There’s No Place Like Queens

If only little Alice, dozing away on the riverbank before sliding down the rabbit hole, had an inkling of the deeper import of the zany adventures that were to come. All those talking animals, querulous playing cards and animated chess pieces were not just peculiar, slightly menacing playmates, according to the new Broadway musical “Wonderland.”

No indeed. They were all potential gurus pointing the way to self-realization, each and every one intimating a message of empowerment. Had little Alice capitalized on all the wisdom they imparted, she might well have grown even taller than she did after drinking that elixir in the topsy-turvy world under the earth. She might have come to tower above the rest of us mortals as only — oh my heavens! — Oprah Winfrey does today.

That is the clear message of this peppily inspirational musical, which opened Sunday night at the Marquis Theater. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s books about a girl’s odyssey through her dream-disordered imagination, the show features generic Broadway pop music by Frank Wildhorn (“Jekyll & Hyde”), workmanlike lyrics by Jack Murphy, and a book by Mr. Murphy and the director, Gregory Boyd. “Wonderland” transforms Alice’s surreal wanderings into a contemporary parable about reconnecting with your inner child and other watery truisms of the self-help industrial complex.

The model here appears to be the Broadway behemoth “Wicked,” which recast L. Frank Baum’s “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a moral-dispensing tale of exceptionally gifted young women (hitherto known as witches) finding common ground in girl power. Unfortunately “Wonderland” reminded me even more strongly of another latter-day iteration of the Baum story, the bloated 1978 movie version of the Broadway musical “The Wiz.”

You’ll recall — or maybe you won’t — that in the film the teenage Dorothy of the stage version became a grown-up, put-upon New York schoolteacher played by a saucer-eyed Diana Ross. The adventurer in “Wonderland” is also a harassed New York schoolteacher, Alice (the capable Janet Dacal), who aspires to write children’s books. Recently separated from her unemployed husband, she has moved to the “kingdom of Queens” with her daughter Chloe (Carly Rose Sonenclar, a good actress and an almost preternaturally skilled singer).

Dozing one night in Chloe’s bed, Alice is spirited away to an alternate universe in which the fanciful figures of the Carroll books are transformed into groovy, multiethnic contemporary equivalents. The Caterpillar with his hookah is a suave black charmer (E. Clayton Cornelious) who recommends a dose of self-reflection in a silky R&B song. The Cheshire Cat is a grinning Latino called El Gato (Jose Llana) accessorized with a glittery pimp-mobile (“My friends call me Che,” he purrs), urging Alice to “Go With the Flow” in a Santana-esque number. The White Knight (Darren Ritchie) becomes a square-jawed Disney-prince type who leads his fellow polo-playing cuties in a boy-band song celebrating his own heroism.

They team up to support Dorothy — um, I mean Alice — as she cracks mother-in-law jokes and tries with increasing exasperation to find her way home, a preoccupation that didn’t seem particularly urgent to the polite, spirited youngster in Carroll’s original. Scheming to thwart Alice’s plans are the local villains, the Queen of Hearts (Karen Mason), whose underwhelming razzle-dazzle showstopper is inevitably entitled “Off With Their Heads”; and the Mad Hatter (Kate Shindle), a glowering vamp with dominatrix tendencies, who plots to overthrow the queen using little Chloe as a pawn in her machinations. (Even the Mad Hatter has a bent for analyzing Alice’s dissatisfactions: “A little girl grows up with a sense of wonder and hope,” she lectures, “but quickly becomes a woman who forgets all the dreams that reside in her head... .”)

Mr. Boyd and Mr. Murphy’s book displays flashes of fresh humor capitalizing on the novelty of an adult Alice at the center of the story. Picking up the bottle of liquid enticingly placed in front of her, Alice notes that the inscription reads: “Drink me. Responsibly.” There are the Broadway in-jokes necessary in any musical hoping for a soupçon of hipness, in this case quotations from “The Music Man,” “South Pacific” and “Gypsy” (rather a strange trinity, come to think of it).

