Through a Glass in Pitch-Darkness

By T. E. Kalem

ALICE IN CONCERT A musical by Elizabeth Swados

This is a tale of two ladies. One of them (Meryl Streep) is very, very good, and the other (Elizabeth Swados) is very nearly horrid. Her work, that is. For a woman who has acquired an exaggerated reputation as a composer, Swados displays an anemic talent for making anything remotely resembling good music. For someone who is 29, she is strangely fixated on the '60s. Her songs, both for Alice in Concert and her previous show Runaways, a short-lived paean to urchin street vandals, sound, at their very best, like numbers that the composers of Hair threw in the wastebasket.

If a "truth in packaging" law applied in the theater, Lewis Carroll's name would have to be removed from the label. A footnote in the program asserts that the show is based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. This is rather like claiming that a bag lady's remnants constitute haute couture.

Sometimes the reworking of a classic can produce ironic historic resonances, as in Jean Giraudoux's sophisticated reshaping of the Greek myths. At other times, sloppy, inane, incongruous desecration masquerades as creative reincarnation, and the people involved spout rubbish about "making the work speak to our own time." In the present instance, Joseph Papp, who took over as director from Andrei Serban and at whose off-Broadway Public Theater Alice in Concert is being presented, reveals no guiding wisdom or purpose.

Neither he nor Swados has the foggiest notion of Carroll's substance or sensibility. The Alice books are funny. This show is frowningly earnest. Wit requires a surrounding quiet in order to be heard. This show is noisy, bustling, full of motion but lacking in any discernible destination. Carroll was a master of wordplay. In this "adaptation," whatever words survive from the original are drowned in the nondescript tunes. Above all, Carroll saw the adult world through a child's eyes, that is, as a theater of the absurd. The logic of that world is seen as illogic by a child, and its arbitrary punishments are edged with psychological menace. This production contains no hint of these elements (they were rewardingly incorporated in Andre Gregory's brilliantly intuitive off-Broadway re-creation of ten years ago).

Even Streep, whose lustrous presence and finely pitched acting skills provide the only reasons for purchasing a ticket, is not cast with total precision. Carroll had a predilection for small girls. Streep is so far from being petite that she might have intimidated that slight figure of a man. However, the radiant tightness of her features, her gestures, her bearing and her voice leads us into the vernal garden of childhood and the willing sus pension of disbelief. She turns two scenes into acting marvels. In one she mimics Humpty Dumpty about to fall off the wall but retaining full possession of a frog-horned comic baritone voice, and in the other she conducts the dialogue between Alice and the White Queen, taking both parts in a way that would have enchanted Oscar Wilde. Why isn't she performing Wilde, or Congreve or Shakespeare or Shaw, instead of gracing this cacophonous chicken coop of a musical?

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