Lots of Smarts from A Noise Within’s “Alice in Wonderland”

“Alice in Wonderland” at A Noise Within (Photo – Craig Schwartz)

The next step in local theater productions is everywhere this spring – online, filmed performances.

By Melanie Hooks

Pasadena’s A Noise Within Repertory Spring Season is wrapping up with two productions, both adaptations of beloved literature, Homer’s The Iliad and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Both feature their strong regular Resident Artists; each face a welcome return for their season ticket holders. The company has also filmed a generous amount of additional content such as backgrounds on each performance and interviews with these artists and others, all free at anoisewithin.org.

Alice opens this weekend with performances from now through June 20^th, and notably, carries a new kind of theater credit: Director of Photography. Andressa Cordeiro has tackled the unenviable job of transforming a live theater experience to our laptops and streaming home screens. By and large she has made the shift feel as theatrical as possible. In so many cases before the Terrible Times, ‘theatrical’ filming meant ‘static,’ ‘boring,’ and ‘flat.’

Cordeiro, working with Director Stephanie Shroyer and company cofounder Julia Rodriguez-Elliot, manages enough close-ups and cuts between characters to keep the eye reasonably engaged, getting stronger toward the end of the play. This is a double challenge after a long year of patrons watching films and television at home, content designed to be viewed on a screen. Shroyer and her cast however still preserve a great deal of traditional theater staging, which can mean long periods of two or three people standing/sitting and talking. It’s an imperfect marriage in the best of cases, but this feels like the best possible solution to the hybrid problem before the company welcomes patrons back inside this fall.

Julanne Chidi Hill, Erika Soto, and Susan Angelo (Photo – Craig Schwartz)

Erika Soto carries the torch as the befuddled but committed-to-working-through-it Alice. Fans of the book will likely appreciate this particular adaptation from the mid-20^th century by Eva La Gallienne and Florida Freibus, which centers dialogue straight from Caroll’s story. However, the theater’s own study guide for the play points out that this isn’t the fanciful Disney-type version geared toward children. It’s very much a commentary on a child’s fantasy by “an adult mathematician on a holiday” as La Gallienne writes.

While we do get the treat of Jeremy Rabb as the White Rabbit, delightfully fidgety, it’s a sparse under-utilization compared to most, more familiar adaptations. The play feels more like a series of stories connected only by Alice, not a wonky-style narrative culminating in a battle with the Queen of Hearts. The gender-crossed casting of Justin Lawrence Barnes as that queen, along with Susan Angelo as the King, ends up giving more authority to Angelo, whose authoritative presence can’t be ignored despite the shrill shouts of Barnes’s demanding Queen.

Genders are fluid in fact throughout the staging, most of which work well to keep the fantastical feeling. Clever costuming by Angela Balogh-Calin with wigs and makeup by Shannon Hutchins certainly create some wonderfully out-there illusions that Carroll would have appreciated. The original music by Josh Grondin is delightful but seems too scarcely scattered.

Susan Angelo and Justin Lawrence Barnes (Photo – Craig Schwartz)

The company is solid throughout, with individual actors playing multiple characters. There are some particularly fun moments from Kasey Mahaffy as the March Hare, Tweedle Dum & the Gryphon, who always has good synergy onstage with frequent scene partner Rafael Goldstein as Mad Hatter, Tweedle Dee & Caterpillar.

Resident Artist Bert Emmett manages to bring some of the only real pathos of the piece with unassuming and lovely performances, especially as the White Knight.  Susan Angelo as the White Queen also gets to have a few such moments, as both characters express their own confusions, while Julanne Chidi Hill as Red Queen, Cheshire Cat & Humpty Dumpty commands the stage each time with Carroll’s brand of nonsense-firmly-in-charge.

It’s a very clever and well-done Alice. It’s important because of how it’s being done to keep theater alive until we can get back indoors safely together. It can’t claim much whimsy or light-heartedness, but perhaps an adult’s view of a child’s world never really can.

Alice in Wonderland cast (Photo – Craig Schwartz)