"Alice"

'Alice', 2002

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I have not seen Alice, the play Tom did with Robert Wilson and Paul Schmidt in the early '90s. I'm guessing most of you reading this haven’t either. It played for a couple months in Hamburg in '92-'93 and has been staged a few other places since, but otherwise seems to be, for a play with some big names attached, relatively under-the-radar.

I only know Alice through the album of the same name Tom released a decade later. Until researching this entry, "songs originally from some sort of play" was about the depth of my knowledge of their provenance.

So a quick primer on Alice the play and "Alice" the song for those similarly in the dark. The titular "Alice" refers to Alice in Wonderland. The play juxtaposes the novel’s story with the real relationship between its author Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and the child Alice Pleasance Liddell who inspired his writing. Waits had just recently worked with director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider a couple years before - Tom turned that score into an album far quicker - so, when Wilson decided to tackle the duel Alice narrative, Tom was a natural choice to return.

Though I can't find any video of the full Alice production, a BBC documentary from the time shows a big of "Alice" performed in the play, sung early on by The White Rabbit. There's also footage of Tom playing the song on a backstage piano. Both occur in the first couple minutes.

In the biography Lowside of the Road, Barney Hoskyns puts Alice the music and "Alice" the song in context:

Most of the Alice music was more approachable than The Black Rider, pointing forward to the parlour ballads of Mule Variations and Orphans while drawing on Waits’ Tin Pan Alley style of old. Later, Waits characterized it as “adult songs for children, or children’s songs for adults … an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense.” As with The Black Rider and Night on Earth, his primary choice of instrumentation—woodwinds, viola, pump organ, upright piano—suggested an amateur chamber group playing in a church hall.

“Alice” [the song] itself was something of a throwback, a tender blend of Kurt Weill and One from the Heart. Performed by the White Rabbit in Scene One and positing Alice as a kind of frozen surface that Dodgson/Carroll falls through, it hinted at the suspect nature of Dodgson’s feelings for Liddell but carried a more universal meaning: Waits would later describe [wife and writing partner] Kathleen as “my Alice.”

Here's the demo version of the song that was, in theater form, called "There's Only Alice":

Up next: Tom goes to Mardi Gras in purgatory