But the desire to create a traditional narrative arc from the unruly dreamscape of Carroll’s original results in a convoluted story line pitting the good guys against the bad. Most of the second act consists of a drawn-out battle over Alice and Chloe’s fates, with an odd little timeout in which Alice encounters Carroll himself, coyly referred to only as the Victorian Gentleman (Mr. Ritchie).

Mr. Wildhorn’s absence from Broadway since his 2004 adaptation of “Dracula” has not exactly occasioned widespread hand-wringing, and his competent rendering of various pop styles in “Wonderland” probably won’t win him a host of converts. Mr. Murphy’s lyrics are of a matching blandness, with Alice’s earnest ballads of self-discovery amply stocked in cliché. (“I remember every moment when my heart was young and free,” she sings upon meeting — literally — her inner child, “and to my surprise I look through your eyes and once more I can see.”)

Although the silvered prosceniums suggesting an endless series of antique mirrors are a clever choice, the sets by Neil Patel, amply supplemented by Sven Ortel’s video projections, lack any transporting fairy-tale magic or even simple stylistic coherence. (It probably wasn’t a good idea to project animated images from the glorious Tenniel illustrations onto the curtain before the show begins.) The costumes, by Susan Hilferty, are similarly a riotous grab bag mixing nods to the traditional — the Queen of Hearts wears a playing-card frock as it might have been coutured up by John Galliano — and twisted variations on contemporary styles.

It might be impossible to recreate onstage the particular magic of Carroll’s writing, which captures as no other literary work does the texture of dreams. The mechanics of live theater cannot easily replicate the swirling imagery that evaporates as soon as it materializes. (Film, animated or otherwise, does it better.) And much of the books’ dizzying charm resides in the inversions of logic and literal sense based on the sound and sight of words themselves.

But Alice’s adventures are perhaps most subversively appealing for their blithe indifference to the kind of tidy moralizing that had been a staple of Victorian children’s literature. “Wonderland” thoroughly nullifies this aspect. Instead of transporting us back to an anarchic childhood world where right and wrong are just words like any others, to be tossed about at merry whim, the show drearily suggests that even grown-ups have to keep doing their homework, working doggedly toward self-improvement day after endless day.

WONDERLAND

Book by Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy; lyrics by Mr. Murphy; music by Frank Wildhorn; directed by Mr. Boyd; choreography by Marguerite Derricks; musical direction and incidental and dance music arrangements by Jason Howland; sets by Neil Patel; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Paul Gallo; projections and video by Sven Ortel; sound by Peter Hylenski; hair and wig design by Tom Watson; musical supervision and orchestrations by Kim Scharnberg; vocal music arrangements by Ron Melrose and Mr. Howland; fight director, Rick Sordelet; associate director, Kenneth Ferrone; associate choreographer, Michelle Elkin; music coordinator, David Lai; technical supervisor, Chris Smith/Smitty; production stage manager, David O’Brien; general manager, the Charlotte Wilcox Company; associate producers, Judy Joseph, Stageventures 2010 Limited Partnership; executive producer, William Franzblau. Presented by David A. Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Judy Lisi, president; Franzblau Media; Nederlander Presentations; the Knights of Tampa Bay, David Scher Hinks Shimberg; Michael Speyer and Bernie Abrams; Jay Harris; Larry and Kay Payton; June and Tom Simpson; Independent Presenters Network and Sonny Everett Productions. At the Marquis Theater, 1535 Broadway, at 46th Street; (877) 250-2929; ticketmaster.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Janet Dacal (Alice), Darren Ritchie (Jack the White Knight/Victorian Gentleman), E. Clayton Cornelious (Caterpillar), Jose Llana (El Gato), Karen Mason (Edwina/Queen of Hearts), Kate Shindle (Mad Hatter), Carly Rose Sonenclar (Chloe), Edward Staudenmayer (White Rabbit) and Danny Stiles (Morris the March Hare).