Oddball Alice at the Citadel

There’s a delightful moment during Alice Through the Looking-Glass when an audience member is invited to pull a golden tasseled cord. Immediately hundreds of jellybean packets attached to teensy parachutes rain onto a surprised crowd.

Everyone was caught off-guard. This production of Alice which opened at the Citadel Theatre last Thursday is filled with a fast visual pace that at times it was difficult to keep up with it.

Bretta Gerecke’s set and costume designs, a bold palette of shapes and colours, perfectly sets the mood for this off-kilter world where trees grow on bicycles, flowers talk, oysters dance and nonsense arithmetic rules.

The late and much esteemed James Reaney wrote the script based on Lewis Carroll’s story of a girl named Alice who travels through a looking glass. Once through the looking-glass portal, and that’s a pretty nifty visual effect, she discovers a mirror-image world on the other side.

In this alternate world where everything is turned upside down, inside out, there are many charming male Alices in drag that are her opposite. Alice is a blonde wearing a white dress dotted with blue and her counterparts wear black wigs and dark blue dresses dotted with white.

Our protagonist’s biggest desire is to be crowned a queen and to do so, Alice must plow through the life-size chessboard covering the entire stage. Each square is a challenge she must overcome with a parade of non-stop magical characters.

In this visual feast of physical comedy, you will relish Jan Alexandra Smith’s haughty Red Queen as she sweeps across the stage barreling over anyone in her path. Or Beth Graham’s more timid White Queen who imbues motherly warmth the Red Queen can never muster.

The rotund Tweedledee (Scott Walters) and Tweedledum (Jesse Gervais) bump stomachs and roll around the stage much to the delight of squealing children’s laughter.

The energetic Lion (Matt Alden) and the Unicorn (Richard Lee Hsi), two animals on the British Royal Coat of Arms, duke it out in a boxing ring with a series of carefully calibrated ninja moves.

John Ullyatt is impressive as Humpty, the curmudgeon egg sitting high atop his wall. With amazingly long arms manipulated by puppeteers and a sour attitude, the thin-skinned egg lectures Alice about the difference between a cravat and a belt.

As Humpty is rolled off stage, we hear a big bang, crash, and splat and the broken egg is tossed on stage. An army of Alices rushes to scoop the liquid into frying pans.

One of the most endearing characters is Sheldon Elter’s White Knight, a golden-curled bumbler with a heart in the right place. He is one of those characters that does everything wrong and comes out of on the winning side, a direct testament to Elter’s comic skills.

Ellie Heath as Alice projects sweetness blended with childish petulance. But Heath’s 20-something age made it difficult to believe her Alice is just a 10-year-old child.

Some of the performances worked. Others didn’t. But if you found something boring, all you had to do was wait five minutes and the scene changed.

All-in-all Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a fun family show with some incredible production elements.