All Things Alice: Interview with Bad Hats Theatre

As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.

The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”

For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Fiona Sauder, Landon Doak and Victor Pokinko of Bad Hats Theatre join me as my guests! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Thanks for being on the show. I'm always excited to talk to other creators who have used Alice as a muse to tell stories.

I want to talk about your theatre company, Bad Hats. Tell me the story.

Bad Hats started in 2015. It was co-founded by me and an artist named Nicola Atkinson. And over time, through making work with friends that we've met through the community or school, we started to figure out how it was logical for this group of people to run a company. Everyone found their place in Bad Hats over the years and now we've got a cohort that spends all its time figuring out how to make space for writing and producing new musicals. Many of these are adaptations, likeAlice in Wonderland. The name Bad Hats came from a friend of mine in Ottawa. Their name is Megan and I bought us matching hats. Megan's head is very small and the hat kept falling over their eyes and they kept going, “Bad hat. Bad hat.” Bad Hats Theater just had a ring to it. We just ran with it and it became an umbrella under which now all these fine folk sit with me.

The other cool thing that we realized in recent years is that Bad Hat is a British-ism for sort of a bad egg or shit disturber, which suits us. We all started as actors, primarily and we grew into various roles, writers, composers, producers, directors, and music directors. But we've always been interested in shifting the paradigm within the industry and doing things a little bit differently.

Interestingly, you mentioned everybody started as actors, because, when you're an actor, often you feel out of control because you're waiting for somebody to give you an audition. It’s a very vulnerable place to be over a long period. I too started as an actor and was looking to empower myself by writing stories and suddenly that opens up a doorway to something else.

Fiona, you’re the writer, so you adapted Alice in Wonderland, and Landon and Victor, you both composed the music. The show is a contemporary spin on Wonderland that takes us down a rabbit hole with Alice, a girl with a lot of questions. What is your contemporary spin on Alice?

We had done a production of Peter Panthat was very successful and ran for many years in Toronto, and around Ontario and is being licensed across Canada now. That was a flagship production for the company. Following that we knew we wanted to tell another story that could feel like it fell in sequence, after Peter. We felt like Alice was a character of a slightly older age than the story we had told with Peter so we blindly picked up the book, knowing some of the general pop culture stuff everybody knows about Alice and knowing the lore and fame and global adulation for the book. We didn't know when we started what the spin would be. I had read it, making furious notes, and I remember when Landon read it for the first time, they called me on the phone, I said, “So what are your impressions? Where do you want to go with it? What do you want to do?” And the first thing Landon said was, “Have you noticed how many question marks there are on every page?” It’s true. Alice is a girl who cannot stop asking questions. She's in a strange place but particularly her curiosity and curiosity as a central focal point of the books drew us in.

I was thinking maybe we can set this in a place that begs questions and has a lot of questions in the fabric of our beginning. And at that exact moment, I came around the corner onto my street and there was a little children’s school desk sitting on the sidewalk. I told Landon, “I gotta go. I have an idea!” So, I picked up the desk, brought it home, and I sat with it, and thought we should set this in a classroom. So that's what our story does. It's a contemporary classroom. Alice and her classmates have been given a homework assignment that Alice is really struggling with and she, unlike her classmates, can't help but ask questions about all the things around her. She's banished to the corner of the classroom and she sees a rabbit out the window in the schoolyard, and the story unfolds.

Bad Hat Theatre group sitting in school desks on stage for their performance of their unique adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Each actor is a student, raising their hands from their desks.

It’s an “all about you” assignment and one of the questions she's asked is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Everyone in the class has their own answer but Alice says, “How can I possibly decide? There’s so many things that I could be.” So she’s scribbled 1000s of answers - fireman, dentist, doctor. She finds it a bit unfair. It’s a really amazing commentary on the school system. What business do we have asking a nine-year-old or a 12-year-old what they want to do for the rest of their life? And extrapolating that further, what business do we have asking high school students to make giant decisions about their future education? So that's the struggle that she goes through, which leads her down the rabbit hole, literally and figuratively.

That's really interesting because Alice has been read by multiple generations and it's captured a large part of our shared imaginative history. When there are creators like yourselves, who can plumb the zeitgeist of what's going on and come up with a theme.

