This spring the Stratford Festival will present James Reaney’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass at the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario.
Alice will be directed by Jillian Keiley, an award-winning director from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Cast members include Trish Lindström as Alice, Cynthia Dale as the Red Queen, Dion Johnstone as the White King, Tom McCamus as the March Hare, and Brian Tree as Humpty Dumpty.
To purchase tickets, call 1-800-567-1600 or order online here.
Notes on James Reaney’s adaptation
In 1991, David William, then Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, commissioned James Reaney to adapt Alice Through the Looking-Glass for the stage. James Reaney recalls the many months writing and rewriting the play and attending workshops:
“So, as the preparatory workshop with the Young Company started in the fall of 1992, my adaptation had pretty well shaken down into its present shape except that a great deal of my commentary and suggestions were kept as part of the rehearsed reading shown to Richard Monette and David William and invited guests so that I myself actually read my mental landscapes of Looking-glass in fear and trembling since the many rewrites and keeping this and dropping that produced landmines for cues […]
Mr Monette took to the story as played that night in late October and also to its trajectory away from the Third Stage to the Avon with a cast [that included] Douglas Rain as Humpty and Barbara Bryne as the White Queen, both actors who had in 1967 appeared in my first Stratford play, Colours in the Dark.”
—From the Foreword to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking-Glass: adapted for the stage by James Reaney, pages 12-14, The Porcupine’s Quill, 1994.
James Reaney’s adaptation of Alice Through the Looking-Glass premiered at the Stratford Festival in 1994 and was revived in 1996. The play is available in Reaney Days in the West Room: Plays of James Reaney, David Ferry, ed., Playwrights Canada Press, 2008.
