‘Wonderland!’ pulls rabbit out of its hat

It seems almost impossible that it only took two weeks to transform a group of 40 young students into an all-singing, all-dancing, glittering group of performers. Luckily, we have the aid of the White Queen to help us believe the impossible. After all, as a young girl she sometimes believed six impossible things before breakfast.

The classic tales of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are so full of magic and enchantment that they are impossible to resist. The Adventures in Acting Group has brought the Lewis Carroll tales to stage in a way that captures all the wild humor, the exuberance and the quirky characters that people Carroll’s tales, and done so using a cast whose eldest actor is a junior in high school and whose youngest is in second grade.

“This was fantastic,” director Beth Riley said at the intermission of the play’s first dress rehearsal, although students had their scripts before rehearsals began two weeks ago.

Much of the magic of “Wonderland!” has been brought to life with astonishing glamour by costume designer Corey Jay, who is an actor in local theater and a junior at Corvallis High School. From the towering hats of the chess pieces to the glittering finery of the talking flowers, no detail is left unadorned, although the results are occasionally precarious.

Red Queen Malory Peterson, a junior at CHS must sing, dance and sashay in her fiery red gown and towering red coronet, which appears to be ready to fall off at any moment.

“If it happens,” Peterson said, “I’m ready to laugh it off.”

The students come from 12 different area schools, and have a variety of theatrical experience in their backgrounds, from little to none to having several plays under their belts.

Erika Lundahl, this Wonderland’s Alice, has been acting since eighth grade, but she has never had a lead role before. The CHS sophomore has never read the Lewis Carroll books, but she has seen the Disney version of the story.

“The contrariness of Alice (is what) I’m really trying to get,” Lundahl said. She said she liked that while Alice is proper, she also has an imaginative spirit.

Lundahl is one of the oldest actors in the cast, which is a new experience, but she hopes that she’s someone the younger cast members can look up to.

“We’re having so much fun,” she said. “It’s five hours a day of acting and singing. It’s my dream.”

Peterson’s Red Queen is as nasty as she can be, but off stage, she’s quite the opposite, smiling as younger cast members hug her and hang off her shoulders.

“I try to be as nasty as possible,” she said of her interpretation of the Red Queen. Her dancing and singing moments also call for a dash of spirit.

“People say I should try to be like Cher,” she said, so she’s attempting to capture some of the diva’s flamboyant performing techniques.

“You’ve gotta like the spotlight,” she said. “It takes a lot of courage. I enjoy every minute of it.”

Another standout performer is Josh Mayes, a CHS sophomore who rocks the stage as Humpty Dumpty. Mayes, like Lundahl and Peterson, is enamored of CHS’s drama program, which introduced him to theater last year.

On stage, Mayes was worried that an egg costume might inhibit his ability to belt out a tune, but luckily, the design of the costume cleverly only uses Mayes’ head, while Maggie Stevenson, 8, provides the body, including skinny little legs in striped orange and black tights.

The costume allows Mayes to pop up and out of his egg body and run down onto the stage in a country singer costume, where he performs a rousing number with his back-up singers, the Dixie Chickens, who are dressed as cans of Chicken of the Sea.

“I was a good egg, but then I done went bad,” he sings in the chorus, and admits that he tries to capture a bit of Little Richard in his performance. But mostly, Humpty is pure Mayes.

“I’m pretty much me, in a different reality,” he laughed.

At a glance

WHAT: “Wonderland!”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday, and 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday. The box office opens half an hour prior to performance.

WHERE: Ashbrook Independent School, 4045 S.W. Research Way

TICKETS: $7 adults, $5 students and seniors.

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