Idina Menzel in Wicked
|
Three years ago, Broadway’s critical and Tony Award battle was between a show with a quirkily clever, low-budget comic heart set in a down-at-heel contemporary New York and another with a rather more earnest but utterly spectacular aesthetic about a journey to an imaginary, futuristic Emerald City. But while
Avenue Q may have won the plaudits,
Wicked has long been winning the audits.
Wicked has become the top earner on Broadway, regularly clocking up weekly sales of nearly $1.4 million, a mere million more than
Avenue Q routinely does. And that same battle is now poised to be repeated in the West End where
Avenue Q arrived at the start of the summer at the Noel Coward Theatre.
Wicked has duly followed it as Broadway’s biggest export to London since
The Producers, where it has opened at that vast industrial barn of the Apollo Victoria, newly given an all-new gloss of green that continues the prevailing colour motif of the show into all of the public areas of the theatre and even the external art deco neon lighting.
This is certainly a production—with its towering environmental design by Eugene Lee that has a gigantic dragon dominating the proscenium and clattering its jaws menacingly at regular intervals—that can match the scale of the theatre itself, but it could leave you feeling a little green around the gills yourself as you succumb to the vertigo of its dizzying leaps of plot, mood and defiant, sometimes deafening, melodies. Is there a human scale to such a superhuman-sized show? That’s fortunately provided by the vibrant pairing of Idina Menzel, recreating her Tony-winning turn as Elphaba, brassily paired with the attractive Australian musical newcomer Helen Dallimore as Glinda, the two leads of this musical deconstruction of the “untold story of the Witches of Oz.”
Idina Menzel & Helen Dallimore in Wicked
|
As well as the stellar turns of Menzel and Dallimore, Adam Garcia preens handsomely as the principal love interest of both women, and Miriam Margolyes—built as more of a battleship than a battleaxe—has a scene-stealing turn as a high-camp turn as Morrible.
In its colourful, sometimes overpowering collection of sly pop culture references and occasional contemporary political resonance, Wicked comes across as somewhere between Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, a Cirque du Soleil spectacle and Harry Potter—with a little bit of David Hare thrown in. It is certainly a potentially rich dramatic palette, but as served up here in Winnie Holtzman’s densely layered book, it also fractures its impact by being rather overcrowded in the narrative department.
Just as Into the Woods famously offered a deconstruction of popular fairytales sent into collision with each other, so Wicked unpacks the Wizard of Oz backstory, long before Dorothy found she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, the musical offers a ferocious battle of wills (and top notes) between two sparky young women, Glinda and Elphaba. The pair meet at a sorcery school, and after initial hostilities and rivalries in love, form an alliance as they discover that “something odd/is happening in Oz” and set themselves on a crash course with the authorities, embodied by the Shiz headmistress Madame Morrible and the Wizard of Oz, who turns out be a weak, ineffectual deity who finds it politically expedient to demonise Elphaba (whose difference is embodied in her unusual green skin colour). As the Wizard says, “Where I come from, everyone knows: the best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.”
Adam Garcia & Idina Menzel in Wicked
|
That’s just one Hare-brained moment. Later on, the Wizard, accused of lying to the citizens of Oz, confesses, “They were the lies they wanted to hear.” But composer Stephen Schwartz is meanwhile intent on raising the hairs on your neck, as the show, in its eye (and ear) popping lavishness throws down a gauntlet to firmly establish itself as musical for the pop idol age, with the belting pair of divas “defying gravity” to reach new musical peaks, while handsome young bucks sing about “dancing through life/swaying and sweeping” (huh?) discover that “life is fraught less when you’re thoughtless.”
That’s probably sound advice for approaching the show. A musical about the casting of spells seems to have duly cast its own and hypnotises audiences who have embraced it not so much as a musical as an event. Though it encourages you to think about themes of difference, disability, animal liberation, regime change and, above all, an ode to the rigours of an unlikely female friendship, it is best appreciated on the more mind-numbing level of the lavishness of its production values that turn it into a glittering cartoon bubble of a show.
Wicked
Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Book by Winnie Holzman, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire.
Directed by Joe Mantello
Apollo Victoria Theatre