Word: wonderlands
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There is no drug quite so powerful as the human imagination-and Lewis Carroll took quite a heady draught before he followed Alice down the rabbit hole. A group of off-Broadway players under the direction of Andre Gregory have now dramatized Alice in Wonderland, and the trip that results is an exciting, absorbing, vertiginous descent into a laughing hell...
Words are at the childlike core of Alice in Wonderland, and it is heartening that they have been honored in this production. Words are a child's grandest toy. They are also his first mystery. Even before he understands them, he puts them together and takes them apart. He pops pieces of them into his mouth, and spits them out in odd shapes. It is a profound form of play, for it is the only tool a child is given with which to comprehend a world in which he coexists without really belonging -the world of adults...
Located on the site of a former resort hotel in northern New Hampshire, Franconia is spiritually somewhere between Alice's Restaurant and Alice in Wonderland. The place abounds with tutorials and individual projects. Freed from formal departments and competition for tenure (there is none), teachers shape their courses to their own interests and those of their students. Results have been mixed. Courses range from imaginative interdisciplinary projects to haphazard bull sessions. Some students, who seemed unable to learn anything at conventional colleges, have blossomed at Franconia. Others have found license as unsatisfying as control...
Wyman Pendleton contributes a deft cameo as a lawyer who revels in hair-splitting; similarly with the paunchy Cockney sergeant of John Tillinger. Joseph Maher gets considerable mileage out of Major Swindon, who-echoing the Queen of Hearts' exclamation in Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first-verdict afterwards"-proclaims, "We have arranged [the hanging] for 12 o'clock. Nothing remains to be done except to try him." At one point Shaw has him say, "You insolent-," breaking off after the adjective. Here Maher provides the noun "bastard"-which Shaw likely had in mind but could not have got by the stage...
SPRING has come, and with it, Boston's vernal rite of music. Each evening from April through June, the marble pilasters of Symphony Hall are transformed into the foundations of a plastic Lawrence Welk wonderland by the magic baton of Arthur Fiedler, as thousands of faithful look...