Funny old show, Wicked. When it opened on Broadway in 2003, the reviews were, at best, mixed. In his Variety review, Charles Isherwood described it as lumbering and overstuffed, Ben Brantley in The New York Times loved Kristin Chenoweth as Galinda but he thought the show lacked wit and originality, and John Lahr in The New Yorker described it as a musical soufflé that fails to rise. But twenty-one years later, it is still running on Broadway and in the West End and the UK tour reached the Birmingham Hippodrome this month.
I saw it in London many years ago from a seat way up in the gods and I found it baffling. Having seen it again from the stalls at The Birmingham Hippodrome, I can tell you it is a great night out. The scale of the production is impressive, the plot is ingenious, the songs are catchy, the cast are terrific and the two leads, Laura Pick as Elphaba and Sarah O’Connor as Galinda, are sensational.
Wicked is based on a novel by Gregory Maguire which tells the story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the witches: Glinda, the Witch of the North, and Elphaba, The Wicked Witch of the West (she is unnamed in the original stories but Maguire named her after L Frank Baum’s initials).
The show is in two distinct halves. The first half is a prequel, origins story of how Elphaba and Galinda (she shortens it later to Glinda because her goat-teacher couldn’t pronounce it—trust me, it makes sense when you see it) became witches at a sort of Hogwarts magic school. The second half follows the plot of the film from the witches’ perspective. We see how the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion came to be and Dorothy is reduced to a brief shadow-play character.
If the plot is intertextual—it’s a musical based on a novel based on a film based on even more novels—then the themes and references are even more so. There’s the traumatic prom dance (Carrie), the make-over scene (Clueless), the cute, ditzy girl who Learns An Important Lesson (Legally Blonde) and looming over it all is the good girl / misfit dynamic of Frozen (it’s no coincidence that Idina Menzel played Elphaba in the original production of Wicked and Elsa in Frozen). There is also a subplot to do with animal rights. It sort of fits but it seems there mostly as a plot device to explain where Elphaba’s flying monkeys came from.
The message of the show is to learn to love yourself and accept difference in other people, so nothing too taxing there. But for the feminist academic Stacy Wolf, Wicked is a radically queer show which adheres to all structural conventions of the traditional ‘golden age’ Broadway musical theatre but subverts their heteronormative narrative. It takes the audience’s collective memory of ‘proper’ book musicals—Wicked is built like a Rodgers and Hammerstein show, no sung-through Lloyd Webberisms here—and a much-loved family film and places the love between two women where conventionally a heterosexual love story would be. And one of them is green!
A heteronormative happy ending is tacked onto the end, but for the most part, the drama is defined by the relationships between Galinda, Elphaba and Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose. The only principal male characters are the airhead eye candy Fiyero, the love-sick doormat Boq and the Donald Trump-esque Wizard.
This all-American Broadway show is played here in English accents with the exception of the Wizard who stays American. With lines like, "truth is just what we all agree on" and "the best way to bring people together is to give them a common enemy," he is a populist, Donald Trump figure, outwardly on the side of the people but ruthless and exploitative.
This is the full, West End production with an enormous, clock-themed set, about 24 cast members on stage, a full-size pit band and an animatronic dragon glaring at the audience from above the proscenium arch. With West End standards come West End prices, though. There are affordable tickets at every show, and if you avoid the merch stall in the foyer and the £12 programmes it needn’t break the bank, but you do get your money’s worth.
Wicked is one of those shows that inspires a fierce loyalty amongst its fans. If that’s you, then you have probably already bought your ticket. If you don’t know it and you just want to see what all the fuss is about, I can recommend it. It is manipulative but in a good way. If you are unmoved by the act 1 finale, "Defying Gravity", then you have a harder heart than mine and I had no qualms about joining the standing ovation at the end.