What were you hoping your show would add to the Alice cultural canon that you have pulled from to come up with this story? What would you want people to take away?

I think with all art, one of the best, and maybe the only thing we can do is offer a piece of ourselves. In this, we all felt like we wanted to write something that was for everyone but also to heal something that felt like it was out of tune in ourselves. I think all of us who wrote the show wrote something we felt like we needed, which was a reminder that as we peek into adulthood, in our show Alice is peeking into adolescence. But for us, we felt like we were peeking out of that into a set of rules, responsibilities, and expectations that we'd heard about in our youth and now were ours to action as adults and leaders in an arts organization and just people trying to move through the world. We were at odds with some of those rules, and some of those responsibilities.

This idea that we can't go and reinvent ourselves. I'm not just saying change your hair, but change what your values are, change your job, change your lifestyle. We felt a bit stuck, even though we're in this bubbling, constantly changing arts sector. We still feel that and so we felt like we needed to give ourselves, as well as our audiences, a reminder that we are forever peeking into potential new versions of ourselves. It's not that adolescence starts and you have to become this new, complete version of yourself, and then you're 20 and this needs to happen now and then you're 30 and you have to have answers to these questions. It's good to have questions for the entirety of your life. You can continue to reinvent yourself as you grow.

And with all our shows that are for all audiences, we take the things we knew as kids and try to give them back to the elder generations that are in the audience. So kids feel seen when they come to our shows and the more adult audiences that bring the kids feel like, “Oh, I used to have that wisdom. Where did it go?” That's a lot of what the purpose is.

I was going to ask you, Landon, because, in the mission statement, you talk about getting back to that childhood curiosity, that childhood imagination, which is where so much great creativity comes from. How do you access that part of you to come up with either your performances or the music that you write?

I think to be a successful artist, you always have to hold on to that part of yourself. There's a reason children are so imaginative and children. I think it's because we come into the world as creative and imaginative beings but pretty quickly, we’re told we have to start to become something and our options become increasingly limited the older we get in terms of who we can become or the way we're seeing in the world. Just being an artist at all, you have to fight to keep that part of yourself alive. As Fiona said, when we were creating the show, in our version, Alice is peeking into adolescence, and we were peeking into adulthood. For example, when we were working on Peter Pan, we were all right out of school. We didn't have careers yet, or reputations, we had everything to gain and nothing to lose. But after the success of Peter Pan, stepping into writing Alice, it was sort of our sequel and we were going, “Can we do this again? What happens if we fail?” Our version of Alice is reminding ourselves as creators to do what Alice does in the play, which is to keep asking questions, rather than just trying to answer all of them. Because questions are a place where creativity can flow and thrive and answers are a place of absolutes. It’s a definitive place when you have an answer to something. There's less room to grow. There's not really somewhere to go when you have the answer to something. But a question is such an open door.

The original is about a young girl who's on her way to becoming a proper young British lady. So I don't think we needed to retell that story, but you can translate that story to any young person having to become anything. Being able to step into a version of ourselves is such a wonderful opportunity we all have but it can also be really limiting. There's something, specifically about music, a lot of musicians will know the four chords in any key and how many successful pop songs are built off of the four chords. Well, as a musician today, I won't let myself write a four-chord song, because I know that's basic or that's amateur or that's been done so often. But when I was younger, before I knew my music theory, I would play the four chords and feel like I had just come up with the greatest hook of all time, because I wasn't aware I had been writing a four-chord song. I think there's a reason a lot of the most famous pop songs in the world were written by teenagers and by young people because I think when you become an older musician, you judge that type of work, and you go, “It's been done. I can do better than that. I can find something more interesting to listen to.” But sometimes the simplest is best and I think that's why children and young people create some really amazing art. It comes from that place of discovering something new for the first time, and not knowing that there's somewhere else to go yet.

Image of 3 actors from Bad Hats Theatre group, performing Alice in Wonderland. They are jumping on the stage with the White Rabbit leading two others in a song and dance number.

