Theater Review: Wonderland is silly, dazzling, joyous

eight levels of reality is enough.

As most everyone knows, Wonderland is a project of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center – in the midst of its renaming as the Straz Center for the Performing Arts – and is headed to Broadway if all goes well during its cross-country tryouts. At this point, I would say: most is going well. We begin with Alice Cornwinkle as a successful, neglectful best-selling author whose husband Jack is about to divorce her, and whose daughter Chloe is feeling increasingly forgotten. Finally, Chloe can take it no more: she decides to “go down the rabbit hole,” and makes it clear to her mother that the only way to find her is to “become queen” – an unexplained goal which can only be attained if Alice “wins the game,” gets to a mysterious “eighth square” and passes through “the eighth door.” With her daughter’s fate hanging in the balance, Alice gives chase. She goes through door number one – into an apparently innocent elevator – and in one of the show’s many visual feats, she hurtles down through so many strata of reality, we can’t be sure that when she finishes, she’s still in the Milky Way.

In fact, she’s not: she’s somewhere much more vivid and absurd, where men and women both wear bright blue and white dresses, and where the Company sings the marvelous anthem “Welcome to Wonderland.” A short stay, and then she’s through door number two – where she meets a singing caterpillar (Tommar Wilson), several more exotic and colorful creatures, and is hastened toward door number three – you get the idea. Among the oddities she encounters as she continues her search for the elusive Chloe: a Hispanic cat called El Gato (the very funny Jose Llana), the aforementioned White Rabbit, with his backward-running clock, the stupendously narcissistic Queen of Hearts, and, looking like an evil Deborah Harry, the blonde and vicious Mad Hatter (Nikki Snelson). There’s also a White Knight (Darren Ritchie) who looks curiously like husband Jack, and the murderous, merciless Jabberwock (Tad Wilson, full of angst), a creature of the Looking-Glass World, where creative people – dreamers, artists, children – are kept in shackles and beheaded. Will Alice ever figure how to get to the eighth door and beloved Chloe? Will Lewis Carroll’s (cameo appearance) words of advice (the lovely song “I Am My Own Invention”) and Alice’s own prowess in woman-to-woman combat (that Mad Hatter is bad) prove enough to get our heroine to and through the eighth door? And what lies behind it?

Now, there are a few other  flaws in Wonderland beyond its intellectual absences. For one thing, Alice’s impulse to dance happily during the “Go With The Flow” section of act one is psychologically nonsensical, and two sentimental songs in a row during a pivotal stretch of Act II – “Love Begins” and “Home” – slow the musical down too noticeably. Finally, the show’s moral lesson – about parenthood and partnership – is, for all its truth, trite. But these are forgivable defects, and ranged against the superb singing of the whole cast, Susan Hilferty’s brilliant costumes and Neil Patel’s surprising sets, they don’t stop the show from pleasing. This is more fun than a carnival.[dataBox]

Will it make it on Broadway? I can’t guess. Nor can anyone.

But the Tampa Bay area just got lucky. This one’s worth your attention.