MOUNT VERNON — If you’re up for a unique theater experience that is being billed as never-been-done in any theater anywhere in the world, then go to “Alice in Wonderland” at Mount Vernon’s McIntyre Hall.
The experience is downright holographic, as the first-ever combination of ultraviolet lights, stage sets and 3-D glasses makes this META Performing Arts production of “Alice” nothing less than trippy.
“The colors are so incredibly vivid and unreal, the way ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is vivid and unreal,” said Kate Kypuros, META’s program director. “The scene set called the Fantastical Forest is 32 feet wide and 16 feet high and … even though it’s one flat thing it has a holographic effect. It’s really amazing; the reds kind of jump forward and the blues seem to go to eternity.”
The roughly 1,000 square feet of stage sets, including a 60-foot long landscape of a rolling English countryside, are the creation of Camano Island artist Jack Gunter, who is well-known for his whimsical paintings and is now putting his first foray into 3-D art on stage.
“It’s a kind of art work that’s so real, it’s really not real anymore,” Gunter said. “It takes reality and pushes it since these people are already 3-D, so when you put the glasses on, it takes the normal 3-D experience and now it’s 3-D squared.”
The way Gunter explained this 3-D experience, it’s nothing like those red-blue glasses of the ’50s. With these newly invented glasses called Chromadepth, light is bent before it enters your brain through your eyes and turns it into a 3-D image in your thoughts, like making a hologram without using a laser. Those old-style glasses filtered the colors of two superimposed red and blue images.
The 3-D glasses — META ordered 5,000 pairs — are handed out to the audience along with the show program. When the glasses are worn with the black lights on, blue objects appear further away and red colors appear closer, Gunter said.
This version of “Alice” was written by Charles Turner as a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.” The cast is 55 strong. It’s a musical, with music and lyrics written by Steve Moore, and boasts a dozen songs including a wild, gymnastics routine performed by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in hoop suits. The show runs 100 minutes with one intermission. It’s suitable for children as young as 3.
Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com
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