After Peter Pan, which is a huge story that's been around almost as long as Alice, how do you confront the anxiety of failure? It seems that what you are saying is you remind yourself about asking yourself questions, as a device to move the creative process forward. Is that true for all of you?

I would say so. I think what resonated for me, and what Landon was just saying reminded me, was the naivete you have when you write a first draft of something is bliss. We often say “first thought, best thought.” Then we’ll go through drafts, drafts, and drafts and then someone will go, “What if it was this?” And we'll be like, yes. And then we'll go, “That was actually how it was when we began, which is interesting.” You write a first draft and you feel good about it. Then the hard part comes when you have to take it apart and make it better. It’s not impenetrable, but it feels good to have it feel good for the first time.

In terms of the anxiety, that's a good question. You can only do the next right thing, right? If I zoom out and think “How will this feel on opening night a year from now and people are seeing it for the first time and those people saw us do X Y, Zed art before and have X Y, Zed expectation?” You could go down a rabbit hole very quickly. But you have to go back to focusing on the micro, “Do I like this line? Is this funny? Does the music want to come in here? Or here?”

You just have to put one foot in front of the other and the joy that we have is that we're all really good friends, and we laugh a lot. We're really lucky. I spend most of my days working with these goobers and we have a wildly fun time and we get to put a lot of ourselves in the piece. You keep going and hope for the best and I think we have to make room for artists also to fail. We have to be allowed to make bad work and I think that's something that we've learned. Post Alice, not because Alice was bad, it was a huge success, but I think the pressure in a way only grows and we've only just now started talking about how it's okay to fail forward. My dad used to say a B.B. King line, “You better not look down or you might not keep on flying,” which I think is a good one. If I look down at what's possible in the darkness of what could go wrong, or the way I could fall, I will. But I think it's also okay to go, “If I do fall, it's okay. I've got all these people who will catch me and I'll catch me and you need to learn.” There's gonna have to be darkness and lightness in the process.

There’s the adage, “You have your whole life to write your first novel, you have your whole life to write your first play.” Peter Pan, there was no expectation. No one knew who we were. Personally, there was a lot of fear of failure regarding the sophomore project. We do other things outside of these major productions, our mainstream flagships. We do a lot of other things. We have development programs, we do smaller plays, and we do workshops. But Peter Pan was a big thing and suddenly people go, “When's the next one ready?”

We have the extreme privilege that our work has been programmed time and time again, which doesn’t happen very often. We managed to do several runs of Peter Pan from 2015 to 2019 and that afforded us visibility and presence in the landscape while being able to work on Alice, whichwe started working on in 2018 and premiered on stage in 2022. Now we're doing little rewrites, and we're coming back for a remount and we'll do little rewrites before we do it again in 2024. We have two stops planned for 2024, so it's nice that we have this time to make iterative art. But we weren't rushed to do the thing. Honestly, the pandemic helped. We suddenly felt we had the time with it. We could actually put forward something worthwhile with a message.

If I can add one more thing about the fear as an artist, there's an element of mindfulness. You have to practice just not looking at it and giving it too much of your attention and energy. It’s the same thing as having the thought, “Am I going to make rent next month?” That's only so useful to actually helping you make rent next month because sometimes the anxiety and the fear can just become debilitating. Sometimes the pressure can prompt you into creativity but sometimes it can actually inhibit creativity.

As Fiona said, about how much we make each other and ourselves laugh within a creative process, it’s important to lean on those moments. Because, when the pressure is out there and opening night is on its way, and you're thinking about all the important people coming to your show, it can be a debilitating thing. It’s true and it’s the reality but I find it’s just often not that useful to give it too much attention. So, I really just try to practice not looking at it. The other thing is, when I was a younger artist, I didn't think too much about what other people thought. I just knew I was making myself and my friends laugh and that was enough. Then in this process, at the beginning, you start thinking, “What are people going to think? Are they going to like it? Is it going to be as good as next time? Can we maintain this status we've risen to?” Again, I find that fear just gets in the way and the older I've gotten the more I've been able to go back to that youthful place of just trusting my taste and trusting the way I make my friends laugh in a room and I've just gotten better at trusting that if I like something chances are other people will probably like it, as well. I'm an audience member. I consume a lot of art. So, my taste must count for something.

