Seeing something break is such an excellent view into it. Such was the case with the ART's Alice vs Wonderland, a "remix" of the Lewis Carroll classic—in the words of the playwright, Brendan Shea. His play is mostly a rambling series of dialogues between Alice and the strange monsters she is supposed to have met, in a quilt of pop-cultural textures (motley Harajuku fashion; Radiohead, Lady Gaga, and metal songs to lubricate). Alice is become a sour-pussed, misunderstood teenager (nobody loves her, you see) in femme-punk dresses. When classics are reinterpreted and made contemporary, I always hope for the kind of thoughtful transpositions that we saw in the likes of Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet, but this production, like so many others, just dresses up the old scenes in new clothes, and meanwhile misses the brilliance of the original.

For, in the original, when Alice says, "Curioser and curioser," she is in fact quite curious about the strange creatures of Wonderland. She is clever; she knows exactly why this world doesn't make any sense, and that's why she's so intrigued and amused by it. The Alice of the ART musical is a brat who "just wants to go home." Yet she still says "Curioser and curioser," perhaps only to reuse the "hook" of the original.

The show does have a few nice inventions. To create a mirror, the ensemble lines up on one bench and one of the Alices (different actors play her throughout the show) sits opposite. Staring at this row, she leans in, and the others mirror her, leaning back; then she stands up and runs into the mirror—the row of actors—disappearing amongst them. Then the whole row stands up and steps forward in formation, leaving alone on the bench another Alice—and so one of the Alice-for-Alice substitutions is made.

The Caterpillar was made of a splendid pair of acrobat-physical comedians, who shared a pair of tights and lifed each other around while doing lots of two-faced, four-armed business. Alice had to keep running around to talk to one head or the other according the caterpillar's own inscrutable logic. And, rarely for this show, we had to wait for the punchlines, as the marijuana-fogged caterpillar slowly monkeyed around and Alice tried to keep up. Such protracted hijinx and physical delights are what this show desparately needed throughout.

(In this and in the recent Tim Burton movie, I'm most taken by the Caterpillar: both times a loving caricature of that universal character, the drugged philosopher.)

Anyway, it undercuts the fun of Wonderland's anarchy, to make Alice herself an "anarchic" teenager. Shouldn't she be the straight man? She doesn't even dig the scene there in Wonderland, while it should be just what she's looking for.

"Even a joke should have some meaning" says Queen Alice. And indeed it is so.