Fantasy in the face of faith-testing adversity is the subject of the new musical “Alice by Heart,” the inaugural production of the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Hell’s Kitchen. So perhaps it’s appropriate that audiences for this thickly layered riff on Lewis Carroll’s much-plundered Wonderland novel, which opened on Tuesday night, should find their own will to make believe so relentlessly challenged.
And no, I don’t mean by such phenomena as a hookah-smoking caterpillar, a pocket-watch-consulting rabbit or a talking cat with a floating grin. Millions of children who grew up during the past 150 years have been able to claim close acquaintance with these anthropomorphic creatures from Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.”
Some young readers may have even been inspired to take as their personal credo the White Queen’s assertion that she was able to believe “six impossible things before breakfast.” And maybe — just maybe — if “Alice by Heart” were seen before breakfast, when the mind is still half-asleep, it might be acceptable as a woozy continuation of a disconnected dream.
Seen in the cold light of a theatergoing evening, however, this production is practically, well, impossible to embrace as a credible work of entertainment. The upside is that MCC’s new space, designed by the architect Andrew Berman, is comfortable and good-looking, well worth a visit in itself.
Conceived by Jessie Nelson (director and co-writer) and the songwriters Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater (Tony Award-winners of “Spring Awakening”) as a magical mystery tour that begins in a London subway-station-turned-bomb shelter during World War II, “Alice by Heart” seems to lose its road map as soon as it begins. (Edward Pierce did the gray-toned, mutable set.) At its center, of course, is a girl named Alice, portrayed with a mellow tone and perplexed expression by Molly Gordon.
In this incarnation, she is named Alice Spencer, and she shares her provisional sanctuary from the Blitz with a host of other dispossessed beings, to whom British accents do not seem to come naturally. They include a debutante, a shellshocked former soldier and an equally addled little boy who keeps rocking himself and chanting, “My mummy’s coming for me today.”
But Alice has eyes only for Alfred Hallam (Colton Ryan), a friend since early childhood, for whom she is now feeling the stirrings of first love. Unfortunately, Alfred has been quarantined because he is dying of tuberculosis. So, Alice urges him to escape with her into Carroll’s novels, which she has committed to memory — hence the show’s title.
Thus our Alice becomes the novels’ Alice (natch), while Alfred turns into the White Rabbit (not so natch). Their transformation is announced in lyrics by Mr. Sater that are typically less than sparkling: “And now we’re down the hole — / And really on a roll.”
The station’s other denizens morph into the usual Wonderland suspects. The tyrannical head nurse (Grace McLean) and stuffy doctor (Andrew Kober) turn into the Queen and King of Hearts, among other menacing things. A young man with Noel Coward-ish wit (Noah Galvin) puts on drag to become a dyspeptic Duchess with indigestion, while a chilled-out gal named Tabatha (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe) is, inevitably, the grinning Cheshire Cat. (The ingeniously homemade-looking costumes are by Paloma Young.)
I think I’ve got that right. The real-world characters are so hastily established and sketchily drawn that there’s nothing compelling or surprising in their metamorphoses. It’s also hard to grasp any necessary relationship between war-warped London in 1941 and the particulars of Wonderland.
Much of this fantasy land isn’t so different from versions of Carroll’s universe imagined by acid-head rock stars and their followers during the 1960s. When Alice is encouraged both to inhale and to join in a threesome by a couple of stoner Caterpillars (Heath Saunders and Ms. Obi-Melekwe), you may expect everyone to start singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”
What we hear instead is called “Chillin’ the Regrets,” a song that blends into most of the others, which suggest the prettier phases of the Beatles’ hallucinogenic period processed in a homogenizing blender. You may also detect echoes of Mr. Sheik’s livelier music for “Spring Awakening,” which had the virtue of being performed with energizing anger rather anodyne wistfulness.
The hazy, dreamy songs of “Alice” feel as if they’ve had the edges sanded off them. The choreography, by Rick and Jeff Kuperman, mostly involves picturesque hand and arm movements, along with cluster movement that reaches its peak when the ensemble becomes a single undulating caterpillar.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” has been subjected to all manner of interpretations — Freudian, Jungian, Marxist — since it was first published in 1865. Some variations on these approaches flicker into being now and then during “Alice by Heart,” with its heroine’s fantastical growth (and shrinkage) spurts used to reflect an adolescent’s confusion about her changing body.
Time is also a central motif in the script and lyrics: how we try to freeze it, bend it, escape from it. An oversized clock hangs over and dominates the set, and it always read 12 minutes past 9.
Of this at least I am sure. I kept looking up to see if its hands had moved.
