Alice by Heart – Greenside★★★

Stories survive because they refuse to sit still.Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has spent more than a century being reimagined, reinvented and repackaged for new audiences. Alice by Heart takes a familiar route into Wonderland but attempts to tell the story through a different lens, relocating Alice and her companions to a London Underground shelter during the Blitz. As bombs fall above, imagination becomes both refuge and escape, and Wonderland emerges from fear, memory and grief. It’s certainly an intriguing idea. The question hanging over it is whether this return journey into Wonderland reveals anything genuinely new. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it feels like a long detour back to places audiences already know. Created by Spring Awakening collaborators Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, the musical shares some of that show’s preoccupation with adolescence and emerging sexuality. Here, however, those themes sit less comfortably. There are moments where Alice’s…