Victorian Visual Culture

Even before rereading “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” for this class, I was familiar with the existence of an “Alice’s Adventures”-inspired musical, but this unit gave me an excuse to see what the musical was actually about, and whether it visually embodies the version of “Wonderland” seen in the original story. 

“Wonderland,” formerly titled “Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure,” was on Broadway starting in March of 2011, and was forced to close in May of 2011 after negative reviews and a low box office made them lose millions of dollars.

I believe that what “Wonderland” gets wrong (and the critics agreed) was that revisionist fairy tales must be done with care to preserve the source material they are revising. In the case of “Wonderland,” this is done clumsily by making the character of Alice a single mother and children’s book author who has just moved to Queens, NY, and who falls down her apartment’s elevator shaft into Wonderland. What follows is a musical which combines almost every genre of music imaginable, in a manner that seems less fantastical and more messy.

Frank Wildhorn, the creator of the show’s music, told Playbill:

“If you’re going to go to a place called Wonderland, it’s a phantasmagorical place, so you really can set your own rules, and in fact, if you establish that the rules are going to be a rule of eclecticism, and you’re consistent with that, you can go anywhere from […] classical to boy-band.”

Reviewers interpreted Wildhorn’s vision differently, though, and said that it wasn’t coherent, and that it “sheds no bright or at least interesting 21st-century insights on the Victorian material.” Personally, the problem with the show’s songs is less with the music, and more with the lyrics relying on referencing other musicals, like “Evita” and “Wicked;” it seems over-the-top and unnecessary to be a musical based on a classic children’s book, while simultaneously drawing attention to more modern pieces of work. 

The plot’s connection to the original Alice begins and ends with the characters– almost all of the characters from the original work appear in the musical, although they have been changed in an attempt to be more interesting for the modern audience. As previously mentioned, Alice is now a single mother living in Queens, but the most drastic change is to the character of the Mad Hatter, who is now a “6-foot-tall dominatrix in thigh-high boots,” according to Entertainment Weekly. The musical’s big plot twist is that the Mad Hatter is meant to represent Alice’s dark side, both metaphorically and literally (she is meant to be Alice’s alter-ego, created when Alice never went to Wonderland as a child). To the character’s credit, she does have a rather good villain song (“The Mad Hatter”). 

The inclusion of a character meant to be Lewis Carroll seems to be there simply to serve as an anchor, connecting the source material to this poorly-written musical. However, by making Carroll appear to be a sort of guardian-angel figure to Alice doesn’t make any sense, and gives the real Lewis Carroll far too much credit. 

This musical journey through Wonderland is convoluted and is obviously trying to be as fairytale-esque as possible, while simultaneously mistaking randomness with the nonsensical fantasy seen in the original Wonderland.

https://playbill.com/article/take-me-back-to-mad-hatter-wonderland-with-janet-dacal-as-alice-begins-on-broadway-com177394#:~:text=If%20you%27re%20going%20to,literally%20classical%20to%20boy%2Dband.

http://ticket.heraldtribune.com/2011/04/18/wonderland-stirs-little-praise-on-broadway/

https://ew.com/article/2011/04/25/wonderland-9/