Anonymous Ensemble’s writer/director, Eamonn Farrell, has paired up with Athens-based composer, William Antoniou to create Wonderland. Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the piece is conceived as an electronic music-infused, multimedia-fueled journey through the destruction of a songstress, Alice’s, self identity.

With a deliberate musical theatricality, the show features many of the familiar characters from the well worn Victorian text in song/dance/scene vignettes. However the well known scenarios are viewed though the deconstructive lens of a modern, mature, multifaceted Alice. So the White Rabbit is a dirty, awkward drag queen, the Duchess is a frustrated career mom and the Caterpillar is a lotus eating academic. Combined, the vignettes don’t so much tell Lewis Carroll’s story as they do a tale of a talented urban dreamer approaching middle age and caught in a quagmire of diminishing potential, corporate insignificance and a mirage of celebrity.

In order to create a true rabbit hole experience for the audience, Anonymous Ensemble delves deep into their bag of tricks with puppetry, befeathered spectacle and live mixed video and audio. They explore Carroll’s theme of malleability of scale by using projections to amplify small-scale visual events as well as amplified audio of small-scale sonic events. The music ranges stylistically from cabaret to heady electronica.

The book and music for Wonderland were developed in a workshop in the spring of ‘09 at Anonymous Ensemble’s rehearsal space in Brooklyn.