Gallus in Weegieland Review – Funny Show Sends Alice Down a Classroom Rabbit Hole | stage

MThe quirky playwright has discovered that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is more difficult to adapt than they might assume. Yes, Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic is rich with modernity, wit and joy. But also yes, its structure is episodic and its hero lacks agency. Things happen to Alice, one thing after another: colorful but not dramatic.

Carroll purists certainly wouldn’t agree, but in Wegeland’s Gallus, Johnny McKnight makes a better fist of it than most. His version may deviate from the original with a story about a girl who travels from Glasgow’s West End to working-class Denniston, where she falls in love with a rabbit boy, but it also gives Alice Pleasance Liddell an incentive and an antagonist.

Being a millennial, she’s on a journey; In this case, find courage, imagination and love (preferably a dance degree). And she can only achieve this by winning the battle of good versus evil with Queenie of Hearts (an enthusiastic Louise McCarthy, the closest thing to a lady in this panto).

Newcomer Georgie Scott Learmonth makes a brilliant Alice. With Ellie Kemper’s relentless positivity in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, she’s blind to happy Queenie’s threat of execution and deserving of winning the affections of the immature Starbenders bunny. Their inevitable kiss is hilariously delayed for most of the show.

McKnight, who currently plays Dame in Macrobert, Stirling, revamped his script for 2017 to include gags about Ozempic medicine, the Pitlochry Festival’s new stage director Alan Cumming (himself a former Tron panto writer) and Celia Imrie farting on traitorous celebrities. She’s not big, and she’s not smart, but she’s funny.

So does director Sally Reid’s company, complemented not only by Catriona Vint, in wonderfully deadpan form as the Hatter, and Mark McKinnon as a laughable Honey the Caterpillar, but also by schoolgirls Jessica Donnelly and Aidan McCall, who give extra strength to Ross Brown’s upbeat songs. It’s all played out on set by Kenny Miller, who, with his clashing black-and-white lines and squares, is somewhere between a licorice plant and a dazzling ship. It adds to the confusion of the deliriously silly show.