Looking Back: Alice

One of the most successful stage and screen director-producers of our time, Mike Nichols has had only a peripheral career in Broadway musicals. He staged The Apple Tree, the 1966 trio of one-act musicals by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. He struck gold producing Annie in 1977, and a few years later brought in a Canadian play with songs, Billy Bishop Goes to War.

Nichols will be making a return to Broadway musicals this season, directing the Monty Python show Spamalot. Today, I'm looking back on the one Nichols musical that was an outright disaster. In 1978, flushed with the success of Annie, Nichols and Lewis Allen co-produced Alice, a contemporary black version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Carroll's works had been musicalized before. Eva Le Gallienne had had success with a semi-musical version that had successful Broadway engagements in 1932 and 1947 but flopped on its third go-round, in 1982. Elizabeth Swados had Meryl Streep to carry the mostly indifferent off-Broadway Alice in Concert. And there have been several TV musical versions of the stories.

Nichols' Alice was clearly inspired by the success of two other properties: His own family-oriented Annie and, more specifically, The Wiz, which had cleverly rethought The Wizard of Oz in contemporary black musical styles and lingo. But there was a problem with most stage versions of Alice, musical or non-musical: Carroll's stories, while delightful on the page, are episodic and not especially dramatic. There was far more at stake for the heroine of Oz than there was for young Alice.

Nichols was only the producer of Alice. The show was conceived, written, and directed by Vinnette Carroll, a major theatrical figure at the time, who had started working on an Alice musical at the Actors Studio in 1962 and continued to develop it at her Urban Arts Corp company. The music and lyrics were by Micki Grant, who had already done two other projects with Carroll, the musicals Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. Grant had also been a contributor to Stephen Schwartz's short-lived Broadway revue Working.

Nichols hired a promising cast for Alice and scheduled a Broadway opening at the Minskoff Theatre for July 27, 1978. Debbie Allen, who had made a good impression in Raisin among other projects, had the potentially star-making title role, and she was joined by Alice Ghostley, Paula Kelly, Jane White, and Cleavant Derricks. The actors played dual roles because Alice came with a framework. The opening and closing scenes of the show were set at "The Rabbit Hole," a present-day discotheque where The Duchess White is celebrating the sixteenth birthday of her daughter Alice. Other characters at the disco included Broadway star Regina Kelly and media folk Lily and Ted White Ghostley and Hamilton Camp. All of these actors reappeared in Wonderland, playing parallel characters, with Lily White becoming the White Queen, and so forth.

Many of the episodes familiar from the Carroll books reappeared in Alice. The heroine becomes disoriented after drinking some champagne and soon begins changing sizes and encountering caterpillars. The Black Queen teaches her chess. Alice insists "I Am Real," although Tweedledee and Tweedledum twin brothers Cleavant Derricks and Clinton Derricks-Carroll insist she's only a figment of the King's dream. The Cheshire Cat tells Alice that "Everybody Is Mad" in the vicinity, then Alice meets the White Queen, who lives backwards. At the croquet game, the Queen of Hearts threatens to behead Alice. Underwater, Alice meets the Mock Turtle, who teaches her the "Lobster Rock." The Black Queen forces Alice to pass a test, after which she declares that Alice has learned who she is and has grown up.

Alice was a troubled production from the start. Director Caroll and producer Nichols clashed, and, at one point, Nichols barred Carroll from the theatre. The show began its tryout run at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia on May 31, and was to have played a ten-week engagement there. But houses were sparse and reviews weren't good.

In The Inquirer, critic William B. Collins wrote, "Vinnette Carroll is in dubious collaboration with Lewis Carroll. Neither one seems to understand the other.....It is a flat, uninspired and uncertain effort, a shotgun marriage of black hipness and Victorian gentility, an anemic adaptation of highly resistant classic material." Variety was similarly unhappy with the production: "Although there is considerable movement on stage, the proceedings have little momentum."

The Broadway opening was cancelled, and Alice closed in Philadelphia on June 11. The show dropped more than $1 million, of which Nichols was said to have invested $125,000, with Universal Pictures supplying half the backing. Leading lady Allen would eventually make it to the Minskoff, in the revivals of West Side Story and Sweet Charity. And even Alice made it to Broadway, in part: In 1979, Vinnette Carroll made another attempt at adapting the Alice stories, this time with a score by Bert Keyes and Bob Larimer, under the title But Never Jam Today. With some of the same cast members and without the disco frame, Jam lasted seven performances at the Longacre Theatre. Grant was back on Broadway two years later as the sole author of the musical It's So Nice to Be Civilized, which lasted a week.

Alice suffered from the fundamental problem of trying to adapt Lewis Carroll to the stage. But its shortcomings were larger. With its incoherent book and lack of wit or point of view, Alice made one appreciate how well The Wiz had done by its source. Alice relied heavily on dialect jokes, gospel singing, and choreography by Talley Beatty. So aimless was the script that, at the end of the evening, it was difficult to figure out what, if anything, young Alice had learned from all of her experiences.

In its favor were a few of the songs, notably Allen's "Impossible Things"; a Tweedledee-Tweedledum duet called "Workin' for the Man"; and a calypso, "Everybody Is Mad," for the Cheshire Cat. And there was a certain amount of spectacle, including a mirrored disco set that reflected the audience at the beginning of the evening, and an elaborate chess board featuring human pieces.

Ghostley later told The Daily News, "I never understood what the conception was and no one seemed able to clear it up...There was no book, and I winced at my lines." Yet the show's outstanding element was Ghostley, who was dementedly amusing as a Southern-style White Queen, wrapped in the Confederate flag. As soon as Alice folded, producers Nichols and Allen put Ghostley into Annie, as the replacement for Dorothy Loudon's Miss Hannigan.

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