Alice in Concert

This "music hall" version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was a New York Shakespeare Festival production. Swados composed the score, adapted the book and directed for the stage. Meryl Streep starred as Alice at New York's Public Theatre. Later aired on PBS and titled Alice at the Palace, this imaginative rendering of the Lewis Carroll classic is performed concert-style on a bare stage, the actors in modern rehearsal clothes. Stylistically, the music ranges from rock to country/western to calypso, as the outlandish characters of Wonderland are reinterpreted in this "story theatre" setting.