Nothing has generated more interest on our refrigerator — not pictures of us, our friends’ babies, our magnetic poetry, our well-traveled postcards — than our tickets to Broadway Across America’s Wicked.
Friends joked about stealing them.
Colleagues practically burst into tears at the sight of them.
We finally cashed them in last night, racing up to Portland after work (the roads were oddly quiet because of Spring Break).
Sadly, if you’ve read the book, you might be disappointed by the musical.
Wicked this book is this amazing sprawling satire, this beefy reinvention of the Oz story where the main characters of the original L. Frank Baum book become all but peripheral.
That happens in the musical too, but the story is altered almost to the point of unrecognizability.
I don’t mind it when the story changes in translation across media. In the best traditions of oral storytelling, characters appear and reappear in other stories, changing in the mouths of the storytellers.
But in this case, Wicked gets dumbed down into a kind of High School Musical for the fairy tale set. Major happy endings that little girls are sure to love.
Wish I had one.
Then I could have experienced the joy at least through a little kids’ eyes. But Wicked was an adult book and I was left disappointed by the show.
As soon as I realized this was happening, I decided to try to throw out the analysis of story (this is very difficult for me. Ask my husband about that time I went with him to see Angelina Jolie in Wanted and ruined it for him by pointing out all the ways the director borrowed from every other awesome flick).
So here’s your silver lining. The set design is bombastically fantastical — one of the best I’ve seen. Glinda — and the understudy who played her — steals the show. Wicked Witch of the West Elphaba brings the house down with her two climactic, show-stopping numbers.
And the use of malapropisms to satire shoddy leadership and abuses of power feels just right — a nod to our former regime, obviously, and one that we can still laugh at even as some of them — strategery? — become part of our vernacular.
Two last words. Flying monkeys!
