Wicked-The Musical

[Ozymandias]

This discussion is now open.

[Isotope]

My mom says I am not old enough to understand the way they changed the story.

[Bookwyrm]

Wicked is a musical based on the novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire. It takes place in the Land of Oz, and tells the story of many of the characters before Dorothy arrived. Elphaba, a smart, good-hearted, but misunderstood young woman will green skin, meets the pretty, popular, but snobbish Galinda at school. They become friends, and go on a journey together that takes them to the Emerald City, where they meet the somewhat corrupt Wizard of Oz, and eventually forces them to take different paths in adult life. Ephalba becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, while Galinda becomes Glinda, good witch and ally to the Wizard.

[Bookwyrm]

WICKED
by Martin Denton · November 5, 2003




In the middle of Wicked's second act comes a scene where Elphaba (soon to be dubbed The Wicked Witch of the West) frees the flying monkeys that the Wizard of Oz has been keeping as captives. Half a dozen or more actors in scary winged monkey costumes zoom airborne out of their cage on stage and head toward the rafters and even soar out over the audience.

Zowee: Flying monkeys, live and in person! You'd think such a sight might be pretty exciting. Yet, as throughout all of this overlong but undercooked musical, I felt not even the vaguest stir of a thrill. The charms of Wicked, which many people seem to think are fairly numerous, completely eluded me: I found the show portentous, platitudinous, and ponderous. What a waste of a number of excellent performers and a great deal of money.

Wicked is based on a novel by Gregory Maguire (I'm not certain how faithfully for I haven't read the book). It's a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, mostly: after an opening scene in which Glinda the Good Witch leads the citizens of Oz in a song called "No One Mourns the Wicked" directed at a pointy black hat (its wearer having just been melted by a bucket of water), we flash back, first to Elphaba's birth (where, being a sickly bright green from head to toe, she is shunned by her bitter father), and then to Elphaba's arrival at an Ozian college called Shiz. Elphaba, brilliant and self-possessed but painfully shy because of her greenness, has come here with her younger sister Nessarose, who is beautiful but confined to a wheelchair. At Shiz, the girls meet Galinda, a gorgeous, spoiled blonde who has everything but wants more; through a cutesy device, Galinda and Elphaba become roommates and, eventually, friends.

The headmistress of Shiz, a robust, no-nonsense type named Madame Morrible who looks like Angela Lansbury's character in Disney's Beauty and the Beast but turns out to be as hard-as-nails tough as Lansbury's character in The Manchurian Candidate, discovers that Elphaba has special abilities. Morrible takes Elphaba under her wing, promising to send her to the Emerald City to meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself. Elphaba is ecstatic—much like the characters we are more familiar with, she hopes to get something from the Wizard, namely, a new skintone that isn't green. At last she does get to meet the Wizard, accompanied somewhat improbably by Galinda, who has now shortened her name by dropping the first "a." They discover—again, like some other characters we know—that the Wizard is a fake; worse, they find out he's some kind of budding fascist, plotting to repress the country's talking animal population and hoping to exploit Elphaba's aptitude for performing actual magic (as opposed to his own humbug variety) to spy on his own citizens.

Well, there's more—much more!—plot, but I think you have the idea. Wicked's first act takes the shape of a fable about an outcast from society finding strength in a mission to make that society a better place. It's loaded with earnest aspirations of relevance, like Elphaba's animal activism and the Wizard's vaguely Ashcroftian paranoia; and with clichés like Glinda's sanctimoniousness and the crush that both budding witches develop on Shiz Bad Boy Fiyero, Prince of the Winkies.

The second act moves us chronologically very quickly out of prequeldom to the events we thought we knew from L. Frank Baum's famous book and MGM's more famous film. Though neither Dorothy nor Toto ever appears in Wicked, everyone else from the familiar story does (often in unexpected guises); the tale unfolds from Elphaba's and Glinda's perspectives. It's sort of like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, except that we're far more familiar with this offstage action than we probably are with Hamlet; which is why the inconsistencies feel very jarring indeed (and there are quite a few of them!) Our familiarity also deadens just about every plot twist—we see them all coming long before they're revealed: who the Scarecrow really is; who Elphaba's father really is; what really happens to Elphaba when the little girl throws water on her; and so on. It's merrily deconstructionist but neither subversive nor enlightening; it is, in fact, rather boring and pointless.

