BroadwayReviewThe Robert W Wilson MCC Theater Space, New York
Creators of Spring Awakening have made a well-intentioned yet misjudged attempt to combine Lewis Carroll’s tale with a second world war romance
Bombs are falling through the air, splintering the darkness of the London night while children cower in a tube shelter, deep underground. But bombs can fall inside, too, like Alice by Heart, an extravagantly well-intentioned and hopelessly inert new musical at MCC. Written by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, the creators of Spring Awakening, with direction and a co-writing by Waitress’s Jessie Nelson, this is a musical through the looking glass, in love with its own reflection.
It is 1941, and a teenage girl named Alice Spencer (Molly Gordon) uses the Lewis Carroll stories to escape the horrors of the Blitz. During one curiously terrible evening, her best friend Alfred (Colton Ryan) is diagnosed with incurable tuberculosis and a Red Cross nurse rips apart her books. (Red Cross nurses, the worst, right?) Alice, who has learned the stories by heart, retreats into her fantasy world, dragging the dying Alfred with her.
The Alice stories are pretty well dog-eared when it comes to popular culture. Once you’ve inspired both a top-grossing pornographic comedy and a popular Disneyland ride, you know you’ve arrived. That doesn’t mean they can’t inspire the occasional new musical. And inspiration isn’t the trouble here. Alice by Heart lacks the hard graft of creating fully realized characters and a recognizable world.
Sheik’s score gifts Alice a nicely mournful opening song, West of Words, but it doesn’t really suggest who she is or where she is or what her life is like. About Alfred we know even less, though as he’s coughing up gouts of blood, it’s probably best not to get attached. The establishing scenes inside the shelter are wildly overwritten and already topsy-turvy, too full of Carroll-like word play and weird jokes to really establish anything. A few rhymed couplets and Spam jokes later and Alice is off into Wonderland, courtesy of Sater’s less than inspired lyrics: “And now we’re down the hole / And really on a roll.” Every barely introduced shelter character has a Carroll analog. The nurse transforms into the Red Queen, a shellshocked soldier is the Mad Hatter. Alfred becomes the watch-toting White Rabbit, his life tick-tick-ticking away.
As Alice, Gordon is oddly bland. Her voice blends sweetly, but it’s underpowered and her British accent, shaky at the best of times, collapses every time she sings. Ryan has the richer voice, but even less of a character to inhabit. Most of the other roles are overplayed, blown up to make them feel fuller. The staging at least is fluid and the choreography, by Rick and Jeff Kuperman, often inventive. Sheik’s score, ballad after ballad, doesn’t lack for prettiness and there are occasional touches of wit in the orchestrations, like a steel drum solo. But it often sounds like a pallid echo of Spring Awakening. Purple Summer ended that show; Winter Blooms, with its those you love still walk behind you message, finishes this one.
The creators have assumed a comprehensive familiarity with the Alice stories. Expertise will decode some of the scenes, but it won’t really deepen or repair the musical. Any narrative propulsion bogs down during set pieces – the lobster dance, the Jabberwocky – and the psychologizing won’t quit. Hours in the rehearsal room must have been devoted to What It All Means – innocence, experience, trauma, sexual awakening. But without a strong sense of who this Alice is and was and will be, her journey goes nowhere. It doesn’t mean much. This is no Wonderland.
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