You’ll feel like you’re personally going down a rabbit hole if you attend Alice by Heart this month. The musical, a Minnesota premiere put on by the Emerging Professionals Ensemble, which brings together artists aged 16 to 24, is being staged at PiM Arts High School in Eden Prairie. No matter which direction you drive from, you’ll need to wind your way around Flying Cloud Drive to find your destination: a school building with temporary fencing near the front. When you finally arrive, you’ll find yourself asking, as actor Eli Zimmerman does in the second song: Is this Wonderland?
Yes, Alice by Heart is a take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it’s not like any interpretation you’ve seen before. The framework setting of the musical is a shelter during the London Blitz of 1941, and our two protagonists, childhood friends Alice Spencer and Alfred Hallam, use Carroll’s fantastical story as their own personal shelter of sorts: a place to escape from the war, tragedy, adulthood, and Alfred’s potentially fatal case of tuberculosis. Alice knows the story by heart after reading it countless times with Alfred over the years (thus the title), and she brings it to him once again when he’s lying in a sick bed. Are there some answers for these two waiting down the hole?
I couldn’t believe my luck at getting a chance to revisit Alice by Heart after seeing its Off-Broadway premiere at MCC Theater in 2019. I was originally drawn to the show for its creators: composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist and book writer Steven Sater, who previously collaborated on Spring Awakening, one of my all-time favorite musicals. (For this show, Sater worked on the book in conjunction with Jessie Nelson.) The reason you’ve probably never heard of Alice by Heart, despite its famous authors, is partly because it was skewered by critics in its NYC debut. It never made the jump to Broadway.
But the thing is, major critics have never been the prime audience for Sheik and Sater shows. In his review of Spring Awakening for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote it “does not have the dramatic impact you would hope for” (really?). And when Ben Brantley reviewed Alice for that paper, he wrote the musical was “impossible to embrace as a credible work of entertainment.” Maybe that’s the case for a jaded mid-60s man who gets stuck on the surface level of the show, too focused on the relationship between “war-warped London in 1941 and the particulars of Wonderland.” The thing Brantley failed to grasp is that this isn’t a WWII musical, or an Alice in Wonderland musical. It’s a musical, as Spring Awakening was, about that lightning strike in between childhood and adulthood, where all the love and grief and passion of life is heated until it explodes.
And boy, does this cast and crew deliver — in a whirl of unexpectedly gripping performances, fearless commitment, and endearing imagination. This show isn’t on par with professional Twin Cities productions, much less Off-Broadway theater, in its trappings (it’s performed in a black box venue in a high school, with individual chairs on risers for the audience), but the performers here are able to coax a more important element out of Alice: youthful honesty.
This musical sinks or swims based on who plays Alice, not only because she’s the title character, but because she’s on stage for almost the entirety of the 100-minute show (presented here without an intermission), and Sophie La Fave navigates the emotional, textual, and vocal complexities with aplomb. Her Alice is indefatigable, compared to Zimmerman’s Alfred (and his White Rabbit, when they enter Wonderland), who is her pragmatic counterpart. Together, their many duets, which are peppered throughout, are all highlights of the production, which is helmed by directors Rachel Brady and Rob Thompson, and directing fellow Jack Moorman.
Despite the heavy lifting of the two leads, Alice is a true ensemble piece, and the first standout moment in this production relies on the entire cast. When Alice seeks refuge in Wonderland in an attempt to ease Alfred’s (and her) pain, the Londoners who were in the air-raid shelter return as Carroll’s absurd cast of characters, from the Mad Hatter to the Cheshire Cat to the Queen of Hearts. Alice first gets sidetracked by not one but two Caterpillars, who convince her to get high and leave her troubles behind — and she persuades the White Rabbit to do the same in the song “The Key Is.” At the end of that invigorating number, when the excellent eight-piece band cut off and left La Fave, Zimmerman, and the rest of the cast huddled together in an a cappella crescendo, I was hit with a wave of goosebumps.
From then on I was on the ride with them. There were a few hiccups that go hand-in-hand with a scrappy production like this (a couple sound issues, an ineffective smoke machine), but I was more focused on the parade of remarkable moments.
Aidan Busse delivered a spine-tingling turn as the Jabberwocky in “Brillig Braelig.” Costume designer Katie Kreitzer and set designer Devin Hueffed both offered their own small miracles in this low-budget production, but their creative efforts are fully realized in “Your Shell of Grief,” where Alice is encouraged to wallow in heartbreak by Mock Turtles — the frankly insane song is rounded out by a cast that gives it their all. And then there’s Marie F. Peterson as the Cheshire Cat, who sings with a confident clarity for a time, and then brings the house down. People sitting around me whispered “Wow” when it was time for her solo “Some Things Fall Away.”
If you’re still not quite sure what Alice by Heart is about at this point, that’s okay. I was less concerned about explaining the plot than explaining to you that, while there are other better-known productions happening in the Twin Cities this summer, put on by professional companies instead of one full of emerging professionals, this is one you’ll regret missing. You’ve got one weekend left, so buy a ticket, take a chance, and even if you are a jaded adult in your mid-60s, go in with an open mind and fond memories of being in that lightning bolt of life.
Alice by Heart
Emerging Professionals Ensemble
PiM Arts High School
7255 Flying Cloud Drive
Eden Prairie, MN 55344
July 18 – 27, 2024
Buy tickets here
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