And it feels like the show's creators recognized this, because they've peppered the show's second act with cheap gags (Elphaba, reuniting with her sister after a long time away, deadpans loudly "There's no place like home") and Urinetown-style parody-pastiche (the second act opens with Glinda addressing the public from a balcony of the Wizard's Emerald City palace, à la Evita). Most desperately, they end their play with a meaningless and entirely unmotivated duet called "For Good" in which Glinda and Elphaba sing about how much better they each are for having been best friends with one another—huh? It's a crass and empty gesture calculated to conclude the festivities on an up note, and I guess it does, but it certainly sacrifices anything resembling a point to this long and now fruitless evening.

Now, all that said, I should add that the top-notch cast acquit themselves really well under the circumstances. Idina Menzel proves (not that I had ever doubted it) that she can carry a big Broadway musical all on her own (now perhaps maybe someone will write her a good one); and Kristen Chenoweth is enormous fun as Glinda (and gets the closest thing to a show-stopper with the made-to-order charm song "Popular"). Joel Grey, trooper that he is, makes the most of his second act number "Wonderful," but it's too little, too late. Carole Shelley (Mme. Morrible), Norbert Leo Butz (Fiyero), and Christopher Fitzgerald (Boq, a Munchkin)—capable performers all—likewise do what they can, but as Brooks Atkinson once wrote in entirely different circumstances, you can't draw sweet water from a foul well.

The foulness is the fundamental problem here, I'm afraid: Wicked is relentlessly unattractive, even though it has a heart of glittery Broadway gold beating just beneath its surface. This essential tension shows in the way that Winnie Holzman's meandering and arch book never jibes with Stephen Schwartz's pop-inflected score. Director Joe Mantello can't figure out what to do with any of it, and so mostly leaves his actors to deliver most of their songs and speeches staring straight out at the audience from positions in the middle of the stage. Musical stager Wayne Cilento hardly gets any opportunities for choreography at all. And set designer Eugene Lee, whose inventive concoction of gears and cogs is the most interesting and conspicuous visual element of the production, seems not to have even been given a copy of the last several drafts of Wicked, for I have no idea what his elaborate creation—evocative of the relentless passing of time, or the clockwork machinery that is man, or something—has to do with the show. It sits, mostly, idle, finally proving to be as underwhelming as those flying monkeys I mentioned at the start.

Ho hum, the witch is dead. Next?

[Bookwyrm]

Wicked

Place: USA (Hollywood)
When: 17 Jun 2005 - 31 Jul 2005 (One off; not Mon)
Cost: US$25-US$89
Opening Hours: Tue-Sun various - please contact the box office for details


Stephen Schwartz's musical Wicked, playing at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre, was the winner of three 2004 Tony Awards. It tells the story of two girls in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald-green skin, is smart, fiery and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious and very popular.

Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, the spellbinding show takes a look at how these unlikely friends end up as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch.

[Leandra]

Unlimited Theme: "Over the Rainbow" Revisited
There are two primary themes used as motifs throughout the score. The first one is from the accompaniment to "As Long As You're Mine." and the second is also associated with Elphaba. When describing what he calls the "Unlimited theme," Schwartz says, "It was written really, really early. In fact I found today, this is a lyric to Unlimited, and it says 'Unlimited reprise.'"

He fumbled through hand-written pages of the early score that were spread across the closed top of the Yamaha baby grand piano. "And then there was a note I was sending, maybe to Winnie or someone, it says, '...this would serve as an intro or be in the middle of some other song, a la 'I had a dream' introducing 'Everything's Coming Up Roses.'"

..From an interview with Stephen Schwartz in his office, October 4, 2004. see more at www.musicalschwartz.com/wicked-musical-themes.htm

[Leandra]

www.musicalschwartz.com/wicked.htm

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