WICKED
WICKED Capitol Theatre, 13 September 2009 for a year; www.wickedthemusical.com.au
TWENTY million people around the world can’t be wrong. And neither can the many thousands of Australians who saw Wicked in Melbourne during its 13 month run there, nor the thousands of others who’ve already shelled out $12.5 million in advance sales for the show’s stay (open-ended) at Sydney’s Capitol theatre. And, of course, that’s not taking into account the serial-Wickeds who go again and again and, presumably, suck up more millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise.
However, I have to admit right here that although Wicked is a bona fide musical theatre phenomenon, I just don’t get it. And, if the quietly muttered comments and perplexed expressions of many in the opening night audience are any measure, I wasn’t the only one by a long way. Not that it would be apparent from the dingbat behaviour and wassailing that traditionally accompanies a Sydney musical first night.
As an entertainment, Wicked is a terrific idea – originally the brain child of Gregory Maguire whose novel Wicked, the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was first published in 1995. It sported a beguiling, cut-out dust jacket and quickly achieved sales of close to a million copies (before the stage show ever happened). It set out to answer the question – what happened in Oz before Dorothy blew in from Kansas? And that’s the story of the musical – with the darker elements gussied up or eliminated and the more complicated story strands straightened out or compressed.
Yet there is more to the adaptation than meets the eye – on stage – because small but crucial changes or shifts, to character and narrative, have been made to the original. They have the whiff of focus group- or marketing led-story making, rather than from places in the heart. Consequently, despite the great efforts of the leading players and the company as a whole, I felt remote and disengaged most of the time. Amazingly, for a show so heavy on friendship, loyalty, and goodness, even the deliberate emotional manipulation was feeble.
The first half has most of the best lines and laughs as Glinda (Lucy Durack) arrives aboard her good witch bubble apparatus and immediately whisks us all back in time to an extended flashback – the rest of the show. She relates, and we see, Elphaba (Amanda Harrison) arriving in the world as a green skinned baby: unloved, unwanted, different. Rejected by her father and (she thinks) the cause of her mother’s death in childbirth, Elphaba has issues. Not least among them is a younger sister, Nessarose (Penny McNamee) fetchingly confined to a wheelchair. (Rather than being born armless as, in a clear reference to drugs such as Thalidomide, the novel has it).
When Elphaba and Glinda meet and immediately clash at college, the scene is set for all the elements of hair-pulling, name-calling, pouty cruelties that girls seem to love getting into with someone who finally ends up as their best friend. Elphaba is smart, churlish, ambitious and, well, green and with a chip on her shoulder; Glinda is blonde, rich, vain, spoilt and popular.
Amanda Harrison is a fine Elphaba, a lonely child whose grim upbringing would be enough to turn anyone “wicked”. She makes an effortless transition from glowering schoolgirl to a young woman with promise, talent yet with the sword of Damocles hanging over her head. She has the best (only?) song, in “Defying Gravity”, and makes the most of it in the show’s most imaginative moment of lighting and trickery. It’s been referred to elsewhere as the showstopper, which is odd as it closes the first half anyway. Perhaps in other cities it might keep the audience for a big cheer and stomp but not Sydney: the bar and loos call at interval and that’s it.
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Glinda would be a problem for any performer as it’s always less interesting or fun to be the goody. Lucy Durack is further burdened by being required to play her as a screechy-voiced Lina Lamont-cum-Valley Girl. Jackie Love got away with it – and was fabulous – in Singin’ in the Rain, but largely because the role required little singing. Glinda, however, has a lot of what could loosely be termed songs and when they’re shrieked in a nasal upper register, not only are the lyrics mangled but the aural effect is like chalk on a blackboard. Poor Lucy, poor vocal cords.
Among the rest of the cast is the love interest over whom the girls inevitably fight. Rob Mills as debonair, Prince Charming-style hero, Fiyero, looks uncannily like Kyle Maclachlan, circa Twin Peaks. And bizarrely, he approaches the role with the same vapid anti-charisma. It’s a blessing when Fiyero’s finally turned into the Scarecrow, but way too late. Bert Newton – as the Wizard of Oz and Maggie Kirkpatrick as Madame Morrible, head of the college – were curiously lifeless and not really there (did I mention a sense of remoteness?). With Reg Livermore and Amanda Muggleton in the audience there was plenty of time, during interminable non-songs, to think about the swings and roundabouts of casting choices.
Speaking to Bryce Hallett in the SMH last week, producer John Frost observed of his smash hit show, “It's got a young dedicated fan base – some people have seen it 30 or 40 times – but audiences here have been very broad. For many people, Wicked was the only show they had been to all year or the first time they'd set foot inside a theatre.” And that about sums up an answer to my original puzzlement, I guess.
Perhaps if you don’t go to the theatre a lot, or even to musical theatre, a lot, you might not mind the music (by serial second-rater Stephen Schwartz whose oeuvre also includes Pippin and Godspell), nor the mish-mash musical staging (Wayne Cilento) and mishier-mashier direction (originally by Joe Mantello now by Lisa Leguillou). The costumes are the best aspect of the show’s hardware, but you can’t leave a theatre humming the cozzies.
Advance sales in Sydney, and audience response across the world, make it quite clear that I don’t have a clue when it comes to why this show works. Millions love it. What do you think? Meanwhile, roll on Mamma Mia! I say.
