Alice: Press Reviews # 3

Remember Sally Ann Triplett, the pretty half of Britain's ghastly 1982 Eurovision Song Contest entry Bardo?  Well she's resurfaced in Leeds playing the title role in the new musical Alice, based on Alice in Wonderland, which has received rave reviews.

Music is by Genesis founder member Anthony Phillips.  He is now looking for West End backing for the show, which features Alice living in the computer world and encountering characters like a beatnik and the madame of a bordello.

The whole thing only cost £50,000 to stage, making Andrew Lloyd Webber's new £1,400,000 extravaganza Starlight Express seem rather poor value.

Writer unknown, The Standard, 29th March 1984

And talking of new rock musicals, admittedly of a somewhat less publicised variety, currently at the Leeds Playhouse is a curious attempt to move Lewis Carroll's Alice into a future world of high-technology where she can be computer-dated by a robotic Queen of Hearts.  The sad thing here is that although the score (by Anthony Phillips, a founder-member of Genesis) has, at any rate in the first half, considerable promise and charm, the book and lyrics (by Richard Scott) are of such appalling banality and confusion that you begin to wonder why they simply didn't issue the whole affair as an orchestral LP and leave it at that.

Midway through the evening it becomes clear that The Wizard of Oz would have provided a more coherent base than Alice for this shaky fable about an innocent abroad in a land of which she knows little and learns less.  Sally Ann Triplett in the title role has a kind of bland, winsome and very innocent amiability, but Nicholas Hytner's production is hopelessly lumbered by the script's lack of any real focus or point and although Alice might have just about got by as a school play in an educational establishment obsessed by computers, in a professional theatre it really will not do at all.

Writer/publication unknown.

The Musical & The Microchip

Congratulations to the Leeds Playhouse for bouncing off and commissioning their own musical, Alice, from Richard Scott and Anthony Phillips.  Director Nicholas Hytner has given it all the feel of a West End production - a West End production of a couple of years ago, but never mind.  Musicals have always been powerful instruments of nostalgia, so it was inevitable that one would turn up that literally exploits the residual juices of memory.

Alice (no relation to the looking-glass people) is a rather common Level 8 microchip off a futuristic society, totally controlled by a computer programme in the hands of a Spider-Queen.  Alice (Sally Ann Triplett) is improbably binaried with the superior Mathmagician (Bruce Payne), who turns out to be a computer-dissident.  After a very uncertain start he introduces her to a gang of likeable young caricatures who sing that that they are "the last of the originals" but look more like clones from "Hair".

These user-friendly subversives survive in the unerased memory spaces of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, which give plenty of opportunities for nostalgic musical pastiche.  The most enjoyable moment is the rock 'n' roll "Duck and Dive" for crepe soles and multilayered petticoats that opens the second half.  There is even an Isadora Duncan-style dance academy surviving from the Twenties.

Alice gradually loses her programmed responses, and in the end her embrace with the handsome Mathmagician produces such irrational emotions in the Spider-Queen that the cruel logic of her regime is overthrown.

It is all an absurd piece of nonsense, you can see, but the verve of the cast carries the day.  The most contemporary elements (apart from the computer-phobia) are the disco-dancing of Peter Alex Newton and the effective robotics of Michael Skyers.  The score zips along, but Scott and Phillips have not fully exploited the openings  for pastiche that our memory-banks are aching for.  Di Seymour's design suits the semi-circus atmosphere of the Leeds Playhouse, but should we really feel nostalgic for dope and drink and can we really believe that liberation means that a woman loses her trousers?

Robert Hewison, The Sunday Times, 25th March 1984

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