MCC Theater, the accomplished but long-mostly itinerant off-Broadway company, has built itself a handsome new home in the far West 50s, outfitted with two theaters, two studio spaces, and administrative space. And for its maiden voyage, it has piloted the ship into an iceberg.
Perhaps a better metaphor of foundering at sea is that it has been sunk by a U-boat’s torpedo. Because Alice By Heart, the maiden mainstage production, is set in a Tube station-turned-bomb shelter-slash-hospital during what one presumes—and the Playbill confirms—is the London Blitz during World War II. (A character suffers shell shock, and eventually there are doughboys, so the specific European cataclysm can feel a bit indistinct.)
Alice By Heart is the new show from the composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist Steven Sater, who are best known for the brilliant and moving score to Spring Awakening. Sater also wrote the book to Spring Awakening, adapting it from a scandalous turn-of-the-twentieth-century German play by Frank Wedekind about sexual awakening and ignorance among a group of teenagers. That script was beautiful and heartbreaking.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
This story, co-written with Jessie Nelson, who also directs and previously wrote the book for Waitress, is, I guess, also about sexual awakening. In truth it’s hard to tell. The script is so unclear, and the staging so busily distracting, that it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s going on.
It seems that a group of London teens, their neighborhood leveled by German attacks, have been evacuated to a shelter-cum-hospital in the Underground. One girl, conveniently named Alice, has grabbed from the rubble her favorite book, Alice In Wonderland. Her neighbor-slash-best friend-slash-maybe love interest, Alfred, is meanwhile dying. (Like Connie and Richie in A Chorus Line, Alice and Alfred adolesce apparently mid-song, leading to an uncomfortable number of lyrics about Alice’s newfound bosom.) He wants to hear the book, his favorite, too. The mean nurse tears it up. And so the children must recite Alice… by heart. (Get it?) By the end, Alfred is dead and Alice is heartbroken. (Get it, again?)
On the way, there are a series of trippy numbers. Sheik’s score is poppy and yearning. Paloma Young’s costumes are fun. The youthful actors are, all of them, fantastic, doing the best with what they’ve been giving and singing tunefully. (I am not naming them because I do not wish to contribute to their ongoing shame in future Googling.) The set, by Edward Pierce, is almost a pull-out-all-the-stops effort for the debut of MCC’s new, modern home, an evocative, decrepit tube stop that seems to engulf the proscenium and not something you ever would have seen in the company’s desert years in the Lucille Lortel.
The choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, who note a Phish New Year’s Eve engagement in their Who’s Who bio, is a serviceable approximation of the distinctive style Steven Hoggett developed in Black Watch and Once.
In Spring Awakening, director Michael Mayer and choreographer Bill T. Jones used a propulsive, kinetic choreography to express the inner angst of those hormonal German teens. You can see how Sheik and Sater saw similarities here: heartsick kids, tragic endings. But this script lacks the bones of that previous effort’s sturdy, century-old bones. Here, the direction and dance clutter rather than clarify. You might say they make things curiouser.
Alice By Heart opened February 26, 2019, at the MCC Theater Space and runs through April 7. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