Still image of actors on stage, performing Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the theater. This is Bad Hats Theatre, on stage with chess board lighting, with a red hue.

This relates to something that you had mentioned, Frank, about Lewis Carroll’s, “Who am I?” thesis. Our director has been with the piece for a very long time since we started writing in 2018. Her name is Sue Miner. She was in the interview for the job and we said, “This will be the project, these are the requirements.” And she said, “This is all fine. As long as I can stay Sue, I can do anything.” That’s something that resonated with me a lot and I know it resonated with Fiona as well. It inspired a lot of that element of saying that it doesn't matter who you want to be when you grow up, as long as you stay you, as long as we as artists stay ourselves in the creation of it, you can get through anything, and you can push through any barrier. The ultimate answer to who we want to be when we’re older should just be ourselves.

Landon, you mentioned that Lewis Carroll wrote his piece as a reflection of Victorian England. This is a question for all three of you. Why do you think it is that Alice in Wonderland still resonates with audiences today? Why is it that you can take something that was written 150 years ago, and put a spin on it? What is it about that story, do you think?

I do actually think there is something to be said for the '60s and '70s psychedelic drug experimentation era, the hippie movement, and the Beatles. I do think the Caterpillar sitting on the mushroom smoking a hookah and the Mad Hatter play into it. I don't know if that is Lewis Carroll's intention but it seems that the hippie and psychedelic culture has taken Alice on as an icon.

That's true. For the 60s, Alice is a reflection of the decade of the era. The music, in particular, speaks to that.

The Matrix took Alice and made it about the internet and falling down that rabbit hole and tech. Each decade reimagines it, which is the great thing about some of these stories, they can be retold so they have meaning for a contemporary audience. As your play or your musical is doing with your theme that is personal to you. As you said earlier, it's a reflection of who you are and that becomes part of the canon.

Fiona when you were writing, were there themes coming from the original that you said “These are universal themes of identity or logic.” For me, the world is so illogical and facts are no longer facts so Alice is the archetypal story of illogic and it seems relevant now.

I think you hit the nail on the head that the universality exists in Alice receiving a world that is a mirror of the real world, and its illogical aspects. Why is time counted the way that it's counted? Why does the sun come up over there and go down over there? What is gravity? Why do our door handles open this way? I think her changing sizes and all the things that happened physically to her when she's in this world have so many nods to how a person moves through life. How do they move through the world? How do we fit into society? Your life can be one way and you get a phone call, you get information, and then you're in a completely different universe.

I read somewhere that essentially, the Hero's Journey is, the Hero sets out on his quest, completes the quest, comes home, and everything is changed. Whereas the Heroine’s journey is the Heroine sets out on the quest, comes home, and spends the entire journey trying to get back to how it was before to level the playing field. Alice, especially in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, comes out at the end and goes, “Oh, that was strange,” and then continues on her way. I rebelled against that a little bit. I felt like I needed to make a hero. The gendering of this is so silly and dated but in terms of those two structures, I wanted to have things changed for Alice when she got home. This is only to say that I think there's a quest-like nature to it that has just as many heinously illogical things that everyday life has had in all the decades that this story has been popular. Life’s been nonsense since it was written so I think we keep going back to these things that make us feel a little bit seen and make us feel like our frustration with the structures of the world and the rules of the world are reflected to us.

Image of Alice, running across the stage. This photo is taken from Bad Hat Theatre's unique adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

I agree with that. I also agree with the idea that her adventure is a quest. But she's so passive in the original and asking questions helps give her some agency, but she doesn't have the traditional or classic Hero's Journey. That also bothered me, which was one of the reasons I wrote The Looking Glass Wars.

But let's get into the music because Landon, you brought up the Beatles and “I Am the Walrus,” which is a classic song that was inspired by Alice. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is another one. There's so much music in culture that is inspired by Alice. There's something about the poetry of music that lets artists explore these themes and allows Alice to be a muse. What kind of musical influences have you had for your show?

