Jason Woods Remixes Wonderland and Recasts the Madness in 'A Mad, Mad Wonderland!'

Jason Woods’ A Mad, Mad Wonderland! is a virtuosic, no-frills thrill ride: no set, no props, just Woods alone onstage with a whirlwind of characters he channels with uncanny precision and theatrical bravado.

The 40-minute solo show is a fever-dream spin through Wonderland, but this isn’t a nostalgic retelling. Woods dismantles and reassembles Lewis Carroll’s world using only voice, posture and rhythm, creating something both familiar and shockingly original. He doesn’t play the characters, he becomes them, with each transformation landing so fully and fluidly that you forget there’s only one person in front of you.

The Cheshire Cat drips with Jack Nicholson’s slippery charm. Eric, the Jack of Clubs, Woods’ own addition to the Wonderland mythos, bursts onto the scene with the rubber-limbed intensity of Jim Carrey. The White Rabbit, all fluttery nerves and dramatic pauses, channels Paul Lynde’s inimitable quiver. But the show’s most inspired stroke may be its reinvention of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, not as fools, but as two sharply drawn minds: one with Alan Rickman’s icy cadence, the other with Jeff Goldblum’s signature stammer and stream-of-consciousness swagger. The result is smart, surreal and often hilarious.

Woods isn’t trading in surface-level impressions; he’s excavating and rebuilding characters from the inside out. The celebrity voices act as framing devices, not punchlines, letting him explore these characters in ways that are surprising, textured and emotionally resonant. Each familiar voice becomes a new lens on the character, and the effect is transformative. It’s Wonderland refracted through decades of pop culture and filtered through a single performer with total command of his craft.

If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s only that the experience is over too quickly. At just 40 minutes, A Mad, Mad Wonderland! is a tight, dazzling burst of theatrical invention. But in that small window, Jason Woods does what many full productions can’t: he takes the audience somewhere entirely new — and leaves them wishing they could stay longer.

Woods is taking both A Mad, Mad Wonderland! and his acclaimed solo show Bing! to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest celebration of the performing arts. Held each August in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Fringe is known for its boundary-pushing, artist-driven programming — a perfect match for Woods’ genre-defying work. He’ll perform both shows daily at Greenside @ George Street from Aug. 1–23. The links to buy tickets for both shows are available at jasonwoodsproductions.com.