Lewis Carroll, for some reason, didn’t think to include brain-eating zombies in his stories about Alice and her curious adventures in Wonderland. That oversight has now been amusingly rectified in Damon Albarn’s musical “Wonder.land” at the National Theatre.Co-created with dramatist Moira Buffini and director Rufus Norris, the piece centres on Aly (an excellent Lois Chimimba), an unhappy mixed-race teenager living in a London tower block. She finds a curious gaming site called Wonder.land, and creates an online avatar – a beautiful blonde upper-class little girl called Alice (Carly Bawden) – to enter it.There she meets anonymous gamers who have adopted avatar versions of the White Rabbit, Mock Turtle and other well-known Lewis Carroll characters. The plot kicks in when the domineering headmistress Mrs Manxome (Anna Francolini) confiscates Aly’s smartphone and enters the game herself, creating hatred and havoc. Aly’s gay friend Luke (Enyi Okoronkwo) brings some zombies from another gaming site for a final battle to put things right.It’s a lively show in a slick staging performed by a terrific ensemble. There’s some fun choreography (the zombie-shuffle number is a particular hit), and a hilarious scene-stealing turn from Francolini – part Cruella de Vil, part Mrs Thatcher - as the wildly unhinged Mrs Manxome. Her two numbers “I’m right” and the bossa nova-like “Oh, children” are the best of the evening.What lets the piece down is a scatter-gun approach to plot-points, musical styles, and the source material. Race politics, online trolling, internet violence, school bullying, familial dysfunction, web anonymity, sexual identity – they’re all thrown into the narrative mixer, but all quickly get flung out again. It makes the story feel undercooked and the final obligatory life-lesson (“I’m now happy in my own skin”) sadly unearned. The musical was trialled at the Manchester International Festival earlier this year, but some fundamental problems remain in this revision.Albarn draws on a variety of styles for the score from 1920s music-hall, via Gilbertian patter-songs, to Latin rhythms. Some of the numbers are great fun, but the diversity feels rather rag-baggy – as if it’s there for its own sake rather than driven by character or plot - and there’s no big take-home melody to hum.Most tellingly, Carroll’s updated Wonderland characters quickly get sidelined and make fewer and fewer appearances as the evening progresses. They may have provided the inspiration for “Wonder.land” but it feels as if the creative team don’t quite know what to do with them, and so the whole essence of the evening gets rather diluted.Albarn and Buffini are not the first artists who have had trouble making something dramatically coherent out of Carroll’s trippy stories (Tim Burton’s film “Alice in Wonderland” hit the same buffers), but they’ve still created a show of just enough zest and zing to make the hits outweigh the misses.“Wonder.land” is in repertoire at the National Theatre until April 30, 2016. It travels to the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, 7-16 June, 2016.
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