Gil Hates Everything

Stephen Schwartz has written a bunch of musicals including “Godspell” and “Children Of Eden”, and the music for Disney movies including “Hunchback”, but, I dunno, it may just be me, but he’s always come across as a little boring. Not as boring as Maury Yeston, and not as incompetent as Frank Wildhorn, but somewhat of a one-chord composer, if not one-note. Still, he managed to sell his producers on the idea of converting “Wicked”, a book by Gregory Maguire which tells “the true story of the Wicked Witch of the West”, into a musical, and here it is. And it must be said, it’s a step up from his previous work, but then he’s been at it for thirty years so you’d hope he had learned some tricks.

Now here is an interesting thing about this musical. No doubt thanks to copyright, there have been very few works of art which have relied upon you knowing another work of art in any kind of detail in order to make sense of them. I don’t mean adaptations: yes, Sherlock Holmes has been adapted plenty of times, but an adaptation is a self-explanatory thing. In this case, if you’ve never seen “The Wizard Of Oz”, (a) congratulations! I never liked that movie, (b) how? it was on all the fucking time when I was growing up – has it been stuck in the vaults at last?, (c) you may well follow what’s going on at the start of “Wicked” – missing a bunch of in-jokes, but whatever – but you’ll be scratching your head during the second act.

It’s interesting because popular culture is now fair game for the more knowing TV show or movie, but only within carefully-observed trope boundaries. (As expressed in the joke about how the world of a Tom Cruise movie must be very strange, because there are no Tom Cruise movies in it, and no-one runs up to the lead and shouts “OMG, you’re Tom Cruise!”) So it’s kinda brave to base a musical – one of the most expensive forms of hopefully-mass entertainment – on another cultural work. A book is a less expensive proposition for both the creative team and the audience. Even a play – “Rosencrantz And Guilderstern Are Dead” comes to mind, as a ‘behind the scenes’ look at two minor characters from “Hamlet” who have no idea that they’re doomed in the main story – is a cheaper concern.

But “Wicked”? We’re talking big sets, flying monkeys, glossy costumes, lighting and special effects… and a big theatre. So merchandising is turned up to eleven – there’s an extremely nice-looking and costly book about the creation of the show on sale in the lobby, for example – and “Defying Gravity” and a couple other of the songs have been somewhat forced into the repertoire through extensive marketing. We found ourselves at a pre-booking event for the show in Vancouver last month where you’d have thought they were selling a presidential candidate: Schwartz and his producers appeared on giant video screens, members of the cast performed, questions were answered. “Wicked” was described as the most successful and most intelligent new musical of a generation. The egos of the movers and shakers were caressed. Come and see this show, we were told, because this is the perfect storm of heart and mind, the only musical you’ll ever need to see, the way things should be done. it was a little scary, really. They weren’t taking any chances on, y’know, whether people might want to go and see it themselves.

Now on the one hand I’m being a bit disingenuous because you know from past GHMs that I’m all about knowing whether it’s worth going to see something. It’s just, I’d rather a work could speak for itself in its own publicity, and that’s not what was happening here.

But enough of all that meta crap. What does “Wicked” sound like? (And, since I have seen it, what’s it look and feel like, subject to spoilers?)

Well, it has a good structure. The entire show is a flashback from the moment of the Wicked Witch’s death, narrated by Glinda the Good Witch, who wants us (the audience) to consider whether someone labelled as ‘wicked’ is really no more than an enemy of the state, or someone pushed too far, or someone born into a life hopelessly biased against them. In this case, the Wicked Witch of the West turns out to have been a woman called Elphaba, the daughter of a magical philanderer – hence her green hue – who managed to get to Oz’s equivalent of Hogwarts, roomed with a shallow popular blonde (the aforementioned Good Witch, before she got a clue), and finally got her dream of meeting the Wizard Of Oz. Along the way, the whole of Oz is being manipulated (I have to say I’m a little hazy on the details here) in a pogrom against the talking animals, and Elphaba isn’t having it – when the guards come to arrest her, she flies off and becomes a resistance fighter. The propaganda machine of Oz is turned against her, inventing numerous demonizing lies, while Glinda is educated in what’s really going on and the true nature of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And out of the sky, a house has just crashed to the ground, containing a confused but angry young girl…

… at which point I’ll stop, as there are some very nice touches thereafter. Dorothy never appears on-stage, so it’s not like this random out-of-the-fucking-sky character is ever a focal point, but her presence in the plot, while amusing / fatalistic as hell for us observing Elphaba’s trajectory towards her final fate, will confuse the fuck out of anyone watching this musical after our collective awareness of the original book or movie has left the building. It’s not like that’s likely to happen between your reading this review and seeing the show, mind you, especially since they’re planning a movie of “Wicked” sometime soon.

The songs: are good. I’d say about half of them are okay (although a couple of them deliver the plot with slightly hammerlike subtlety, especially the Wizard’s explanations of the show’s central metaphor) and the other half are the hits: “The Wizard And I” (packed with innocent Cassandraisms), “What Is This Feeling?” (the roommates at war, although it starts by making it seem like they’re about to have a lesbian affair), “Popular” (Glinda considers how to spruce up the unprepossessing Elphaba – this song contains one moment of such wit that I’m really surprised Schwartz did it), “Defying Gravity” (Elphaba cuts loose), “As Long As You’re Mine” (Elphaba and her bishy on the run), and the near-to-closing “For Good”, in which Glinda and Elphaba reconcile moments before Elphaba goes out to face the water-wielding Dorothy.

Or at least I say they’re good. Some of them… c’mon, you know it in your heart: the lyrics are gibberish. (“Ah, Gil, there you are! We thought you’d gone soft!” I hear my avids say approvingly.) The chorus of “For Good” is full of awful comparisons, “Defying Gravity” is a song about flying, which only just gets away with it because the character in question can actually fucking fly (which is kinda funny, I admit, but the lyrics are still several steps below a Queen song)… Schwartz as a composer sets himself lyrical tasks which he frequently can’t quite measure up to, and I have to wonder whether “Wicked”‘s success is because it sounds like it’s intelligent and thus enables a large audience which can pat itself on the back without having to strain the ol’ parser too much. He’s certainly not as bad as JRB’s infamous “Marco” (“he may not be Cole Porter but he knows a bunch of words that sorta rhyme”) but the lyrics mark this out as a mainstream show which is content to leave the intelligence to the script. (Which is by Winnie Holzman, an actual writer.) And that’s a bit of a shame, because I’m sure a better lyricist could have matched the pretty-good music.

As it is, the show comes across as a good, pretty, kinda clever melodramatic play – although let us not forget that Stephen Schwartz did not conceive of the clever melodrama at its heart – with a bunch of upmarket pop songs stirred in. Which doesn’t make “Wicked” a fail, as you’ll see from the score – I have a fair amount of time for it – but I am irritated at the notion that this is marketed as the best we can do, because it isn’t.

I’d also be interested in seeing just how much of the extremely lefty metaphor of this show actually modifies the lives of the audience. The pre-booking event featured lots of footage of people saying “I just saw Wicked and it was awesome!” – but no-one was asked “So, having just seen this show, have you changed your opinion about the Unabomber… or Al-Quaeda?”

Random Panda awards “Wicked” seven out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted 2009)