Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play

In late August 1886, Lewis Carroll received a letter asking permission to create an operetta based on the Alice books. He granted his permission and by late December Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play was on the London stage. It received very positive reviews and would later become a Christmas staple for the first quarter of the next century.Matthew Demakos, a leading Lewis Carroll scholar, recreates for the first time the complete script in all its variations as performed during Lewis Carroll's lifetime. Demakos' copious annotations are based on:hundreds of collected reviews and contemporaneous articlesLewis Carroll’s private letters and journalvarious rare librettosand the never-before-seen handwritten orchestral score, which Demakos has specially reconstructed, edited, and analyzed for this project.Lewis Carroll was so involved with the adaptation of his Alice books into an operetta that it should be regarded as another of his works. Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice is incomplete without the addition of this annotated version of the Alice dream-play by Matthew Demakos.With his unique combination of musical and Carrollian knowledge, Demakos has reconstructed visual and aural details of the original staging that would otherwise never have been known to us today.This publication—which contains about two hundred illustrations—builds off the previous and extensive research of Catherine Richards, all of which is available open access on the website Lewis Carroll Resources.The book is dedicated to those who produce the first proper production of Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play in the twenty-first century. Read more