Spoiler warning! Don’t read if you don’t want to hear spoilers about the Broadway show Wicked!
This was the first show that Fox and I saw on our annual trip to NYC. He’d been wanting to see it since last summer when he did a little Wicked theatre camp. I really wanted to fall in love with Wicked. I LOVED the look of the stage when we walked in, and I loved the sets, costumes, and artistry of the whole production, but I’m afraid the book, and the music all fell a little flat for me. It’s just not a show that resonates with me.
I should have known it wasn’t going to be a show that really hit me, because the song Defying Gravity never did much of anything for me, and I know that’s THE song in Wicked. If that one doesn’t hit it for me, I should have known that the rest of the show wouldn’t either.
It’s hard to try and pinpoint what exactly it was about the show that didn’t do it for me, but I think a part of it was the inconsistency of the emotional tone of the book. The stuff about the animals being persecuted was extremely sad and heavy, but then at many points of the show it felt like an extremely light-hearted parody, poking fun at the Wizard of Oz source material a lot. Then it would flip back to heavy with moments like Bok and Fiyero going through awful body horror. Musicals often have moments thrown here and there to lighten the mood, but it felt like Wicked was constantly going back and forth, and I could never really settle properly into my emotions.
The character development of everybody but Glinda and Elphaba also seemed lacking. Particularly with Nessarose who I feel like we barely got to see, which made it hard to fully appreciate Elphaba’s connection with her. It also made her becoming suddenly “wicked” feel a little bit out of left field.
Our Fiyero and Elphaba had excellent physical chemistry together, but in spite of that, I had a hard time understanding exactly where their emotional connection came from. I feel like they could have used one more scene or song to show the attraction building on Fiyero’s part. A solo song for him, singing about what it is about her that makes her feel more different and special to him than Glinda would have helped a lot.
They spent so much time building up the Glinda/Elphaba relationship during the musical, but I feel like all these other relationships that we’re also supposed to care about suffer in comparison. It’s weird, because in the end, Elphaba winds up lying to Glinda, and never seeing her again, so in the end, what was the point of building their friendship up so much? And honestly, I didn’t really buy their going from enemies to besties almost instantly. It felt forced.
The persecution of the animals is also never addressed again, although I suppose it’s implied that Glinda will do something to fix it, but it honestly just felt like it was a very heavy subject matter to leave kind of open-ended.
I must confess that I’m getting back to this review a few weeks after seeing the production, and I’m having a hard time remembering a lot of it. It was just not a memorable show for me, which is a funny thing to say about a show so saturated in my favorite color green. Although I did really love the outfits worn by the residents of the Emerald City, and Glinda’s outfits.
The second act felt oddly rushed and strange, with everything suddenly tying into the Wizard of Oz so closely that it almost felt like they were telling a completely different story from the first half. I really wasn’t a fan of Bok and Fiyero turning into the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow, because it just didn’t make any sense in the context of the film that everything is based on. The first act was different enough that it felt like its own thing, but the second act really felt like weird Wizard of Oz fanfiction, and not very good fanfiction. Elphaba tormenting Dorothy just to get back her dead sister’s shoes felt pretty out of character for what we’d seen of her before. I honestly think the show would have been better if they hadn’t tried so hard to tie it in with the Wizard of Oz, and make it seem like a proper prequel instead of its own unique take on the source material.
I just felt the whole thing was lacking… something. It had plenty of style, it had that in spades, but I wanted more from this show. I wanted to know more about the characters, I wanted to feel like I understood their motivations more. I wanted to understand the world more, and instead I felt like I just got more and more confused by it. Why do they even have this magic school when it seems like barely anybody except for Madame Morrible can do magic? The Wizard’s motivations for making scapegoats of the talking animals really didn’t seem to make much sense. Neither did his wanting a relationship with Elphaba, especially once I realized he didn’t know she was his daughter until the end when he thought she was dead. The show was colorful and beautiful, and some of the songs were fun, but the story just seemed kind of a mess to me.
This show also has a MASSIVE ensemble, which made it hard to focus on just about anyone when there were so many people on the stage at once. I’ve seen other shows where there are huge ensembles, but I’ve never felt so OVERWHELMED by the presence of a big ensemble. I think it just felt like there were always so many people on the stage at one time, it made it feel hectic and crowded. One of the ensemble cast was a woman that I’d seen in Phantom, and it was nice to get to see her, but it didn’t feel like anybody in the ensemble really ever had moments to shine, they were just always this huge crowd that everybody got lost in.
We were there on Broadway Cares night again, which is always kind of fun to experience. The guy playing Dr Dillamond apparently was the original Dr Dillamond from the first Broadway cast, which was pretty cool. People who donated X amount of money got to do a backstage tour with him, but I knew Fox wouldn’t have been interested in that anyway. Thankfully, he really enjoyed the show, and happily declared it his new favorite show. Although I honestly think his favorite show is whichever one we’ve seen most recently! His favorite thing was the mechanical dragon at the top of the proscenium that moved around during some scenes, although he was disappointed that it wasn’t actually a character in the show. It does seem odd that they went through all that trouble to have this mechanical dragon that moves and lights up but it’s just set dressing. Honestly, that kind of encapsulates pretty well how I felt about this show. Sorry for all the Wicked lovers out there, this show is just not for me.
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