Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Curiouser and Curiouser

Storytelling is simple, if you take the King of Hearts’ word for it: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.” But something tells us the writing process behind Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a little more involved — and Québec’s Théâtre Tout à Trac celebrates the author’s way with words in a fittingly nonsensical production. “Alice is a classic story,” artistic and stage director Hugo Bélanger told the Ottawa Citizen. “It’s full of whimsy, and, above all, it’s told in a magical language.” Created for grade-school students — “but you’d never know it,” notes Montréal’s Gazette — Bélanger’s adaptation sticks to Carroll’s original wordplay but features a more rambunctious Alice and a shape-shifting library set, where actors and puppets literally come out of the woodwork.