Karen Mason and Darren Ritchie have a pair of showstoppers in Wonderland, the Frank Wildhorn musical that has a return engagement that begins next week at the Straz Center in Tampa, leading up to its opening on Broadway in the spring. Much of the show has been retooled since its Tampa premiere in 2009 -- there are at least four new songs, the book has been rewritten, and several major roles have been recast -- but you can be sure that Mason and Ritchie's big numbers remain more or less intact.

In every performance of Wonderland I saw in Tampa and then Houston, One Knight, a swoony boy band number featuring Ritchie (pictured here), and Mason's vaudevillian turn as the Queen of Hearts, Off With Their Heads, got rapturous receptions from the audience.

"Darren and I used to have a little competition about that,'' Mason told me in early December during rehearsals in New York. "We could judge the age of the audience by who got the bigger hand. The young girls and medium-aged women love the boy band, and then I have my older people.''

Ritchie recalls being skeptical about his number in the beginning, because he thought the whole boy band fad was passe. "I felt a little lukewarm about it, but when you stand that one up, people go crazy,'' he said.

I asked Susan Hilferty, the costume designer of Wonderland and an astute analyst of musicals, about the two songs and how they fit into the show. "I love the boy band number, but it's like reading romance novels: Do you really want to tell everyone that you love them?'' she said, laughing. "But Karen Mason is the real deal with that great voice of hers and the Queen's wacky persona. It's a stylistically different sort of song in a strong pop score.''

Wonderland has 14 performances beginning Jan. 5 (pushed back a day from the previous schedule) at the Straz's Ferguson Hall. These are considered previews in advance of the Broadway production at the Marquis Theatre. There, it’s scheduled to begin previews March 21 and then open April 17. For details, see here.

Photo: Michal Daniel