Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Musical Theater | Wilbur Cross High School
Zara Baden-Eversman as Alice. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In a theater just off Mitchell Drive, the sky was falling. An infernal red glowed beneath the curtain, feet shuffling to safety beneath its glare. An air raid siren pierced the darkness, splitting the afternoon in two. Among the empty seats, student Soraima Roman looked up and took everything in. Before her, the stage cooled to a strange, hazy blue, as if no one could tell if it was day or night.
And then there was Alice, paging through her book as the world above burned. She opened the cover, so well-loved it was nearly soft, and set her world back into motion.
That shift—from rage to grief to hope and back again, sometimes in a span of seconds—is at the core of Alice By Heart, running at Wilbur Cross High School from March 6 through 8. A production of the Lights Up Drama Club, the work is the first in years to meet the moment, navigating fear, loss and the human need to survive at a time when many students are feeling all of those things acutely.
Tickets and more information are available here. The work, which is directed by Heather Bazinet and Salvatore DeLucia, is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland developed by Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater, and Jessie Nelson in the early 2000s. After a London premiere in 2012, it first came to the U.S. in 2019.
It is dedicated to Patricia Podurgiel Krodel and Antonietta Galletta—Bazinet’s mother and DeLucia’s grandmother—both of whom died last year.
"When I first saw it, I was worried it was too weird and too different," said Bazinet, a speech pathologist at Cross who is in her eighth season co-directing alongside DeLucia (students know and love her as simply "Baz"), and saw the play last year at Naugatuck Valley Community College. “But this group of kids and this show was like a match made in heaven. Ultimately, it’s about hope. It’s about grief, but it’s hopeful too.”
If the show was an unlikely choice, she added, students (who, for the record, requested a drama) have risen to the challenge several times over. Set entirely in an air raid shelter after the London Blitz, the musical follows sweet and starry-eyed Alice Spencer (Zara Baden-Eversman), who is trying to hold onto some notion of Wonderland as the world falls apart around her. In her hands, Carroll’s fantastical book is her constant, trusty companion.
Confined to the underground shelter, she seeks out Alfred Hallam (Jack Vann), her childhood best friend and would-be love interest if it weren’t the middle of a World War. There’s a catch, of course: a sick Alfred has been moved to the tuberculosis ward, where he is in quarantine. His prognosis, delivered by the grim-faced Dr. Butridge (Daniel Cardenas), isn’t good. When Alice breaks the rules to get to him, a beleaguered nurse from the Red Cross (Erin Palmer) loses it, and rips up her book.
This, of course, is what sets the play into motion. Alice vows to make the trip to Wonderland by heart, and brings Alfred with her in an attempt to read him back to health. Around them, a crew of exhausted, war-ravaged Brits become the characters who populate Carroll’s world. There is the shell-shocked Harold Pudding (Iris Baden-Eversman), who makes total sense as the Mad Hatter, the stern and overworked nurse who becomes the Queen of Hearts (Palmer, of course), a young child named Nigel (Journey Rosa) , who insists his mother is coming back for him as he rocks back and forth on a cot, then shape-shifts into nearly half a dozen characters.
On Cross’ stage—which has been totally transformed, thanks largely to senior Cecilia Castelan, stage manager Roman and an all-student production crew—no one misses. From the moment the curtain opens on this underground shelter, students jump fully between two worlds, probing the thin membrane between what is real and what is make-believe.
Maybe it’s just the world-weariness of this moment, but that tug-of-war is fascinating to watch. As sirens pierce the air and lights become a swirl of color, characters grapple with exhaustion and detachment, but also the will to survive and limits of the human body to do so under extreme stress. When Alice dips in and out of the book, she brings a sense of magical thinking that is so deeply relatable it’s hard not to start singing along.
She’s not alone in that. Vann, a junior at Lyman Hall High School, becomes Alfred, the White Rabbit, and the March Hare all in the course of the show, with something a little different each time he transforms. As Alfred, he’s despondent and sickly, but also jumps through octaves and gallivants around the stage like it’s no big deal. As White Rabbit in “Down The Hole,” there’s something animated there, a whimsy that is just as short-lived as the song. His March Hare is cruel, but in the way that friends are when they want to say “I love you” and can’t find the right time or words.
