Jazz singer Hagenbach introduces Carroll to Coltrane

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Angela Hagenbach is 9 feet tall.

Or so her character claims, in a jazzy crescendo, as she summits a stool, a tiny “Eat Me” cake in hand. She’s onstage in the Plaza Library’s Truman Forum, hitting her marks during the second week of rehearsals for JazzAlice: Adventures in Wonderland.

The show is part of the Kansas City and Mid-Continent public libraries’ first Great City | Great Read initiative, which this year centers on the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

JazzAlice may be the most ambitious of the libraries’ slate of Carroll-themed programs, a musical that Hagenbach conceived and wrote, and in which she performs the title role. On this Wednesday afternoon, tapper and trumpeter Lonnie McFadden is stomping slick on the stage’s gleaming wood floors, White Rabbit to Hagenbach’s Alice. For the live show, an ensemble of notable local jazz musicians supplies the score, but today the music is a recording.

The score in question is all John Coltrane. Hagenbach’s lyrics stage Carroll’s story against her two favorite Coltrane albums (Giant Steps and Blue Train, for those Spotifying at home). The decision was like jazz: part structured mathematics (Carroll’s meter fits perfectly with Coltrane’s), part improvisation.

“I had been binge-listening to Coltrane for a while,” Hagenbach says. “So I’m in the kitchen cooking one night, cookin’ up some greens,” she says with a laugh, stretching the vowels into caricature, “thinking ‘What am I going to do with Alice?’ And this song comes on — “Syeeda’s Song Flute” — and I thought, ‘That’s the rabbit!’ and ran downstairs and boom-boom-boom, I wrote three songs.”

Although Carroll’s tales are mainstays of children’s literature, Hagenbach’s approach courts an older crowd. She has set her Alice in the 1960s, the era of A Love Supreme, and made Alice a graduate student in composition, nodding off to Wonderland as she studies a dry tome on mathematics and modal jazz. (Carroll was a mathematician, and one imagines that he would have appreciated this music’s embedded logic.)

For Hagenbach, the universality of Carroll’s text was the easy part. “There’s a reason it’s lasted 150 years,” she says. “Alice could be an old woman, a young woman, a dancer. Anyone could have this dream and negotiate all of the weird things she encounters as she makes her way through life.”

Although JazzAlice is her first full theatrical production, Hagenbach seems comfortable negotiating weird encounters as the show’s de facto director, knowing when to lean on her collaborators and when to take the reins.

Today’s task is correcting the timing for when and where JazzAlice‘s three backup singers (“Carroll-ers,” she corrects with a wink) will place the rabbit hole (a black-fur-covered hula hoop) onstage. Hagenbach asks to play back the soundtrack — a recording of the musicians who will play live on opening night — to hunt for the right measure. “It’s really going to be tough to find where it is,” she warns.

Timing anything to Coltrane’s unpredictable sax seems impossible. But Hagenbach and her cast are the types of musicians who can accomplish, in the words of Carroll’s Red Queen, “six impossible things before breakfast.”

Stage manager Doug Perkins (a jazz guitarist by night) stops the recording. “It might be easier to have a vocal cue than a measure cue,” he says. Hagenbach agrees. Which means: Back up the rabbit hole to the beginning of the tune. Eyes swivel toward Perkins and his little black boom box. With the press of a button, a high-hat starts keeping time.

McFadden peeks coquettishly from behind a cuddly cardboard tree, peering alternately at where the audience will be and a long-chained pocket watch. Hagenbach launches into the vocal line soon after, hopping on each downbeat in a slow-grooving recitative. Her voice is dreamy, a rich contralto that still manages to feel cloud-light.

The two dance together, then dance apart. The Carroll-ers — bassist Brian Hicks and Hagenbach’s fellow Book of Gaia singers Nedra Dixon and Pamela Baskin-Watson — wait with the furry hoop. When Hagenbach arrives at the right vocal cue, McFadden scurries across the stage to the hole, sliding backward on the balls of his feet like an ice skater. He hops in the hole. He taps in midair (don’t sweat it — this is Wonderland). He does it all at white-rabbit speed.

“Whoo!” Hagenbach calls when the scene ends, wagging her shirt front up and down like a tongue. “Remind me not to wear a sweater to work.” Then, in a mock-Teutonic accent: “Ahrt is much verk.”

McFadden, proving her point, slinks away, and barely 10 seconds later, a muted trumpet sounds a few notes backstage. There are no plans for the trumpet in today’s rehearsal, but McFadden isn’t going to waste valuable practice time.

For Hagenbach, there was never any other choice. “I knew he [McFadden] should be the rabbit right away.”

Though today’s rehearsal is only their second, McFadden already seems to have the part down. He strides back onstage in the next scene, late for a very important date. “Oh, my dear paws!” he cries, so endearing and sincere that the small assembly of designers and assistants stop scribbling production notes and share smiles. But McFadden misreads their reaction and calls to production coordinator Fred Goodson: “You gotta pull me back, Fred. I don’t know how to act.”

Acting talent doesn’t seem to be a problem. The real obstacle is a most Alice-like one: time.

“We’ve only got a set amount of time each week,” Hagenbach admits, “which makes me nervous.” It’s only three weeks until the opening night of a three-show engagement: two at the Plaza Branch, then an encore in November at the Lee’s Summit Pavilion at John Knox Village.

But Hagenbach doesn’t want JazzAlice to expire after just two shows. The day we speak, she breaks off our interview to chase after scenic designer Marilyn Carpenter, hoping that Carpenter might know how to set up a 501(c)(3) that could give her compositions new life. While Hagenbach lives in Wonderland these days, her time outside rehearsals is increasingly spent in the less whimsical world of arts administration. She’s bullish about seeking grants, partnerships, the funding she needs to transform JazzAlice into a longer show.

“There’s a lot more that we can do,” Hagenbach says. “In my mind, this is just the prototype. I want to go broader. I see a traveling school show, an audio recording, a symphony — “

“You go, girl,” McFadden cheers, brushing past on his way out the door.

Hagenbach smiles a 9-foot-tall smile, eyes tracking to a wall of windows facing downtown. She will.