What I thought of Wicked...

Happy Saturday everyone! I’m very happy to have gotten to sleep until 8 this morning. Probably could’ve stayed in bed a little while longer, but Trey was up and getting ready for work by then and it’s always nice to actually get to talk to him in the morning. Topic for today - Wicked review. If this post doesn’t get too long, I’ll talk a little about my IUD experience from yesterday. If not, I’ll do that tomorrow or Monday, unless people really just don’t want to hear about it.

Wednesday night Trey and I got to see Wicked, courtesy of Moet et Chandon – they did a bubbly tasting at Trey’s store in conjunction with a Wicked promo and had some comp tickets that no one stayed around long enough to win. Hooray for free tickets! I must admit that I wasn’t expecting too much – yes, it’s gotten a lot of hype, including very high ratings from the gay guy in my office who’d know, but it’s also one of those shows that every teenage girl is gaga over, plus I wasn’t really familiar with any of the music. Overall, I really did like it, though it took me until about the middle of the first act to get into it. I would certainly recommend it to others, but first, the negatives...

The very first thing that hit me was that everything was amplified. Most of you are probably saying ‘duh’ but I realized that T & I haven’t seen anything but opera or other classical music in a few years, and all of that is done without mics. The Oriental in Chicago is much smaller than the Civic Opera House, but probably not as good acoustically. Plus, the singers are singing over synthesizers, and they haven’t necessarily been trained to project the way opera singers have. Anyway, so that was a little weird at first, and it did get annoying when the sound guys decided to have fun and crank the speakers up – there were a few times I was wished I’d brought earplugs because the decibel level got too high.

The only other negative I have is that, after talking to my brother I found out that the musical does not follow the book very well at all. Though I thought that the musical was incredibly well written story line wise, and that this prequel meshed very well with the original story, it was annoying to find out that most things didn’t happen on stage the way they did in the book.

Now, the good – the flipside of my last comment is that I felt the story in terms of the musical left very little lacking in terms of explaining the original Wizard of Oz. Trey will crab that the Tin Man and Scarecrow each became those characters too late in Wicked, but it didn’t bother me much as the timing actually worked incredibly well with everything else that was going on.

Something I really liked and appreciated about this show was that it had a lot of great lessons and morals – any teenage girl who gets out of her bubble head long enough to pay attention will learn a lot. One of the most important lessons, reiterated and reiterated, was that nothing external can make you happy – you have to make yourself happy through your own thoughts and your own mind. Receiving love, happiness, or some kind of tangible possession did not make the characters who’d wished for those things happy – it only made them more miserable.

Another theme that kept coming up was that nothing is really black or white. You come away from the show thinking that maybe the Wicked Witches of the East and West weren’t necessarily bad people, and that Glinda really wasn’t all that great. This is something that Trey didn’t like, but I did.

Now, other aspects – the effects, lighting, and sets were great. Costumes were very whimsical, exactly what they should’ve been for this show. The music, I came away thinking that none of the tunes were terribly memorable, but I do want to listen to the soundtrack again. I bet I’ll find that some of them will stick.

Ok, so that’s a long enough post for today, I think. Questions, comments? Let me know. Have a great day, all!