Robert Wilson's 1992 Avantgarde-Musical or Kunstmusical is based on the Carroll-Myth. It's following most of the plot points we know from both Wonderland and Looking Glass. In between scenes and serving as the skeleton of the story, are moments of the life of Charles Dodgson. We see him writing letters, taking pictures and he is even following Alice as the White Rabbit and the White Knight; the Rabbit being an almost aggressive, haunting creature, the Knight a kind, tormented soul that is trying to save Alice. The music by Tom Waits is not directly connected to the stories; instead telling stories that can be associated with what is happening on stage. For example "Table Top Joe", a song about a young guy being born without limbs; sung by the Caterpillar.
“Alice is adult songs for children, or children’s songs for adults. It’s a maelstrom or fever-dream, a tone-poem, with torch songs and waltzes... an odyssey in dream and nonsense.”
“Once again it is mother’s fault: whenever her son did not want to go to sleep, she would read him ‘Alice in Wonderland’; and the images of this tale, in which a girl tumbles through a hole in the ground into a phantastic world, are still ‘etched’ in Robert Wilson’s mind, he says. At Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, he dug them up and arranged them into ‘Alice,’ a stern tale for adults. In it, Wilson ... tells two stories: one about Alice and one about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). Dodgson, an inhibited and speech-impaired clergyman and mathematician at Christ Church College in Oxford, felt most comfortable in the company of children. His darling was Alice Liddell, the dean’s little daughter. It was for her that - under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll - he invented the phantastic stories of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ ... In two acts, Bob Wilson (trademark: a style of provocative theatrical slowness) and his writer Paul Schmidt connect Dodgson’s erotic life drama with his famous fairy-tale myths. The show suggests that Dodgson wrote his books only in order to make his sexual object, Alice Liddell, rely on him.”
More pictures after the jump break!
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