I heard some artists talk about influences and how early on in your career as a songwriter you'll just hear the influences. So, when I was a younger songwriter, you'd hear a lot of the Beatles, a lot of traditional musical theater, a lot of pop punk, a lot of Green Day. You’d hear one of my songs and go, “That sounds like this Paul McCartney song or that sounds like this Green Day song.” Then the more influences you gather as an artist, the more you can't actually hear those specific artists and those specific influences, and instead my artistry gets to be at the forefront, which is an amalgamation of all these different influences. But I do feel now like there's a little bit of a Landon Doak style. Now I collaborated on the music with Victor, and Victor has a background in a lot of classical music, actually, and we have very different tastes. Although David Byrne is definitely a crossover, which is definitely a whimsical flavor.

The '60s-70s psychedelic movement is a massive influence on the type of music I write. I'm definitely a Beatles fan but I'm a Paul McCartney fan, first and foremost. I think he's one of the greatest songwriters of all time. So that's definitely an influence on my writing. I also listened to a lot of musical theater and I listened to a lot of rap and R&B, as well. So this show, I guess, would span from pop to folk to a little bit of R&B. Then, Victor is a really accomplished pianist. Typically, as a songwriter, I sit down on the guitar, but there were times when Victor would play piano. He would start playing something and I would say, “That! Take that part and loop that over and over again,” and that would be the impetus for me to write a certain song in the show.

But you could write albums upon albums from this text. There's so much poetry. Lewis Carroll touches every theme and idea under the sun. There are a lot of different styles of music in our show. My influences are the main influences you'll hear so it’s some version of contemporary pop, folk, and musical theater. I find a lot of contemporary music these days is blending what we perceive as genres and so you'll hear a lot of that in the show. Victor did a lot of the instrumentation. I typically write the chords, the melody, and the lyrics. But Victor was the one who really steered the ship about what instruments are going to be where and what instruments are going to make up which song. We use these instruments called melodica, which are little pianos that you blow into that's got its own kind of whimsical sound.

The reason that this instrumentation is so important is because these are actor-musician shows. Everything on stage is being played by the actors singing the song, so you might be noodling on the piano and you jump off, you play the dodo for a bit, and then you jump back on the piano, or you go over to the electric bass and whatever.

As Landon said, I'm a classical pianist. I also was a concert tuba player and brass player. So I played a lot of that in my previous life and then I decided to ditch music and become an actor, and then it all worked its way back. The reason I was laughing about David Byrne was just that I find his music so funny, profoundly so. I love the themes of home that he brings into everything he writes, but one of the reasons that we got drawn to David Byrne as an influence of the show is Landon and I were really interested in the idea of time in music when we started writing this. That was the first launch point, we were performing Peter Pan one day, and Landon and I were backstage and we just started jamming right before one of our entrances, talking about what we can do with time and music, how do we make that come across? A lot of those ideas were pushed to the side by the end of it because you need to make it palatable as well. You can't have this disjointed strange, amelodic stuff happening on stage. But David Byrne is someone who I really admire for his ability to manipulate time without anybody realizing it.

The most “out there” one we went with was the Tea Party song, for which I wrote three songs in three time signatures and overlapped them over each other. Which was one of the most sadistic things I've ever done. The band is like, “I can't believe you make us do this every night.” Everyone's just sweating the whole time. But it is one of those pretty insane and counterintuitive songs, which we eventually wrote lyrics overtop of and remarkably it worked well.

But to go back to the instrumentation, I didn't want anything that sounded too normal. I didn't want it to be the classic pit band on the side. I wanted it to feel whimsical and we found these melodicas, which are functionally speaking the keyboard side of an accordion with a hose or just a little trumpet mouthpiece that you blow into, and it blows air through it in a similar way that the bellows of an accordion would work. It gives you this kind of “whah” sound as the reeds themselves are in dissonance. We liked these little instruments because they were portable and they were so squeaky, honky, and strange, while still producing enough sound to be able to actually orchestrate with. So we have piano, bass, and these three melodicas. For percussion, we have a cajon, which is a drum box on wheels that zips around the stage and then we have a clarinet and a trumpet, as well.

The great thing about it is Fiona is the queen of this cajon and it's literally flying around as she's ripping on the drums and then she passes it to someone else and someone else sits down and starts going. It's a really fun and accessible way of presenting these kinds of musicals because families and adults and kids and whoever comes to see it, are watching us have an insane amount of fun.

