Wicked fun

(Photo: me)

I had such a good time at Wicked on Thursday.

I have to eat my crow - I've spent the last four years turning up my nose and rolling my eyes whenever people returned from the show giddy with praise. I saw the show myself during its first year on Broadway with the original cast, and I just wasn't impressed. The book was thin, the songs were catchy but not particularly special, and there wasn't much that was original about it. But here also was the context: I had seen Avenue Q and Caroline, or Change in the very same week, and seriously, compared with those two shows, Wicked loses. Avenue Q is sincere, intimate and heartfelt (not to mention insanely funny), and Caroline is a beautifully written and moving piece of music theater.

It's all relative though: Wicked has its faults, but it is ultimately a show that has a touching message at heart, and it is an undeniably seductive theatrical experience. From the moment you walk into the theater, you see an enormous dragon puppet staring down at you from the set - a set which spans the entire front section of the auditorium (here in LA you get even more grandeur with the gorgeous, art-deco Pantages Theatre). The rousing songs are inescapable, belted out over a rock-concert sound system by a talented young cast. Intimate and subtle it certainly is not, but they do put on a pretty damn good show.

(Photo: Joan Marcus)
Wicked is based on Gregory Maguire's much longer (and darker) novel of the same name, and is prequel of sorts to The Wizard of Oz story. The story uses the notion that history is only a version of truth as told by the victorious: Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, it turns out was actually a good witch. Here she is an outcast from childhood, shunned because of her green complexion, but possessing extraordinary magical ability. She and Glinda the Good - characterized as a popular, ditzy blonde girl - become unlikely friends at university when they are assigned as roommates. When the Wizard of Oz hears of Elphaba's special ability, he attempts to use her to his own power mongering ends. She cries foul and runs off with the sensitive information that he has no real power. The Wizard and his cronies begin a public smear campaign against her - using Glinda as an unwitting talking head - where they paint her as a wicked force. Elements of the familiar Wizard of Oz tale are woven into the plot and cleverly turned on their heads.

Director Joe Mantello deserves a lot of credit for piecing together the show's many parts. Spectacle, song and plot are all slickly folded together, but most importantly he brings the show's core drama and character relationships to the surface, not letting them get lost in the mix. He zeroes in on key moments in the characters' relationships: when they become friends, when their friendship changes, etc., so then we the audience get to know them and sympathize with them. When it's time for an important scene, the music stops and the sets pause, everything turns inward on the people for a few minutes.

Weaker spots come from the material itself. Wini Holzman does a decent job of distilling the novel's many main plot points into a 2 hour 40 minute musical, but a lot is lost or changed completely. And since the show has to get through a lot, the plot zips by, sometimes at the expense of depth and plausibility. Holzman and Mantello have chosen to balance things so that the action slows down to focus on the important parts (evidently changes in the book have also been made since Broadway to further focus the material). The weak and rushed spots in story get swept away by flashing lights or moving sets, perhaps not unintentionally. Case in point - that dragon staring down on the audience? It doesn't even serve a function in the show's script, it just starts moving when a large distracting effect is called for (the time dragon clock does play a larger role in the novel, but not here).

Stephen Schwartz's music is a collection of rousing anthems, sometimes giving the characters much more depth than the book supports. The songs don't do anything particularly unique or interesting musically, but they are very catchy and appealing nonetheless. You leave the theater humming "Popular" and "Defying Gravity" (and can buy both slogans on a t-shirt in the lobby, too). Some of the lyrics are burdened with unnecessary complex words (did he compose with a thesaurus next to him), and others are simply puzzling. Like in "For Good," a song where the two witches reconcile their differences and agree that they learned a lot from each other, their change "for good" is likened to "a comet pulled from orbit as it passes the sun" and "a ship pulled from its mooring by a wind off the sea." The relationship between cosmic orbital change and friendship is kind of overblown, and in this situation, tenuous at best. But sure, it sounds pretty enough, and the song overall has a nice uplifting message, so you go with it and hum along anyway.

Wicked has been playing a sit-down production in Los Angeles since March, and I finally decided to give the show another chance because I wanted to see Eden Espinosa and Megan Hilty play Elphaba and Glinda (Espinosa's last performance is Dec 30). I watched Espinosa perform in Disneyland theme park shows all through high school, before she "made it" on Broadway. Most memorably, I have a video of her from those days wearing a plastic skirt and a giant pink Medusa wig, belting it out splendidly in Disney's Steps in Time. (The show was about a "hip" fairy god mother who bursts out of a television set to reform two brothers who are fighting over the remote - and she decides to do it by conjuring up hip-hop remixes of classic Disney songs for lessons. It was a last minute patch job that Disney threw together to fill the new, giant theater at Disney's California Adventure in its grand opening year. Francesca Zambello's hokey 45-minute version of Aladdin fills the theater now.) As for Hilty, I had heard a lot of great things about her performance, that she was hilarious and loveable. Plus she's been cast in the upcoming musical adaptation of 9 to 5, so I was curious to see her.

While the two were great individually, it was their chemistry together that brought a real center and heart to the show. They looked like they had a real connection, so that we went with on the journey of the show. The camaraderie helped fill in plot gaps, too - since we don't see them actually developing a strong bond in physical stage time, that they naturally reacted well to each other made this omission less evident. (On Broadway, Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel were fantastic individual performers, but together the looked like they were competing for the spotlight. So when they said that they were best friends, it seemed forced.) Espinosa has a powerhouse voice and gives a similarly powerful performance. She sings and acts wonderfully, though really the role is written for the audience to love her. Hilty was great: hilarious for one, as her performance of "Popular" had the audience in stitches. More remarkable is the pathos she brings to the role, when she realizes that her ditziness isn't good enough and matures into a real friend to Elphaba and a truly good witch by the end of the show. The other standout cast member was Carol Kane as a delightfully evil Madame Morrible.

The place was sold out tight last week for Christmas, and the show reportedly reaches sell out for all the weekend performances in LA also. Weekly reported grosses for the Broadway production have it consistently at over 100% capacity, and I can't imagine it's any different for any of the productions in Chicago, London, Tokyo and on the road. This show is an unstoppable theatrical machine. But I get it now. It's still not the best musical ever, but a lot of fun nevertheless.