Playwright: Adapted by David Catlin from the works of Lewis Carroll
At: The Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan
Phone: ( 312 ) 337-0665, $20-$58.
Runs through: Aug. 12
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Deep in the heart of Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty's cataclysmic plummet into thin air becomes a tragically hilarious reminder of the clumsy foolishness with which we mere mortals bumble through life. In Lookingglass Alice, the doomed egg's mighty downfall is also gasp-inducing, an eye-popping stunt of great and splattering implications, both physical and metaphorical.
So it goes in the turvy-topsy, ever-transcendent land of Daivd Catlin's wild and wonderful adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Lookingglass. Also directing the piece for the Lookingglass Theatre, Catlin creates a place where slapstick meets aerial ballet meets metaphysics meets the grandly vexing existential conundrums of life in the millennium that could be our last. Here, garrulous caterpillars and melancholic ova wax philosophic in jabberwockese while oversized hedgehogs shriek at croquet and giantesses set sail in umbrellas through tempests of tears.
Alice begins with a quiestish, sing-song prelude that abruptly gives way to a literally ( and momentarily ) blinding dazzle as the audience is transported through the mirror to a not-so invisible world. Cue the White Rabbit. He's running late in this merry kaleidoscope, but that's all right. Time on the other side of the lookingglass bends like silly putty in the hands of Salvador Dali. So does language, as Carroll's brillig and slithy wordfoolery leaps to life in all of its not-so madness.
As Alice, Lauren Hirte reprises the role she created when Lookingglass Alice debuted in 2005. She's extraordinary, projecting the luminous innocence and wonder of a seven-year-old in a role that demands the physical strength and athletic agility of an elite level gymnast.
The cast of five feels like 25, as Alice encounters the a pantheon of fantastical creatures including a fantastically nattering Mad Hatter ( Kevin Douglas ) , an accordion-playing White Knight ( Larry DiStasi ) , the apoplectically ferocious Red Queen ( Jesse J. Perez ) and a Cheshire Cat ( Anthony Fleming III ) who is, quite simply, the coolest dude on stage anywhere right now. Anywhere.
Wondrously, the simple, heroic heart of Alice never gets lost in all of the production's truly breathtaking displays of circus artistry and ingenious choreography. It is important, one of the denizens of Wonderland stresses without fanfair, to believe in at least six impossible things every morning before breakfast. And so it is.