Photo from Bad Hat Theatre's production of Alice in Wonderland, during a musical number. The White Rabbit is playing the melodica, while Alice is standing on her desk, presumably singing a song.

That sounds genius. I think anybody listening after that description would want to run out and see this show.

Because you've talked about lyrics, are there some lyrics that you can share with us that capture the theme of your show?

I love all of the lyrics of this show. The first lyrics of the show are always really important. What is the first thing we get to hear? The first thing we hear in our show is the clock ticking, giving the audience a sense that something’s gonna happen. But the first thing that Alice sings is “I can't help but wonder why don't others wonder too?” It’s this big ringing question in her of, “I can't stop my brain from being curious about everything.” Why is it called noon and also called 12 o'clock? Why don't the other times have names? And why don’t we say we tuck our pants into our shirts instead of our shirts into our pants? She sees things and she has these branches of questions that come off of it. Our proposal is that this is true for everyone. We've just trained ourselves not to ask them. We’ve gotten really practiced at it and we need to unpractice it.

That’s terrific. It’s very expressive of what you've all been talking about. Is there a song that people have latched on to that they sing on the way out?

There are a lot of styles in the show so depending on what you're into, you might latch on to something different. The Queen song where we first meet the Red Queen, it's the Red Queen in our version, and the song starts, “What's it gonna be? What's it gonna be Alice? Since you gotta be, what's it gonna be Alice? You could be a queen, you could be a queen, Alice. You could be free, you could be a queen.” It’s this hip hoppy song that really gets stuck in people's heads.

Two of my favorite numbers are the opening number, which we call “Curious,” and the closing number, which we call “Questions”. They book end the show really well and they’re two sides of the same coin. Alice starts in a place where she is curious, and you'd almost think the natural place to end a show would be “Answers”. But it's not. It's “Questions”. The show ends with this open-door question mark with Alice inviting her class and the audience to not actually answer those questions and to remain in that curious place. There’s a recurring line in the first song, “I'm not curious, I'm not interested/It doesn't matter/It doesn't even matter.” It's Alice talking to herself to try and beat away that curiosity but by the end of the show, she’s embraced it. It’s actually after a run-in with the Caterpillar, who tells her that you don't need those answers and you don't need to figure out who you are until you aren't who you were, then you are who you are and that changes you will learn,” is a lyric the Caterpillar sings and by the end of the show, that final song starts, “Do you have a question? Go ahead and ask it.” That’s the note we leave the audience on.

The White Rabbit and the Red Queen from Bad Hat Theatre's on-stage play production of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

That’s very powerful. I really like that. You guys have worked on a lot of fantasy with Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and I know you have a Chronicles of Narnia story coming up. Why do you think certain stories or music can stand the test of time? Especially these fantasy stories?

These three stories 100% spoke to the times they were written in but they are universal in terms of the mirror they put up to society. It creates a beautiful canvas for a few reasons. The first is recognition. People know when they go into Alice in Wonderland, they’re going to experience the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, and the Queen of Hearts. So you can take that and subvert it. You can really ask the audience to see those characters and those moments in different lights and reflect on their own lives in that way.

I also think one of the reasons these fantasies especially endure way longer than contemporary stories is because technology is not as prominent a factor in those stories. Technology in the sense of swords and shields or in the sense of clocks, absolutely. But these aren't people sitting on their cell phones or their laptops. There's a universality to it because it is not rooted in time. Even though Narnia is set post-World War II, it's also in a different world and in a different time. Even though Alice was written in the 1860s, you can translate it because Wonderland is out of time and place, similar to Neverland in Peter Pan, which was written in the early 1900s. With each story, you're transported away from regular life.

As Victor said, fantasy allows you to imagine a multitude of life experiences and a multitude of timelines in the same human experience. I love how Star Wars phrases it, they start everything with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” To us, it looks like the future but Star Wars is technically set in the past, just in a different galaxy. Those types of worlds, they have no timeline and they exist in a different dimension.

Stories last because the human experience hasn't changed that much. Since the beginning of time, we were all these little biological beings who have this innate sense of love and then we're at war all the time. So being a human is this weird little equation of the amount of time I have and the love I need to feel or give, and what to do with that love in the amount of time I have. I think that's been true of the human experience forever and that's never going to change. Pop culture references, history, politics, and our values as people do change but when you set a story in a fantasy world, you take it outside of that stuff. You take it outside of time, but the fundamentals of being a human are going to be the same no matter what dimension or period you're in.

I agree. I think these universal truths and emotions bind humanity and the stories reflect that. It doesn't matter when they were written because, at its essence, it's about the human experience. Love and reinforcing certain values that we all aspire to is evoked over and over again in these stories and it doesn't matter what era you're in because you're telling that same universal truth.

When in your life you interact with a specific piece of art also matters as well. We may have seen Alice as a Disney film when we were young or we read the book. I read Peter Pan in grade 11 and I remember going, “Oh my god, this is the story for me right now in this moment of my life.” And then I read it again and again. I think of each person as a tuning fork and we each have a note. Then when you pick up a piece of art, whether you listen to a song, look at a painting, or read a book at a different age of your life, it goes in harmony with that tune, your pitch, in that moment of your life in a different way than it will when you're in your 60s or when you were five years old. The spirit behind all our shows is inspired by the idea that we can present this piece of art and it's going to be in harmony with people of different ages throughout the audience in different ways but everyone is going to blend and make a chord together.

That's the whole reason that when stories enter the public domain, folks like us take those and reimagine them to be relevant for a contemporary audience.

I find it interesting how many times we've used “down the rabbit hole” today or you said, “Oh, I'm gonna use that pond again.” I don't know if people realize that Alice in Wonderland is literally the most quoted book in the world, except for the Bible. By far, “down the rabbit hole” is Lewis Carroll's biggest contribution to the English language, and most of the time we use that metaphor to mean a time suck of some sort. But we also use it to mean a guilty pleasure. “I'm down the rabbit hole of whatever show you're watching.” So, what rabbit holes of guilty pleasures do you enjoy separately from your work at Bad Hats?

I'm in a nature rabbit hole. I'm very fortunate that my family has a little cottage out in the Kawartha Lakes and it feels like a rabbit hole. You're right about this “down the rabbit hole” thing. It's something we all say all the time, and it feels like you're down a thought loop. You're stuck in a hole that you need to somehow find a way out of. But it's interesting that in all three stories we’re adapting, they all go through a magical portal at some point. This is common in a lot of stories but in Peter Pan, Peter takes the Darling children out the window and they end up in Neverland. In Alice, they obviously go down a rabbit hole and end up in Wonderland. In Chronicles of Narnia, they walk through a wardrobe and end up in Narnia. Anyway, my rabbit hole is the woods, escaping the city of Toronto and disappearing into this magical place I'm in.

That's great. Very true to the original.

I was actually counting earlier and by the time you mentioned how many times we’d said down the rabbit hole, the count was six. I feel like you should have a counter on the podcast because I'm sure this happens every time you interview anyone. But I don't know if I could pinpoint one exact thing. I've been going on this pretty fantastic journey through British panel shows. It’s comedians on really inane talk shows that are all just about playing stupid games together or who's lying or doing trivia because they love pub quizzes and trivia. You wouldn't think it's that entertaining but it's that British wry humor and there's a sort of a circuit so you see them go from one show to another and you kind of follow your favorite ones. I've honestly found a guilty pleasure in watching all of these shows, Would I Lie to You?, QI, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and Taskmaster.

That’s definitely a rabbit hole and you have a rabbit picture on your wall. So you're really hitting the theme heavily.

My answer is pretty boring. I've been knocked down a puzzle rabbit hole for the last year. I just can't stop doing puzzles. It’s funny that you said things that aren't Bad Hats and the sad truth is that most of my time is spent working at Bad Hats or for other companies I freelance for so one of the only things I can do to stop myself from working is to sit down and have to go, “Where does this line or match up with another line?” It’s just a busy thing for my fingers and my brain. Often another positive but unfortunate result of that is it allows enough space in my brain for new thoughts to come in and I get back up and get to my computer and I start writing other things. So, it's a breeding ground for all kinds of stuff.

