Alice in Wonderland

A Note from Bill

My second foray into the world of Panto with People’s Light was Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Panto, one of the most joyful and consequential experiences of my directing career.

Panto is loud, irreverent, participatory, and wonderfully ridiculous. It asks an audience to play along and imagine that the world could be different than it is.

With Alice, Jennifer Childs, Alex Bechtel, and I leaned fully into that possibility. Our Alice was a middle schooler caught between childhood and adolescence, between fitting in and understanding who she is. Wonderland became a theatrical metaphor for that experience: a place where nothing quite makes sense because growing up often doesn’t.

We wanted to celebrate and center the art of drag, and to reconsider one of Panto’s oldest traditions, the Dame. Rather than making gender the joke, we asked what might happen if gender expression became a source of artistry, celebration, and liberation. The answer was a Wonderland where people could be unapologetically themselves.

During the run, the production became the target of a national campaign by the hate group Moms for Liberty. What began as an artistic conversation became part of a much larger one about LGBTQIA+ people, drag, children, and whose lives are permitted to be visible in public.

I do not believe artists can, or should, remain neutral when the humanity of our community is being debated. For me, this was never provocation for its own sake. It was the question at the heart of Alice: what if the world did not require us to become smaller in order to belong?

I am proud that this production took a stand through joy. 

Sometimes joy is resistance. 

And sometimes the most radical thing a theatre can do is gather a room full of people and invite them to imagine a world in which everyone gets to belong.

That is the Wonderland I wanted to build.