The following is the official introduction/synopsis for Speakeasy. While you read it, you may want to listen to the Wonderland’s Master of Ceremonies Chet Cheshire sing the Speakeasy opening number:
(If you are “greedy” and want to listen to more Speakeasy demo tracks, they can be accessed here.)
“Speakeasy – John and Jane Allison in the Wonderland” is a big full-length musical, generously over-stuffed with memorable songs, that cleverly adapts Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to take its audience on a fantastic journey through the little known vibrant Queer culture of Prohibition era New York City. Love and Identity in their many facets are explored in surprising, whimsical and ultimately profound ways in an evening full of song, dance, laughter, heartbreak and adventure.
John and Jane Allison are newlyweds in 1929/30 New York. Although they love each other, they have desires they haven’t even acknowledged to themselves, let alone explored. But after giving her neighbor Roberta White a kiss, and running after her, Jane enters a basement Speakeasy to find herself in a strange world where time and space and identity don’t appear to follow conventional rules. John too enters this world in his own way: after accepting a sexual proposition in a public men’s room he mysteriously slides through the bathroom mirror. Thus Jane goes “down the rabbit hole” and John falls “through the looking glass”. Their adventures, first separate, then together, mirror Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, only with Carroll’s characters and events transformed into characters and events from New York City’s Prohibition era culture.
Notes from a Composer 