As Autumn greets us with the Fall leaves and cold breezes, we approach another enchanting Fall play production from our wonderful theater department. This year you are invited to take a trip down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland!
Alice in Wonderland actors taking a bow. Photo by Roman Trovato
The story of Alice in Wonderland is not one that can be understood with ease. On the outside, it is a very episodic adventure full of eccentric and surreal characters that find themselves in zany and certainly questionable situations. On the inside, however, it not only tells the story of a young girl who is simply trying to get back home, but also one that shows Alice change throughout this experience from being a very refined and polite person to someone who is no longer fazed by the seemingly hallucinatory reality she found herself in.
Wonderland is a very visually demanding place. From enchanting mushroom forests to a royal courtroom, this play has proven to be a technical challenge for both the stagecraft team and the stage crew. Depending on the height, a single mushroom could take a week between building the foundation, wrapping it in chicken wire and paper mache and then finally painting it. Behind this 26 mushroom forest are five 10 foot walls that have two sides, on one side there are several smaller mushrooms attached to the wall and on the other there is a black and white checker pattern that matches the massive chessboard scene as shown in the picture above. As the stagecraft crew was in the midst of creating these beautiful and lucid sets they had to keep in mind how one set could be transformed into the next. With so many individual mushrooms to manage in front of several massive walls, these sets (opposed to a singular structure) had transitions that required much coordination and speed to get through.“The primary difficulty is that there is a lot more to manage backstage with the movement of these mushrooms during the show” said theater director Mrs. Saleh.
But it has been well worth it, the hard work that both the cast and crew has put into this set is shown in its beauty and craftsmanship. At the end of the day, the production of Alice and Wonderland is well made, with some great effects.
The assembly of the chessboard scene. Photo by Roman Trovato
