Wicked, Apollo Victoria

Not a show that’s Popular with me

I was rather excited about seeing Wicked. I had read numerous articles about how this new show, written by Stephen Schwartz, about the history of the witches in The Wizard of Oz, had taken Broadway by storm and was received with a standing ovation night after night. As a big fan of Schwartz’s previous most major musical, Godspell, I expected this to be a dead cert success. It was a show, however, that left me cold.

It is, in its entirety, like a musical Harry Potter, which may be an incentive for a lot of people to go see it. We see Elphaba (Idina Menzel), the eventually wicked witch, go to a Hogwarts’s equivalent and there discover her powers of magic. She is meanwhile bullied for being green, befriended by the ditzy Glinda (Helen Dallimore), introduced to her future boyfriend (Adam Garcia) and seen lobbying for a more just Oz. It’s a tricky story to follow, further diluted by the sub-plot involving Elphaba’s wheelchair-bound sister, Nessarose (Katie Rowley-Jones). Not surprisingly the show has an aimlessness about it, lacking any sense of build-up or direction. We are dizzily transported from school to the Emerald City to poppy fields to Elphaba’s home, and consequently feel seriously disorientated and curious to see how they’re going to wrap it all up.

The cast and production team do al they can with this show-without-an-identity. The costumes are inventively wacky, the chorus throw themselves into every (difficult) number with gusto. Idina Menzel is excellent as Elphaba, having been imported from the States especially to play the part. Not only is her voice both powerful and sweet, but she is also delightfully calm and thoughtful in her presentation of the witch, if rather let-down by her English counterpart, Dallimore, who just totters, struggles with the dance routines, gets on your nerves and looks decidedly pink. The show uses ambitious special effects – a huge dragon yawns at you from the top of the stage – and there is nothing shy in its employment of razmataz.

The songs are very ambitious and often lose the audience when the lyrics and material are as complex as in songs such as Defying Gravity which could be a chapter from a GSCE Science textbook. The more catchy songs, however, like Popular and As Long As You’re Mine go down well, but I just wish there were more of them in the show, to rescue it from the muddy waters it seems to get itself into.

It’s generally a real labyrinth of a show. The storyline and songs seem to wind around its various channels, never seeming to get to its centre. En route, it didactically raises a number of moral issues – being different isn’t bad, loyalty you owe to a disabled family member, what a human is without a voice and addressing the crushing influence of dictatorship.

It’s certainly not a children’s show and the hundreds of children that piled into the Apollo Victoria for the Wednesday matinee left looking just a little puzzled. I found myself frantically eavesdropping on the child’s questions behind me, in a desperate attempt to fathom what was going on.

It’s good to see Stephen Schwartz back on the scene again and I’m pleased for the recognition that Wicked has earned him. I know I am definitely in the minority not being a fan of the show (it seems to be attracting a cult following similar to The Rocky Horror Show and Forbidden Planet), but it contained no ingredient which excited me.

Anna Brewer : 07 Jan 2007 13:09 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem