POV and Inspiration

Central to our interpretation of Alice by Heart (ABH) is that our Wonderland only exists insofar as Alice imagines it to, and the characters inside of it only insofar as Alice projects the personas onto their real life counterparts. Thus, while Alice’s Wonderland is a means of escaping the grimness of reality, ultimately, it is only something that exists as layered on top of the real world. Because this world can only exist when Alice believes it to, a critical moment in this rendition happens in Chillin’ the Regrets, when her getting high enables her to more easily escape reality. Over the course of the show, Alice’s immersion deepens and only in moments where the wellbeing of people embodying these characters are threatened is she brought back to reality. 

This interpretation allows for moments where the real world resurfaces when sounds of bombs or sirens, which threaten the wellbeing of the entire cast, are heard, temporarily breaking the illusion. What finally completely breaks the Wonderland Alice creates is when Arthur, for whom she had initially created Wonderland to delay the loss of, dies. Even in escaping to the world of a timeless tale, she falls short in escaping time itself. In spite of this, as the musical ends, she remains grateful for the time she got to spend in her story with Alfred, knowing that it had to come to an end eventually. 

For the sake of lighting, there exist four general worlds: 1) the world before the war started, 2) the world now, reality, in the bunker, 3) Wonderland, and 4) in between reality and Wonderland. While the atmosphere of worlds 1 and 2 will remain largely static, the aesthetics of world 3 and 4 will shift depending on the context, as Alice’s emotion generally dictates the states of those worlds. The director and I want audiences to be immersed in the world from the beginning to end, and so they will enter with lighting tonally similar to W2, and exit in W3.

The color I play with most is blue, as its arc will follow that of Alice’s: appearing first when she smokes the hookah, it initially represents a highness on life; a state of euphoria. In Shell of Grief, it transforms into the fall from this high; a state of helplessness. In Afternoon, it is the color that Alfred walks towards as he dies; a state of grief. In Winter Blooms, it floods the bunker encouraging Alice to thrive in spite of the loss of Alfred; a state of hope. In this development, I link Alice’s personal journey to the presence of blue, thus grounding our aesthetics in the happenings of the world.