vignettes. “I was fascinated as I started to research vaudeville,” she says. “A show would open with a poem then there would be another scene with two women doing some kind of trick then a musical number then a magic show then straight theatre scenes by the stars of the day,” she says. “As I started going through the plot of Alice in Wonderland, I thought, ‘This is the way we can tell the story.’ It’s fast-paced; it’s not a classic iteration of Alice in Wonderland—but it sure is fun. There are all these layers of the onion that get peeled away.”
Those layers also feature music (including some from the Big Band era), magic, projections, illusions, and slapstick; put them all together and things get curiouser and curiouser once Alice goes down the rabbit hole.
In Wonderland. Photo by Ben Laird
Directed by Kadri, In Wonderland is a family-centric show geared to children aged six and up starring Sarah Roa, Natascha Girgis (Nine Dragons) and Graham Percy. The lead character is not the passive person portrayed in the novel. “We wanted to give her more agency,” Cummer says. “I wanted her to have a transformation from the beginning, so it's really kind of a coming-of-age story now. I think that resonated with my daughter, the idea of this young girl on the verge of adulthood who has difficulties interacting with adults and understanding the social constructs and social norms who’s thrown into this topsy-turvy whimsical world where she can play, test the boundaries of childhood and by the end she matures and understands or has a better idea of her place in the world her ability to affect change. There’s a bit of modernization that happened.”
Cummer describes the show’s overall feel as bright, beautiful, and whimsical. “It's quite delicious,” she says. “I think Lewis Carroll would approve.”
For more information, see Gateway Theatre.
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