Creating a musical landscape for ‘Wonderland’

Alice? The famous one in Wonderland? She’s a little bit of a headbanger, windmilling her hair around wildly. At least she is for a moment in a production by the New Renaissance Players, thanks to a soundtrack written and performed live by Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. “Alice In Wonderland” premieres this weekend at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls, with performances on Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m., as well as the same days and times next weekend. (Information and tickets are available at www.theshea.org/.) The Greenfield-based Hales, and the frost heaves. weren’t just a big part in creating the musical landscape of the production, adapting 12 Lewis Carroll poems into songs and writing two Alice-themed original tunes — they’re also part of the play’s actual landscape. They perform in full view, on a riser positioned eight feet above the main action, a tree house of sorts, perched in front of a painted backdrop of blue sky, white clouds and green patchwork hills. Before a rehearsal last weekend, I was invited onto the platform to take in the view. I clambered up the ladder and gingerly peered over the edge — it was a thin world up there. The band’s riser was only about four feet wide, packed with amplifiers and music stands, plus James Lowe on bass, Ivan Ussach behind his drum set, Anna Wetherby on viola and Hales with electric guitar, Casio keyboard and an array of guitar pedals. Hales sound-checked with a strum, stepping on a distortion pedal; the whole riser rumbled. I said thanks and edged backwards down the ladder to solid ground. “It’s a lot of fun for most of us to be up on the platform — Anna has specified she’s not afraid of heights, just of falling,” Hales said. “Since they added the silvery trees to the front of the backdrop, it feels even more like a treehouse. As a lifetime lover of tree houses, being able to spend so much time up there is kind of a dream come true.” It’s been a lot of work to get to that dreamy treehouse world. “Writing, arranging and rehearsing this material has been the band’s entire focus for the last three months,” Hales said, noting that they all work full-time jobs and have full lives. Hales has long been filling his already busy schedule with creative outlets, like the Greenfield Arts Eclective, an all-day festival he’s organized for the last four years. The New Renaissance Players have performed at the Eclective, and since Hales has written plays before, NRP asked if he’d write the script for the “Alice” production. Hales liked the adaptation as it was, but another aspect of the play got his creative wheels turning. “The poems were a huge part of the script, and they were just sitting there, sweet, juicy and ripe for the picking, begging to be adapted into songs,” he said. “I adapted the Mock Turtle’s songs first to see what I could come up with.” Hales took his guitar over to director Jillian Morgan’s place and played his two compositions. Morgan “really dug them,” he said, “and from that point on, I worked on the adaptations every day, from the minute I got home from work more or less until I went to bed, until I’d done them all. Simultaneously, James (Lowe) was composing the viola arrangements. This has been a beautiful collaboration between Frost Heaves and NRP from start to finish.” The teamwork between the band and the actors demands serious focus. “There are six songs where I am basically singing a duet with various actors on stage, and one where the whole cast sings along,” Hales said. “Because they’re onstage with their backs to us, it can be tricky syncing up with each other. I can’t actually hear the actors, so they have to sync up with me. I’ve got to try and sing as consistently as possible so our phrasing matches up.” “Father William” is one of Hales’ favorite Carroll poems; he transformed it into the heavy tune that gets Alice to let loose. “Jabberwocky” became a dark rock song, while “Fury said to a mouse...” was arranged for ukulele, viola and triangle. The garage-rocking “Contrariwise” is one of the original tunes Hales wrote for the production. NRP’s “Alice” is the first time Hales has been moved to write music for a play — “I wouldn’t have taken on this project if I didn’t like the poems enough to wish I’d written them myself,” he said — and the results were so satisfying that the band plans to record its “Alice” songs next month. It’s a project Hales calls “an homage to a kindred spirit, and a fun musical exploration of magical realms before our next album of all-original material.”

This post originally appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette's "Clubland" column.