Alice by Heart 2026 Production Slate: High School and Regional Run Dates and Venues
By Robert Thorne
The musical did not arrive overnight. Its developmental gestation spanned nearly a decade, originating as a collaboration between composer Duncan Sheik and lyricist Steven Sater following their Tony-winning work on Spring Awakening. Enlisting book writer and director Jessie Nelson, the team reshaped Lewis Carroll's 1865 fantasy into an allegory for wartime trauma. Instead of a pastoral Victorian riverbank, the story unfolds in an underground London tube station during the height of the Blitz in 1941.
Alice Spencer, a teenage girl hiding from Nazi aerial bombardment, watches her childhood friend Alfred contract terminal tuberculosis. Desperate to shield him from his impending death, she turns to a battered copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, reading aloud as their fellow bunker occupants transform into Carroll’s erratic figures: the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and the Caterpillar. When the production debuted Off-Broadway at the Newman Mills Theater inside MCC Theater in February 2019, critics were divided on the libretto's fragmented narrative structure, yet universally acknowledged the raw emotional pull of Sheik's folk-rock score.
Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.
