Next week, the Triple Door hosts, for the sixth time, Lily Verlaine and Jasper McCann’s burlesque tribute to Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. It follows the almost decade-long running production Land of the Sweets (the burlesque Nutcracker) which sells out the Triple Door for most of December.
But tackling and reinterpreting Alice in Wonderland presents a unique challenge because it’s so thoroughly embedded in our cultural memory, and has been adapted dozens of times previously. This production features Seattle burlesque royalty like Miss Indigo Blue, Inga Ingenue, Babette La Fave (Ivy St. Spectre when she’s in the Atomic Bombshells), and out-of-town ringer Ray Gunn of Chicago, recently named the King of Boylesque.
Through the Looking Glass has evolved from its first performances six years ago, and Lily Verlaine and Jasper McCann are always thinking of ways that it can evolve. This year will include even a new Alice.
Together, they make a brilliant and creative team, advancing burlesque and bringing in elements (and personnel) of classical dance and ballet. City Arts Magazine once described them as “a pair of stylized lifestyle artists dropped into the mundane conventional world.” Which seems fitting and apt.
I met Lily Verlaine and Jasper McCann at a Capitol Hill coffee shop to talk about the production and how it has evolved, and what they’re working on next.
I know you’ve been doing Through the Looking Glass for several years now, but what was it that drew you in to Alice in Wonderland and made you think it would translate to a good burlesque show?
Lily Verlaine: It was on the tail end of Land of the Sweets, which was successful right out of the gate. We were quite surprised by that. We were looking for a new concept.
Jasper McCann: This is one of our favorite stories, having to do with our career or our creative process. We had decided that we were going to take Land of the Sweets on tour. We took a five thousand-some mile road trip to the Midwest because our target city was Chicago. We had been kicking around some ideas for a new thing. We were thinking about things like “Twin Peaks,” but that was too gruesome.
L: But in the car on the way there, we were reading to each other. We read Kerouac’s On the Road, and we read…
J: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, and we read…
Together: Alice in Wonderland.
L: It was so amazing and we knew that was what we needed to do. The source was so incredible and the characters are amazing and it’s so famous. It was so charming and there so many twists and turns that an interpreter could take with it. You could go in a million directions.
J: That was something that was really successful with Land of the Sweets, that someone could come in with what their preconceived notions of what the Nutcracker is, and we hoped that when they arrived for the first time at the Burlesque Nutcracker, it was much different from what they had expected. The same idea was we could take Alice and make it into something that is unexpected, but still familiar. Everyone knows who the Mad Hatter is.
L: We just underlined pieces in the book that we loved. Who can turn a phrase like Carroll? It was just begging to be out in the world. And I’m not a fan of Disney in general…
J: A lot of us aren’t…
L: …Because Disney really controls the cultural conversation around all of our fairy tales, which to me is problematic because it’s a narrow perspective. I know there are some brilliant people that work there but we completely avoided anything that had to do with the Disney version (of Alice in Wonderland).
Lily Verlaine as the Caterpillar in Through the Looking Glass.
One of the reasons why Alice in Wonderland is one of my very favorite books is that it holds up amazingly well from reading it as a child to adulthood. It will always be a great book to read and you don’t really ever outgrow it.
L: It’s so flexible to interpretations. There have been so many intense interpretations of Alice. There was a porn film in the seventies. I watched it in research (laughs). It was actually really beautiful. It was the seventies and was in soft focus. It was so charming. It was like the most charming pornography you could ever imagine.
J: There was the live action version from the 1980s, which had Donald O’Connor, Sammy Davis Jr., and Carol Channing in it, which is really frightening… and weird.
L: The text lends itself to be taken in so many directions. Thank you, Lewis Carroll, for writing it.
The direction that we took is to play to the strengths of the venue, the beautiful venue, and to the strengths of Jasper, who is a lovely MC and singer, and this idea that I had with Alice and her reflection. I actually wanted six Alices but we have two.
J: It was a compromise.
L: We have Alice, and then there is looking glass reflection. There are a bunch of choreographic themes that I wanted to explore that fit in really well. Just finding dancers that are of the same stature and move in a similar way, who could do this intensely difficult choreography and be of a differentiating personae so we can show the sides of the human being: this person who is in the real world and has all of these notions of who they are, and then the reflection shows a piece of themselves they didn’t actually know existed.
J: Or a piece of what they’re looking for.
L: Those themes are present in the text as well. Some people think Alice is a story of the journey of self, and that interpretation lends itself to the interpretation that we have, as well. I wouldn’t say the book is about that, but it is one thing.
And Alice in Wonderland is a book that you can ask twenty different people what it’s about and get twenty different answers.
L: Agreed, completely agreed. One of the cool things is that as the show has evolved over the last five years, we’ve been able to pull in more and more of those themes as our understanding what the show we created is about, or our interpretation of the text widens.
J: And we continue to develop deeper philosophical themes, which you might think is funny for a burlesque show but the more and more we talk about, to use a cliché, the deeper down the rabbit hole we go. It’s exciting to look at the way that characters are interacting with one another and the manner in which the story is progressing. It has a lot more layers as we’ve grown as artists. This year is even a great departure from years before.
My understanding is that there will be a lot of changes this year from years past.
J: Yes. There are major, major changes.
L: I need to acknowledge the audiences in Seattle sticking with us. One thing I appreciate so much is that we’ll put an idea out the first year and they’ll believe in it and tell their friends and they’ll come back. One thing we seek to do is grow with the audience. As the audience helps us grow, we like to grow with the audience.
We have quite a few re-casts this year. I’m seeing some existing choreography with new artists is deepening my understanding of what the choreography is, even though I created it.
