Tickets-Entertainment

Item Description

The Alice-in-Wonderland Follies opens in 1915 at The Palace Theater in New York in the electric atmosphere of a vaudeville extravaganza celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s literary classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With rapid-fire staging and droll humor, Alice’s fantasies unfold in music halls reminiscent of the crowd-pleasing effervescence of headliners such as Joe Weber and Lew Fields, Lillian Russell, Helen Hayes, Eddie Foy, Vernon Castile, Fay Templeton and Marie Dresler – the perfect time-travel cast.

Springing to life are a host of favorite scenes and characters: Alice and the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, the Cheshire Car, the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Cook and the Baby of “Pig and Pepper” fame; the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Tweedledum and Tweedledee; the Cards, Flamingos and Hedgehogs from the Queen’s Croquet-Ground; The Jabberwocky poem and the triumphant crowning of Queen Alice. Whimsy and charm overflow from each vignette.

The music is a confection of high-brow and low-brow art styles prevalent in vaudeville housed across the country at the turn of 20th century – ragtime, waltzes, classical composers interpretations of popular forms, sentimental favorites, opera standards, dance hall classics, czardas and foot-tapping marches. The dance vocabulary is a melting pot dessert of the American vernacular – burlesque “song and dance”, African juba and Irish step dancing, ballroom, toe-tap, slapstick physical comedy, minstrel strutting, eccentric dancing and acrobatics – all finessed with a froth of classical pointe dancing.

John Tenniel’s original illustrations inspire the stage set based on over-sized children’s toy’s – a doll house, toy trees, and alphabet blocks. Rearrangements and transformations underscore the fancy of Alice’s peripatetic propensity for changes in size. And who can resist a derby hat with white rabbit ears, a Cheshire Cat with a 50-foot tail and an exploding tea table with characters in tea-cup hats?

In other words, in the hyperbolic lunacy of Weber and Fields, “What a jumble of jollification!”

Item Special Note

Tickets for February 12 showing.  Either 11 AM or 1 PM will work out with winner.