No One Mourns The Wicked

[When I heard that a new musical take on The Wizard of Oz was coming to San Francisco, I knew I would be there. I have no idea how young I was the first time I saw the movie, but it was early, and my grandmother had started me on the books by the age of five. She and I were, I think, the only two people in the theatre when the bizarre misfire sequel, Return to Oz, appeared in 1985 (giving us the mixed blessing of Fairuza Balk's film career in the bargain.)]

[So. Wicked. I had never heard of the novel on which it was based, and I had little idea of what to expect, other than a prequel to our foursome's Jungian adventures along the Yellow Brick Road. I guess I'd heard it would portray the Wicked Witch of the West in a more favorable light, and kind of assumed it would end with the Gales' house falling on the other wicked witch, leaving our memories of the movie and books intact.]

[Whew, did they do a lot more than that! The show cleverly turns every simple notion of good and evil from the original on its head: in the "real" Oz, Glinda is a magic-impaired sorority girl who meets the bookworm Wicked Witch at school, and the real story is the complicated friendship between the two is woven thruout Baum's simplistic "front" story of good vs. evil. The show's at its best exploring their relationship, including the heartbreaking last number where, just before W.W.W. goes to be melted by Dorothy, they sing how they are who they are because of they were in each others' lives. I cried, and not just because Grandma would have loved the show.]

[Wicked is in previews or preproduction or workshopping, or whatever they call developing a show before it goes to Broadway. Its unfinished state shows: much of the music, while promising, has a generic, Andrew Lloyd Webber orchestration that needs to be fixed, and most of the songs are just too long. The set and costumes are amazing, though; they borrow heavily both from the movie and the books (yay, sunglasses de rigueur in the Emerald City!), and the sets move around on early 20th-century-looking mechanical apparatus reminiscent of a factory. There are winking (Winkie?) references both to many other Broadway musicals, other pop culture effluvia (Glinda, trying to sympathize with W.W.W. having been born green, opines "It can't have been easy" - ah, Kermit), and the current flimflam national politics (even going so far as to ad lib the term "regime change"); some of this works, some of it doesn't.]

[Wicked's at the Curran in S.F. until June 29, then moves to New York. If Oz played as much of a role in your childhood imagination as it did in mine, you must see it.]

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