Wicked, the wonderful progeny of Oz, now in its third lucrative run at PlayhouseSquare, has something in common with the man-eating plant in another musical, The Little Shop of Horrors. And it’s not just the color green. Wicked achieved its gigantic bulk first by consuming the MGM film The Wizard of Oz.
While spitting out the charm and musical genius of the film,
Wicked retained the art deco green Emerald City, the Freudian
terrors, a smidgen of the wry wit and its no-place-like-home
wish-fulfillment fantasies.
It also gobbled stacks of female self-empowerment manuals to mix
with Gregory Maguire’s chilling novel. And then, to intoxicate
adolescent girls, it swallowed large amounts of Disney Channel pop
anthems. The result is an overpowering aphrodisiac that helped sell the
wares of the OzDust Boutique and gained unparalleled success
everywhere.
Now for a moot point: Is it good? Sometimes. We have to acknowledge
the ingenious backward glance at a film classic most people discover
soon after taking their first steps. Key to its success is that
novelist Maguire and Wicked book writer Winnie Holzman
apparently heard some juicy gossip to which L. Frank Baum, author of
the original 1900 Oz book, and MGM weren’t privy. As a result, Baum and
MGM gave us a hag of a Wicked Witch, out only for revenge and ruby
slippers, while Maguire and Holzman knew her as a sensitive feminist
with a mission to curtail the Wizard’s fascist regime. Unlike the
unremitting hostility that the Witch and the good Glinda display toward
each other onscreen, we learn in Wicked that the pair started
out as college roomies who eventually enhance each other. In this
incarnation, the beloved Dorothy is reduced to an interfering shadow.
All of this is swell. And more than swell are the sets and costumes,
every bit as fanciful as their MGM counterparts.
What is not so wonderful is Stephen Schwartz’s schizophrenic score,
which engenders the show’s shrill, unsettled tone. When the songs
behave, they advance the story and accentuate the characters’ quirks
and dilemmas. “Popular,” for example, beautifully demonstrates the
schism between a perpetual debutante and a green wallflower. But
Schwartz’s need to be au courant too often defuses the charm and
muddies Holzman’s smart book.
When a property is this valuable, the powers that be aren’t going to
send out a second-rate tour. Vocally affecting and emotionally true
under her green makeup as Elphaba, Donna Vivino goes past archetype
into gravity-defying truth. The rest of the cast members more than earn
their Actor’s Equity per diems as they spin neurotic glitter into
show-biz gold.
This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2009.
Thank goodness there are very effective medical therapies for bitter, angst-ridden theater critics. It’s okay to insult the creative genius of Stephen Schwartz and insult the intelligence of the appreciative public who made this show a hit. After all, this is the United States of America. But it also casts light into the dark world of jealousy and subterfuge. I can’t think of a single creative work by Keith A. Joseph that merits praise or criticism…including this piece of third-rate journalism.