It was originally anticipated that I would probably not see my family at all while I was in the States, but I managed to fly in a few days early. I stayed with my sister Kay, which is always interesting, given that we spent most of our childhood hating one another, and, as my mum says, we have reached the upper levels of tolerance at this point. She’s in seminary in Chicago, which may unto itself explain a lot about why we’re not close. My parents, who are, by contrast, two of my favourite people in the whole world and arguably the very closest of my friends, came down for two days so we’d all get to spend at least a bit of time together. I hadn’t seen them in almost two years, but I was much relieved to find them unchanged.
When I lived in the States, Mum and I would take semi-annual trips down to Chicago for opera weekends. The Lyric has these really nice out-of-towner packages, where you come down on a Friday morning and stay at a rather nice hotel in town, and binge out on something like three or four operas from the season over the course of the weekend. I love opera, but Daddy’s not terribly keen on it (at least, he thinks he’s not, although he’s a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and I’ve seen him giggle his way through Marriage of Figaro on multiple occasions), so instead of opera we decided to go see a musical, which is something the entire family can agree on. I’m the only one of us who hadn’t seen Wicked yet, so we went to that.
I should mention that even though I haven’t seen it, I’m extremely familiar with the soundtrack and probably as well informed about the show as you can be without actually watching it. I’ve also read the book by the same title, which is the source text. (I did not really love it. While I admire greatly the idea behind it, I didn’t think it lived up to its promise in terms of writing or structure.) Kay and Mum have each seen it a couple of times; it’s Kay’s favourite show and she is bat-shit crazy about it. After the fact, when Mum and I were giving our critiques, she stuck her fingers in her ears and hummed loudly.
Because while Wicked is a very good show, it is not a perfect show. In fairness I ought to state that I’m a minimalist; I don’t like showy shows: if you’re spending all your time gawping at the tech, at the lighting and effects, you’re not actually seeing the show. It’s very easy to swamp a production in, well, production, especially these days when audiences seem to want all that fluff. Wicked is not Cats, for example, where there is no substance behind it all; nor is it the Hal Prince Showboat, where the rather delicate story of the first modern musical was overshadowed by having a giant boat on the stage (thereby making ‘Old Man River’ Mississippi, which is of great symbolic importance to the play, completely invisible). Wicked is a strong enough- if predictable enough- story that it can hold up to a bit of gewgaw and furbelow. But it doesn’t actually need all of that.
The stage is framed with cut-out gears and machinery, and in the centre of the proscenium arch is a very large animatronic dragon. It does some fairly cool things with smoke, and it swivels its neck, at the downbeat, but that’s all it does, the entire performance. Both the mechanics and the dragon are a nod to the source text, but since that particular theme isn’t really dealt with in the play, it serves no purpose except to say, Wow, look what we can do! (And drive up the budget phenomenally, I’m sure.) And if you don’t know the book, it makes no sense at all. There were also a lot of things that rolled on and off stage rather needlessly. Even though musicals require a certain suspension of disbelief and creativity on the part of an audience, we seem to have forgotten their ability to imagine the characters into different locations, without very obvious, and large, and preferably electronic, signposts.
To continue with getting my kvetches out of the way, the song ‘Wonderful’ is woefully misplaced. The second act is quite dark and tense, and then they throw in a carnival piece that absolutely stops the tension and the action dead in its tracks. Put it in the first act and it would be fine, but it absolutely, under no circumstances belongs where it is. I don’t know how nobody caught this in previews, because it’s neon obvious. (I rather thing ‘One Short Day In The Emerald City’ is another throw-away tune, but I acknowledge the need to give a nod to the film-induced expectations of the audience. And Wicked does do a good job of balancing the imagery expected from the movie without becoming a slave to it.) Axing the last five minutes, and the happy ending, would be a much better decision- this is not a story that wants a happy ending.
All that said, Wicked is still pretty awesome. Don’t go into it expecting the book; the plot is much simpler, a rather standard fare of storytelling. But the characters are engaging, and the music is wonderful, and it is technically spectacular. The lighting is fantastic; whoever did the design, while I think it a little bit much, did some really beautiful work with scrims and gels and gobos. It was also nice to hear a real orchestra, where so many productions these days use synth. And in moments when the production really needed to look like the movie, it did, but in a way that blended in with the rest. Arguably more important, there are some excellent melodies and lyrics here. ‘Defying Gravity’ is a showstopper; while ‘For Good’ can make you a bit choky. (Unless you are my mum, in which case these two songs, and my particular favourite, ‘I’m Not That Girl’, make her totally lose her shit.) There are also a lot of little funny bits in what is essentially a pretty dark show. I’ve always thought of Glinda as reminding my of my friend Cori, who always wanted to be Glinda when we were younger (the film version, that is: she got a poufy pink dress), but I sat through the first two scenes trying to figure out who the character reminded me of, because the likeness was uncanny. The penny finally dropped and I realised that it was like watching an only slightly characterised version of Rachel.
But I think the thing I like best is that Wicked is structured more like a good old-fashioned musical from Broadway’s golden age, rather than the sung-through monstrosities or vomitous revues that have cluttered up New York and West End theatres in the past decade. It’s original, and it’s charming without being either overly clever or overly precious. And I think that, if you’re not like me, and prone to looking at theatre through too critical a lens, you can walk out of there really exhilarated. There’s a degree of depth to it- it’s not going to keep you up nights, but it’s not absolute fluff, either- that you don’t see terribly often in contemporary musicals. Ultimately, this is a production about the grey areas of ethics/morality, which is about as close as you can come to putting the very philosophical aspects of the book to the stage. Is good actually good, is evil truly intended, and how much do fate, circumstance, and general human nature play a part? Those twist and turns, darkness covered by light, are what I think make the best musicals (look at, to give the two earliest examples, Show Boat or Oklahoma!- sure, Rodgers and Hammerstein is sugar-coated, but there’s some actual meat under the cotton candy).
I don’t know that I’ll become devoted to the show and feel the need to see it time and time again, like my sister does, or like Adrienne does with Phantom. There aren’t many shows I love that much. But I’m awfully glad I finally got to see it, and at least, to some degree, understand what my family has been going on about all this time.
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