“Leo Marks portrays a most endearing, humbly playful Dodgson. The chemistry between Marks and Corryn Cummins as doe eyed, sassy, knock-kneed Alice is lustrous and palpable. The production’s glowing light feels like a warm hug at dusk– just before sitting down to read aloud a story– and the reveal into Wonderland is a magical, textured space for play. A color palette of winsome, flowing ivory and beige receive pay off with the iconic blue-dress Charles presents Alice (receiving audible sighs from the audience) and the scarlet shock of Mrs. Liddell’s dress when she brilliantly transforms into the Queen of Hearts. Director Abigail Deser’s inventive staging choices establish beautiful, poetic pictures for the eye to feast on.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“This project could have gone so wrong in so many ways. But Lily Blau and company have created an intriguing, visually fascinating, and perfectly portrayed vision of what might have been, weaving in many Alice references and visuals, including the White Rabbit, who emerges from the rabbit hole and charmingly remains throughout the story to warn, goad, and observe Mr. Dodgson/Carroll. Every actor is perfect in his or her part. The set is gorgeous and smoothly transitioned from a closed room to a room with open windows, beyond which you can see the children’s swing and an ivy-covered wall that reaches beyond where the eye can see. Although Alice is played by an adult, she is wonderfully childlike and believable as young Alice. Mrs. Liddell appears as the Red Queen in several frenzied scenes, and the transition is fun to watch.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“The remembered Alice (fetchingly played by an adult, Corryn Cummins) is a Victorian Lolita, who has a crush on Dodgson and coyly sets out to seduce him. Her mother (the imposing Erica Hanrahan-Ball) keeps stumbling in at inopportune moments and morphing into the shrill Red Queen. This matter-of-fact mingling of fantasy and reality is a clear tribute to one of Carroll’s most endearing literary strategies, and the production, under the assured direction of Abigail Deser, uses it at times magically.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Blau also smartly injects the undefined presence of The White Rabbit (a playfully surreptitious Jeff Marlow) as a wise alter ego and warning bell for Dodgson/Carroll. Once out of his rabbit hole, White Rabbit slips in and out of the action, connecting dots and goading Dodgson. Leo Marks, who plays the fundamentally timorous Dodgson/Carroll, skillfully provides the full complexity of the man, in a lucid and furtive performance that includes the poet, the arrested child within, the stutterer and the tortured soul.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Intriguing, well-acted and beautifully staged “The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll” opened to a sold out house on Saturday, January 31, 2015. Between hallucinatory dreams and “real life” Lily Blau’s new play takes the audience down the rabbit hole to find out what might have occurred in pages torn out of math professor, Charles Dodgson’s/Lewis Carroll’s, personal diary.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Nonetheless, the careful crafting of this piece is obvious everywhere, and the playwright’s fascinating juxtaposition of the internal fantasies of a man whose social life was thwarted in numerous ways and the overt world in which he walked day by day keeps one interested from start to finish. “The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll” is performed without an intermission, and one can see why as the tensions and angst grow slowly over the course of the piece.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“The director’s work with actors is particularly tasteful. Together the two leads are Deser’s most handily-wielded tool. Leo Marks’s voice (the stutter when talking to grown-ups! the orotund vowels around children!) is even more impressive than his face and body; his Dodgson is a full, complicated, completely sympathetic human being. As Alice, Corryn Cummings is not merely convincing but equally fascinating as an innocent child, a mischievous object of desire, and a disappointed adult. As the other Misses Liddell, Erin Barnes and Ashley Ruth Jones delight and effectively project the trappings of childhood as well.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Cummins’ transit from willful, coquettish adolescence to recriminatory womanhood is a marvel of observation and nuance, and director Abigail Deser’s staging gets high marks for sheer polish (helped by Garry Lennon’s surreal-edged costuming, Keith Skretch’s psychedelic video projections and John Ballinger’s vivid sound).”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Leo Marks IS Charles Dodgson, stuttering, hesitating, awkward, inappropriately sexual-all! Marks’ Dodgson charms and flatters the Liddell females while having enough education and smarts to win over Professor Liddell. Time Winters‘ perfectly scholarly and patriarchic as Dean Liddell. Erica Hanrahan-Ballgives Mrs. Liddell the proper upper crust attitude and posturing of a woman wed to a man in position. (And her many gowns stun! Many thumbs up to costume designer Garry Lennon!)”
Click here to read the entire review.
“As playwright Blau delves deeper into what may have been in those titular missing pages, sound designer/composer John Ballinger, lighting designer Jaymi Lee Smith, and above all video designer Keith Skretch combine their prodigious talents to take us on a vertiginous journey into what might be either fantasy or memory, the White Rabbit averring that memory is but “a vivid form of fantasy,” to which Charles responds that “fantasy is to memory what desire is to action.” You be the judge.
Click here to read the entire review.
“Blau’s play, which supposedly occurs on the day when Alice has planned a visit to Dodgson for one last photograph before she marries Hargreaves, is a sad one, not only because it calls up all the quandaries of reality and imagination that, no matter how he actually lived his life, Dodgson surely faced, but because it finally reveals that his great failure in life was not doing some dreadful deed, but doing nothing.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“Into this void — where lurid fantasies and undocumented theories have rushed — Blau lets something simpler and truer emerge. A young girl finds she can be loveable to someone outside her family, and takes a shy practice step toward the terra incognita of romance. A young man finds, to his consternation, that a young girl can be both innocent and desirable. Perhaps, a kiss. Perhaps.”
Click here to read the entire review.
“The story begins in the early 1860s, when Dodgson (Leo Marks), a mathematics professor at Oxford, befriended Dean Henry Liddell (Time Winters) and his family. Dodgson took photographs of the family and entertained the three daughters with stories, one starring 10-year-old Alice (Corryn Cummins) in particular. Dodgson wrote the story down and had it published under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, and became ever more intrigued with Alice, now taking her picture alone. Years later, Dodgson defends himself to the White Rabbit (Jeff Marlow), saying he never did anything improper, but the Rabbit points out that several pages are missing from his diary, and in those pages Dodgson will find the truth he’s been running from.”
Click here to read the entire review.
**
Click here for tickets and information.
This is a tough ‘two hander’ (plus one) that offers a challenge for the actors as well as for the audience. Leave your expectations at home and come to Pasadena to see something just a little bit different. Truly, Fantastic.
And my, oh my, do those natures come out in full force as director Michael Michetti shepherds visible mankind and invisible beasts into this vivid but unimaginable world. His work with his actors is psychologically deep, bringing out truths about human nature. Michetti’s stagecraft, too, is fabulously imaginative. In collaboration with scenic designer Tom Buderwitz, lighting and video designer Tom Ontiveros and sound designer John Zalewski, Michetti cracks open the stage, the characters’ psyches and the audience’s minds.
Spectacular indeed are the surprises that scenic designer Tom Buderwitz’s initially stark urban set has in store (and which production stills purposely avoid spoiling). Spectacular too is sound designer John Zalewski’s mix of city and desert sounds coupled with that distinctive, tension-building “Zalewski hum.” Tom Ontiveros’s lighting and video design is equally striking, with Garry Lennon’s just-right costumes revealing much about Tony and Melinda and they journey each embarks upon. And there are some fabulous “body makeup effects” as well.
![Steven Dietz B-W 7447[1]](https://weplaydifferent.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/steven-dietz-b-w-74471.jpg)
we PLAY different 