J: In the past, we’ve shied away from anything that could be considered grotesque. Not in a vulgar way, but in a gruesome way or anything that might be scary or dark. I think now we’re at the point where we can talk about because it’s part of the story. It’s really exciting to see the way that we have progressed in this way.
To speak to what Lily was saying, the Queen of Hearts has become much more violent, or gruesome.
L: The Queen of Hearts has become a bit more complicated. I’ve been reading about societal power and how it can corrupt. What interested me about the Queen of Hearts is not who she is, but how did she become that? How did she become that bloodthirsty? How did she become interested in taking people’s heads off?
One of the great gifts to us is in Inga Ingenue because she’s exactly five feet tall. We could have this Napoleon complex theme. When she enters the room, everyone has to shrink because no one can be taller than her. That’s one reason. Another reason is that Alice beheaded Jabberwocky in the book. Our question is: what if Alice became the Queen of Hearts? Now we have a new Alice coming in.
J: It’s also self-referential because Inga, in the last iteration of the show, was Alice. We essentially are telling the story of the Alice that came into the looking glass the first time, defeated the original Queen of Hearts, and has become corrupted by the same power. But a new Alice has arrived, so it’s, if you will, this revolving door of self-reference and the nonsensical idea behind Carroll’s world.
Jasper McCann as the White Rabbit in Through the Looking Glass.
Can you talk a little bit about what goes into putting on a show like this, or Land of the Sweets? I know it’s a ton of work…
L: What I do in our process is find the talent, schedule the talent, I connect with amazing costumers. This year, we’re working with Eric Andor, who is awesome. He’s done some work with Madonna but he’s local and just amazing. He’s redesigning the costumes. That’s my role: doing the choreography, finding the talent, learning what their skills are, finding out the best way to paint them, and figuring out the best way to bring them into our production with the skillsets they offer. At the very last minute, I work on my act and realize I don’t have a costume or choreography. (laughs)
J: The way that we start is that usually there are drinks involved and then we go back and forth of what we want the idea to be. Then Lily does all of her things and I source the music, I do all of the editing, I do most of the writing. We have the privilege of knowing each other well enough that we enough that we can edit each other on occasion.
I do all of the stuff that has to do with music editing. I design the lighting, although I don’t hang the instruments. I work a composer to write original music. I do a lot of PR and business management.
L: Paul Strong at the Triple Door has been a tremendous asset to us. He does all of the lighting at the Triple Door. He is rebuilding one of our props this year and always puts us in touch with the right source at the right time. He’s kind of a miracle. The venue has been very supportive. Part of the creative process, we really need to mention the Triple Door because they give so many dates, they give great exposure, they give us a great venue to work in.
J: And they give us a lot of technical and production support. The guys who work there are real professionals.
When it comes to casting, how do you find people, besides being in particular circles in Seattle burlesque?
L: One of the cooler things that has happened is that our show started in 2006 and we were working with all burlesque talent. I come from a classical background and my secret hope was that people in the classical world would be interested in working in this type of show. On my end, being a classical dancer is like dance rehab. I love modern dance, I love ballet, I’m a subscriber at the Ballet, I do not behoove those wonderful music options. Normally I don’t have any issue with where I came from, but the lifestyle we have is very different from the lifestyle that those guys have. Around 2010, we started to attract classical dancers. The first one being Isaiah Sumler, who was this gorgeous male. He was hired to work in a children’s ballet I was choreographing in Tacoma. When I met him, I was expecting this scrawny blonde kid, but it was a god who was in front of me. He’s since gone to the Rock School, which is a prestigious classical dance school and has gotten a job with Company C in San Francisco. He has a very bright future ahead of him.
Once he came, all kinds of interesting classical people started to show up. Scott Bartell, who unfortunately passed away last year, worked with us. Donald Byrd is such a magnet for talent in this town. A lot of the dancers he has attracted are dancing for us in their off-time.
One of the mission statements I’ve been tossing around lately is that there are a lot of talented people in this city, and I’d like to give them enough employment that they stay. That is one of my current driving forces.
J: At this rate, we’re slated to do fifty performances between our three shows. A number of the people who perform in Through the Looking Glass also perform in Burlesco DiVino and Land of the Sweets, as well. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re full time or part-time employing a huge portion of the people we work with, which is super-exciting.
L: We created a product that was attractive enough that people started to find us.
L: Oh and we have a special guest for Through the Looking Glass! His name is Ray Gunn. He is from Chicago and is a member of the Stage Door Johnnies. He is the current reigning King of Boylesque. He won a very stiff competition, with Waxie (Moon), Paris (Original), and Mr. Gorgeous from New York. He was awarded the crown. It’s very excited to have him. Waxie is teaching at Cornish this semester.
J: There was an academic conflict.
L: [Ray]’s a classical dancer, so his interpretation of the Cheshire Cat is very different from Waxie’s.
J: For the record, Waxie Moon is not being replaced.
L: It takes the King of Boylesque to stand in for Waxie Moon.
Last question, but what are you working on next that you can talk about?
L: Directly after Through the Looking Glass, we created an event in Walla Walla called Hotel Notel.
J: It’s a smaller format show that we developed for a friend of ours that has an event space. The venue that it is in is formerly the oldest hotel in the Washington territory. It was opened in like 1870. We started this project in March.
Then we’ll be returning to the Triple Door in the early part of October to remount Burlesco DiVino: Wine in Rome, which is very exciting.
{Through the Looking Glass is at the Triple Door Wednesday, April 16 through Saturday, April 19, with two shows nightly. Tickets and more information can be found here.}
