This "music hall" version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
was a New York Shakespeare Festival production. Swados composed the score, adapted
the book and directed for the stage. Meryl Streep starred as "Alice" at New York’s Public
Theatre.
Later aired on PBS and titled Alice at the Palace, this imaginative rendering of the Lewis
Carroll classic is performed concert-style on a bare stage, the actors in modern rehearsal
clothes. Stylistically, the music ranges from rock to country/western to calypso, as the
outlandish characters of "Wonderland" are reinterpreted in this "story theatre"-type setting.