Two people holding umbrellas, and dancing upon a multi-colored circle. From the on-stage play: Alice in Wonderland by Bad Hat Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I always ask this question and, as you guys are all performers who have done Alice, it's probably going to be much easier for you. But, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, would you be, and what part of your personality is best reflected in that character?

I relate pretty hard to the characters I play in the show. My primary character is Tweedle Dee, opposite Landon's, Tweedle Dum. I relate in the sense that those two characters represent our relationship really well which is just playing off each other and constant tomfoolery. It feels like I get to run around in a playground that I built with my best friends. It feels very true to my specific relationship with Landon. If I was a character in Wonderland, it's hard to say. On different days it's different people. Sometimes I feel like I get a bit White Knight-ish. But I do really relate to the characters in the show, there's a reason we kind of wrote them for ourselves.

I think what makes these characters in the book, not just in our version, but in the book so relatable is that none of them feel like full people. They all feel like aspects of all of us. Like Fiona said, on different days, I probably relate more to different ones. We played Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, who, in our version, are constantly saying the phrase, “Let's go!”. They’re these two characters who have a positive outlook on everything and are really jacked up on learning stuff. They’re the first people in our version who Alice stumbles upon who aren't telling her what she should do and how she has to do something. They’re open to anything that can happen and they think, “Let's go learn a thing, and let's go on an adventure.” I think Fiona and I, as artists and as creators, on the days where we get a little too cerebral, and we're looking for the answers, and we're looking at the fear, you’ve got to adopt that Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, attitude of, “I don't know the answer, but let's go look that place.” We also play the Mad Hatter and the March Hare opposite each other. There’s sort of this duo-ship that we get to play with.

I would say, I want to be the Caterpillar but I think I'm often Alice, living in this place of questions and dealing with the anxiety that that place can cause. But I would want to be the caterpillar who, like Alice, is living in a place of questions, but is so at peace with not having the answers.

I think if you want to hit it on the head, White Knight was my first response. But it's funny because there's the original book and then there's the adaptation we've done. Your listeners don't necessarily know the adaptation we've done but Fiona has fused Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in a lot of ways. So Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are in our version of Alice, even though it's not in the original adventures, we've combined them in that way as well. It’s almost hard for me to say because I feel now I've experienced this stage version more than I've experienced the book. So, my perception of reality is a bit skewed in that sense, but I do see parallels between myself and both the White Knight and the Dodo. I also relate to the Mad Hatter as portrayed in our show. The concept behind it is Alice stumbles into a dinner party and it's all adults talking. It’s the idea of what someone younger might feel like witnessing the most inane adult conversation.

“How are you? I'm busy. Oh, me too. So busy. So busy. Isn't that hard? Oh, it's so hard.” Just complete nonsense as she's trying to chime in and they go, “Why don't you sit here at the kids’ table and they continue with their inane banter. I’ve become that a little bit of my life. I send Fiona memes a lot of being like, “How are you?” “Busy, busy.” And she's like, “This is just art imitating life imitating art imitating life. So those three are my go-to.

Those were excellent answers and it's been such a pleasure chatting with you. I'm going to say that my takeaway is the creative energy the three of you have. There's a synergy to what you're trying to accomplish that comes through. It’s a really beautiful thing to see and to witness and listen to. I think my audience is going to enjoy this episode immensely and I know that they're all going to want to see your show whether it's in person or if you put it on film one day, we all hope to see your Alice in Wonderland.

Thanks so much for having us on. It's such a delight to get to go back and think about the source material since we've lived with it as an adaptation for so long. It's such a great universe to get to play in and we're really lucky to have gotten to go there and that people liked what we did in the sandbox of Wonderland. I do hope your audiences can find their way to Toronto in the winter to see it at the Soulpepper Theatre in the Distillery District. If not, I have a hunch it will be around for years to come in different locations. So, look out for us.

It is great to get back to the source material. I haven't thought about this for a long time. I have a newfound appreciation for one of the babies I made. So, thanks for giving that to us, Frank. And thanks for having us.

FB Enjoy your rabbit holes and thanks again.