Defeating the Wicked Witch of the West is one thing, but will a little brain, heart, and courage help Dorothy and her friends against The Queen of Hearts? Find out where both the Yellow Brick Road and the Rabbit Hole lead when whimsical worlds collide in this year’s holiday production from the Peterborough Theatre Guild.
Dorothy in Wonderland – The Musical by Brian D. Taylor combines the fantastical worlds and eccentric characters of two of the world’s most recognized stories for a fun and creative production that runs for nine public performances from Friday, November 29 until Sunday, December 8 at the Peterborough Theatre Guild, with additional non-public performances for school groups.
Adapted from the beloved works of L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll, Dorothy in Wonderland – The Musical begins after Dorothy Gale has reached the end of the Yellow Brick Road. Before she’s able to accept the Wizard’s offer of a balloon ride home to Kansas, however, a whirlwind appears over Emerald City, sweeping Dorothy, Toto, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion off to Wonderland.
From there, Dorothy’s friends try to help her find the way home and, along the way, run into the whimsical characters of Wonderland, including Alice, The White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, The March Hare, and their dangerous new foe The Queen of Hearts. Dorothy and Alice team up to beat the Queen at croquet, but will that be enough to get both girls back home where they belong?
An American playwright, Taylor first penned the original full-length version of his Oz and Wonderland mash-up in 2013. The next year, he wrote a musical version with lyrics by Scott DeTurk and with musical composition and additional lyrics by the late award-winning Bill Francoeur.
Long-time collaborators, DeTurk and Francoeur produced several works together over the decades, including the acclaimed musicals The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and Western Star, whose book was done by Dale Wasserman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Throughout his own career, Taylor has made a habit of writing fractured fairy tales, as evident in his more recent works The Thirty-Three Little Pigs (2020), The Snow White Musicapalooza (2017), and Rise of Robin Hood (2017).
Dorothy in Wonderland, however, is a fractured mash-up of two classic stories, both of which share similar attributes. In a 2013 blog post, Taylor writes that much of the fun of writing the play came from comparing Alice and Dorothy as protagonists.
“Both are young girls lost in strange worlds, both meet very odd characters, both are sent on a journey to overtake an evil female villain, (and) both girls just want to go home,” he wrote.
While that is all still true in Dorothy in Wonderland – The Musical, the show presents an all-new side of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, who use the newfound qualities they learned they had at the end of The Wizard of Oz to get Dorothy back to Kansas from Wonderland.
“In what other retelling do you get to see a Scarecrow with brains, a Lion with courage, and a Tin Man with heart?” Taylor wrote in another post in the blog series which, leading up to the play’s release, introduced its characters.
Those characters also include Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. Taylor notes that, in all the adaptations of The Wizard of Oz, she is depicted as “saccharine sweet, almost disgustingly so” and he was “tempted to try another direction.”
The other direction was to focus on Glinda’s major flaw: that she did not immediately help Dorothy get back to Kansas by telling her the power of the ruby slippers, after Glinda had magically transferred them to Dorothy’s feet from the house-crushed Wicked Witch of The East. Instead, she made Dorothy go on a journey through Oz because, as she explains to Scarecrow at the end of the 1939 film, “she wouldn’t have believed me.”
“If you’re going to show up and be the hero, you need to do more than that,” Taylor wrote, noting that in his mash-up, Glinda flies to Wonderland to actively search for and help Dorothy. “Sure, she regrets that she didn’t help Dorothy from the outset, but she’s trying to find her to correct that.”
VIDEO: Cast members introduce “Dorothy in Wonderland – The Musical”
The Peterborough Theatre Guild production of Dorothy in Wonderland – The Musical is directed by Sarah Rogers and co-produced by Marion Griffin, a combination that audiences saw for last year’s holiday staging of The Enchanted Bookshop. Cynthia Wardrope is another producer, with Hayley Griffin-Montgomery acting as stage manager for the production assisted by Cory Gavin.
The family-friendly production will be performed at the Guild Hall at 364 Rogers Street in Peterborough’s East City, with evening performances at 7:30 p.m. on November 29 and December 3 to 6 and weekend matinee performances at 2 p.m. on November 30 and December 1 and December 7 and 8.
Tickets are priced at $15 for everyone and can be purchased by calling 705-745-4211 or online at www.peterboroughtheatreguild.com.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2024-25 season.
