Playwrights: Martin Wesley-Smith, Peter Wesley-Smith. At: Caffeine Theatre & Chicago Opera Vanguard, Storefront Theater, 78 E. Washington. Tickets: 312-742-8497; www.dcatheater.org; $25. Runs through: Dec. 19
Boojum! Nonsense, Truth and Lewis Carroll should please fans of theatrical music and fans of Lewis Carroll. However, unless you're a fan of both equally, the US premiere of this operetta may leave you in its dust. It "takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" as Carroll wrote in Through the Looking-Glass.
Boojum! introduces Charles Lutwidge Dodgson-—Anglican deacon, Oxford University mathematics lecturer, logician, pioneering photographer—and his nom de plume creation, Lewis Carroll ( from the Latin for Lutwidge and Charles ) , the witty and successful author of Alice In Wonderland and other fantasy fiction. Dodgson often was uncomfortable with Lewis Carroll's renown, a fact known to Dodgson's friends within his lifetime ( 1832-1898 ) . Boojum! serves up the Dodgson-Carroll conflict through a musical retelling of "The Hunting of the Snark," Carroll's 1876 mock-epic poem. Other Carroll material also is appropriated, such as sparring identical twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who stand in for Dodgson and Carroll. Alice Lidell is present, too, as the young girl immortalized by Carroll and the adult woman in whom Dodgson had no interest.
Boojum! is almost entirely sung, and the music is quite wonderful, a richly melodic tapestry of solo and ensemble pieces encompassing opera, doo-wop, ragtime, Gilbert & Sullivan and close-harmony vocals among other styles. The lyrics frequently are Lewis Carroll's own words, but where they are not you cannot tell, so skillfully has lyricist Peter Wesley-Smith mirrored his source in what is, in effect, a musical Rorschach test of Snark and its author.
But understanding the words of sung music is a sometimes thing, even at its best, and the text for Boojum!—based on Carroll's writing—is very dense indeed. Anyone can be amused by a Carroll work, but only serious students pick up all the puns, plays-on-words, epigrams, acrostics and debts to chess, logic and mathematics incorporated within them. Also, The Hunting of the Snark is far less familiar to most than Carroll's Wonderland and Looking-Glass books, which means Boojum! audiences may not comprehend the pertinence of many details. You'd do well to give Snark a read before seeing Boojum!, unless you're content with the music alone.
The company for Boojum! is outstanding: tenor Alex Balestrieri ( Dodgson ) , baritone Jeremy Trager ( Carroll ) , bass Michael Reyes ( Bellman ) , and sopranos Marielle de Rocca-Serra ( Young Alice ) and Heather Townsend ( older Alice ) carry the most weight in the 10 member cast, but all contribute to the effectiveness of the piece, staged as an ever-changing series of tableaux by Jimmy McDermott and choreographer Natalja Aicardi. Top honors to co-musical directors Myron Silberstein and Audra Velis Simon ( who conducts and plays piano ) , and to Philip Dawkins's creative found costumes.
FYI: Boojum! is intended for adults.
