Explore ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ like you have never seen it before as you journey down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass with the Savannah Children’s Theatre and this Collective Face Theatre Ensemble in this newly conceived production.
“I decided from the beginning that we were going to divide the story. I was not happy with a lot of the adaptations of Alice, and we wanted to make our own Alice. We took the original writings by Lewis Carroll and literally took the book and said here’s your script,” said David I.L. Poole the director of the show and founder of Collective Face.
In this show the cast was involved from the very beginning with building this version of Alice and the script.
“We were able to build this play from nothing. It’s an interesting process for actors that they get to be at the ground roots of something at the very beginning. They own this text as much as I do,” said Poole.
They used some of the dialogue that was written by Charles Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, to create this world that features music, dance, songs, and acrobatics for all ages.
“It’s spectacular. Mary Edwards composed some original underscoring. There are songs in it that were composed in the 1920s, and so we’ve used that music to form our play as well,” said Poole.
The show will be told in two acts. Act one being ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and act two being ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ giving the audience a full scope of Alice adventures in wonderland with the cast of about 25 playing multiple roles.
“There was a lot we talked a lot about when looking at Alice. Alice as a child and Alice growing up. This play is about growing up and becoming especially act two, through the Looking Glass is a book about hitting adulthood,” said Poole.
Using viewpoint exercises in rehearsals helped the cast and Poole build scenes for this show as they broke down chapters in the book and interpreted them into this play.
Poole is a master at production design. Rather it is elaborate or simply Poole’s sets and designs leave audiences wowed and the sets are just as much a part of the story as the cast and crew are.
“For this show I looked at hedge Gardens mazes, the hedge mazes that are predominantly in Europe,” said Poole when talking about his influences for the designs. “We get this sense of wonderment, lush greenness. That’s what I was constantly thinking about with this hedge maze. You go in and you get lost in all the spectacle and all of that and the opulence”
This aspect and others of the shows production design was inspired by ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ preface poem called ‘All in the Golden Afternoon. For this show Poole did not keep things minimum.
“We went to the maximum. The set is comparison of hedge walls to give us a maze that constantly move and shift and change, to reveal things, to have doors on them, even though they’re hedge walls,” said Poole.
The audience will be immersed as soon as they walk through the door transforming the experience the audience will have right away.
“We’re trying to give it a bit of an immersive experience. It’s about experiences of lifetimes for me. How does our Alice behave differently than anyone else’s Alice? How is it different? How is it experienced for people that are coming? This is not Walt Disney’s Alice by any means.,” said Poole.
The last show dates are Nov.19 and 20. For more information, visit SavannahChildrenstheatre.org