There's junior Aniya DeBerry, whose buttoned-up Angus becomes a lax, smooth-voiced caterpillar who lulls Alice into a weed-kissed fever dream by the show’s 20-minute mark. Singing alongside sophomore Gia Dupuis, DeBerry straddles these strange and contrary universes, chipping away at one reality as she builds the other up. When the Cheshire Cat (Nitzamir Negron) picks up where she and Dupuis have left off, it seems like it couldn’t be any other way.
Around them, Jennifer Kaye’s lyrical, sometimes strange and surreal choreography fits the bill. Students fall backwards, hoist and lift each other up, weave in and out of the set (and, at times, each other), and turn things—loose pages, mattresses, small props—into part of this slow-moving waltz with an alternate reality. It works, leaving the audience suspended somewhere between Wonderland and New Haven.
Meanwhile, Baden-Eversman as Alice lends the show its whirring, sometimes arrhythmic and nostalgia-drenched heartbeat. From the moment the pit orchestra launches into “West Of Words,” she’s just trying to make it through this thing unscathed, a girl interrupted on the cusp of adolescence. As she sings her way to resolution and through her grief, her vocals are sturdy but ethereal, like a memory passed through a game of telephone until it is a ghost.
“I think, like, the world out there helps develop the characters in here,” she said during a tech rehearsal Monday, before running to get into costume. “Everyone has their thing. They have books or movies or theater or their way to escape.”
The show is bittersweet, she added: it will likely be her last. In the fall, she plans to start at NYU on a nursing track. “We’re doing something that people will remember,” she said.
There’s a weight to the show, meanwhile, for which students are surprisingly grateful (the past three shows have included Freaky Friday, Charlie Brown, and The Little Mermaid; many of them wanted a tonal change). At the end of World War II, England had lost almost half a million people. The toll of war was everywhere: in the streets, in destroyed homes and businesses, in fragmented families and childhoods upended and by violence.
To help guide someone through their grief—to teach them to live another day—became a regular part of what it meant to survive. What other choice did people have?
Decades later, students have felt some of that exhaustion in their present. When rehearsals started several weeks ago, many of them were already talking about the current political situation, which has since attacked LGBTQ+ people, people of color, immigrants and the children of immigrants, and the right to public education (basically, a cross-section of Cross’ theater kids). Some never stopped having those conversations.
Salem Jones (dangling pearls): "A lot of us need an outlet for a lot of our anger and frustration and sadness and grief."
Palmer, whose nurse and queen is candid but never quite cruel, said she sees her straight-talking character as practicing a kind of tough love. She tries to take what she learns onstage into her life off of it.
“I think you can relate to the characters in the show because they’re actual people,” she said Monday. “My character, the Queen of Hearts, she’s perceived as not a nice person. But she wants Alice to wake up and realize that this is not make-believe. This is serious.”
Salem Jones, a junior who plays both Dodgy and the Dutchess, agreed that the show feels right for the moment in which students find themselves. Four years ago, Jones fell in love with theater when he saw a production of Romeo & Juliet from Ice The Beef and Elm Shakespeare Company.
Now, “it feels very on brand” to be doing a show about war, destruction, psychological escape and coming to terms with grief, he said. It’s also a welcome shift for the young actor, whose background includes both Shakespeare and The Little Mermaid. He added that he looks for the fun in his characters, including the Dutchess’ evil side.
“It feels especially like now is the time to do the show,” he said, snapping a white fan open with the precision of a seasoned drag artist. “A lot of us need an outlet for a lot of our anger and frustration and sadness and grief. You can see yourself in every one of the characters. It [the play] takes your hand, guides you through to the end. You learn that it’s gonna suck for a while.”
Roman, a senior who plans to attend community college in the fall, agreed. In the past months, she’s felt stress around what the future may hold. And yet when she steps into the theater, that anxiety fades into the background. During rehearsals, members of the creative team “make you feel like family,” she said.
In addition to a student-run crew, upperclassmen have doubled as mentors for their younger peers. Through the "New Haven Musical Theatre Alliance," students from James Hillhouse High School (junior Samantha Bello Avila), the Sound School (Rosa) and Lyman Hall High School have also been able to participate in the show.
“This time can be hard on a lot of people,” Roman said. “There’s a lot of difficult things going on and a lot of worrisome moments, and being able to step into this space has been freeing.”
“The whole point of this show and how we perceive it is that we want to show people that it’s okay to be hurt and scared, but you’re not alone,” she added. “You’ll never be alone. There’s always someone by your side.”