Now and then one likes and dislikes something at the same time. This conflict of feelings applies to the opera Alice in Wonderland by Unsuk Chin just released on a DVD, produced by Unitel & Classica for Medici Arts.

Although in many ways a musical banquet of extraordinary sounds, from the DVD's point of view, the video crew, headed by director Ellen Fellmann, offers too many uncomfortable close-ups. One seldom gets an idea of what the whole production looks like, though, admittedly, when one does see it, it is a let-down.

The world of fantasy and nonsensical fun is a world not only reserved for children, but also adults. That is why we are so attracted to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Alice through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The various characters and their many quotes have crept into our language to be used in common conversation without the slightest thought of their origin. Alice in Wonderland, the single title by which the two books have generally become known, is so entwined in our subconscious as are many lines from Shakespeare's writings that they ensure that the abstract world of fantasy has become reality to us.

No one needs to tell us that Alice's world is full of Victorian satire that takes a poke at all sorts of conventions we accept as part of our heritage. Absurd humor, satire, irony and self-deprecating nonsense that allows us to laugh at ourselves, are instinctive, cultural phenomena in the English-speaking world. Few other societies have this absurd, humorous instinct that allowed Carroll to write his stories more than a hundred years ago, and have it universally accepted and appear still relevant today. O, I should qualify this. Around 1931 Carroll's wonderful tale was banned in Hunan, China, because censors there felt that animals should not use human language, and because animals and humans should not be placed on the same level.

Knowing of this Asian reaction to Alice's strange world, it therefore came as a surprise to find in my possession a DVD that features the world premiere of the opera, Alice in Wonderland, by Chin, born in South Korean in 1961. She moved to Germany in 1985 to continue her music studies and is now settled there.

The premiere of this, her first opera, was conducted by Kent Nagano (music director of the Montreal Symphony) at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich In June 2007. Chin's composition, which changes mood, tempo, and musical style to fit both the humor and the nightmarish aspects of Carroll's work, is suitably abstract to fit Alice's adventures. The voices of the many characters are excellent and capture the essence of the characters to perfection. Musically, there are no complaints from this end.

Sadly, however, Achim Freyer, the stage, set and lighting designer of this premiere appears not to be quite in tune with Alice's world. It is a grey, bleak, far too sober place, and totally lacks the visually corresponding implied humor of the dialog. Perhaps it may be that being German, especially East German, and having studied under Bertolt Brecht, he failed to grasp Carroll's surreal, nonsensical world that makes the stories so enjoyable. In other words, Freyer's inability to discover the child in himself or to laugh at himself, made him see only a forbidding world in the tale.

Although costume designer Nina Weitzner, who also created masks and puppets for this production, managed to introduce some color into this grey world of Freyer's, the staging placed considerable restraint on her work. There is also the strange appearance at the beginning and end of this opera of men in grey wicker masks with rather phallic-looking proboscises that makes one wonder what the designers had in mind. And here is another question? Why is it when Germans bring a mouse on stage, it has to be a mean-looking Mickey Mouse? This Disney character hardly suits that of the Dormouse [Corylus avellana] in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and has no relationship to Carroll.

There are many aspects of this opera that I found absolutely fascinating, yet in the end, I wished to see it in a more sympathetic setting. Chin's music, although not always easy on the ear, deserves better than it got here. Besides, this opera should not just be for adults. In this setting, though, it will repel rather than attract youngsters to opera. It is just too morbid and dour.

Which brings me back to both the beginning and ending of this opera. Chin collaborated on the libretto with David Henry Hwang, who has also collaborated with such luminaries as Philip Glass. They stuck pretty close to the original text, yet invented a new opening and closing to the story. They disallow it to move from the real world to the imaginary and then back. This lack of transition minimizes rather than maximizes the tale. This implies to me that Chin, despite her apparent love of the Carroll books, really cannot comprehend his world and its subtext. Maybe there is something to this theory of misappropriation of another culture that leads to misunderstandings.

In the liner notes Chin is quoted as saying that dreams from her childhood onward have "a far more existential level of experience than anything I have ever known in my day-to-day life." But, if one reads Carroll'' s works properly, one can only understand them wholly if one can relate to the absurdities of daily life. His stories mirror them. Chin also admits that her dreams include visions of immense light and hugely improbable bright colors, which she attempts to capture in her music. This is confirmed in her ending of Alice in Wonderland. After Alice has a very bleak escape from Wonderland, there appear shrilly colored panels on the steeply raked stage in a burst of color that is meant to represent flowers from seeds Alice is given by an Invisible Man to grow on very hard ground. The music soars briefly in unison with the colors. Until then, the stage had remained black, with white strips of light forming lines that created an optical illusion of Alice shrinking and growing as needed. Still, despite the music, this is a crass ending, which fails to capture Carroll's spirit. So, in the end, if a rating is to be given, I sadly give this production two-and-a-half out of five stars.

Review of the short film, Mouth to Mouth has been moved to Archives.
It must be noted here that its star, Ellen Page, received a Best Actress nomination for
a 2008 Academy Award