Critics blasted Wicked, but the musical packs them in on Broadway and has 10 Tony nominations, thanks to the timeless appeal of the magical land of Oz.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published June 6, 2004
NEW YORK - The yellow brick road leads to Broadway. That is the message of Wicked, a new musical based on a novel by Gregory Maguire that deconstructs The Wizard of Oz by telling the story of what happened in Emerald City, Munchkinland and the rest of Oz before Dorothy blew in from Kansas.
Playing to packed houses, the musical by Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics) and Winnie Holzman (book) has the most Tony Award nominations, with 10. It is the front-runner to win the coveted prize for best musical in tonight's broadcast of the award ceremonies.
It doesn't seem to matter that many critics panned Wicked as an overblown bore. I went to the show soon after it opened in October, and it struck me as musically leaden and dramatically incomprehensible. Schwartz, whose previous hits include Pippin and Godspell, concocted an amalgam of Les Miserables-style pop opera anthems and '70s stadium rock to drive the score, and his lyrics are all too prone to make clunky rhymes, such as "frank analysis" and "personality dialysis" in one of the catchier tunes, Popular.
The book by Holzman, a television writer responsible for the acclaimed but short-lived series My So-Called Life, simplifies Maguire's darkly textured novel, published in 1995, to focus on the relationship between two witches of Oz: Elphaba, the green-skinned, sympathetic Wicked Witch of the West, played by Idina Menzel; and Glinda the Good, a bratty blond played by Kristin Chenoweth. The two meet at sorcery school, where they loathe each other at first but come to an uneasy detente, and the play follows the witches' changing relationship through the years.
Menzel and Chenoweth both were nominated for the Tony for leading actress in a musical, a category that includes a pair of formidable contenders, Donna Murphy from the revival of Wonderful Town and Tonya Pinkins from Caroline, or Change.
Wicked is not a lock for best musical. Avenue Q, with its 20-something puppet characters, is clever and fun. Caroline, or Change, which boasts a book by Tony Kushner (Angels in America), is musical theater for thinking people. The only nominee that probably doesn't have a chance is another vaguely Oz-related show, the Peter Allen biomusical The Boy From Oz. It stars Hugh Jackman, the likely Tony winner for leading actor in a musical for his portrayal of Allen, the Australian showman who played piano for Judy Garland and married her daughter, Liza Minnelli. Jackman is host of tonight's telecast.
Whether it wins the Tony or not, Wicked will probably run for years because of the perennial allure of the magical land created by L. Frank Baum in his 1900 book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was adapted for the iconic 1939 MGM movie with Garland. Recently, I talked with some Ozian experts about the show's success.
"Here we are in Oz again," said Susan Wolstenholme, who wrote an entertaining essay on the pop cultural impact of Baum's book as the introduction of an edition by Oxford University Press. "People have a voracious appetite for Oz. I think it resonates with their childhood. They just want to live in Oz for a little while, as long as it takes to sit in a theater and watch a show."
Wolstenholme, who teaches children's literature at Cayuga Community College in upstate New York, not far from Baum's birthplace in the town of Chittenango, finds that her students all have seen the movie, but few have read the book. She urges them to look at Oz as a political allegory - with Emerald City as a kind of capitalist fantasy - or she applies a feminist interpretation to a land where the witches have all the power, Dorothy empowers herself and the Wizard is ineffectual. But the most powerful theme in Baum's fable is the most simple: "There is no place like home."
"It's one of our deepest cultural needs in America, the drive to go home again," she said. "If you want to be mythic about it, it's The Odyssey; it's the story of Peter Rabbit. It's Peter Pan, in a way, if you take it from the point of view of the children rather than Peter Pan himself. The Tolkien books, too. It's the classic story of going off on an adventure and then coming home."
Dorothy is never seen in Wicked, though she is mentioned a couple of times. Maguire's novel and the musical also depart from Baum in portraying Oz as a sinister place. Elphaba, an animal rights activist, learns of a plot by the Wizard to enslave the animal population, meant to suggest a parallel with fascism or racism. As one of her professors, a talking goat, puts it in a song, "Something bad is happening in Oz," and the Wicked Witch sets out to challenge the injustice.
"It's interesting that Wicked makes some pretense of dealing with the nature of evil," Wolstenholme said. "I don't think Baum was interested in that in the least. In fact, his relentless cheerfulness is something that people love. I think it sort of fits into the American optimism that we cling to even when it doesn't make sense."
This is not the first time Oz has been turned into musical theater. Several years ago, a stage version of the movie toured with Mickey Rooney as the Wizard and Eartha Kitt as the Wicked Witch. The Wiz, an all-black version with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, won the 1975 Tony for best musical. And back in 1903, a musical extravaganza called The Wizard of Oz, with a book and lyrics credited to Baum, was a Broadway hit.
"It was more of a burlesque of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It veered considerably from the book," said Michael Patrick Hearn, editor of The Annotated Wizard of Oz.
Under director Julian Mitchell, later known for staging the Ziegfeld Follies, Baum's fairy tale was transformed into something quite different. Dorothy became a young woman who fell in and out of love. Instead of Toto, there was a cow named Imogen. The Wizard was a comic Irishman. There was no Wicked Witch of the West.
As would Wicked a century later, the show included arcane tidbits of Oziana. For example, it introduced Pastoria, the rightful ruler of the land, who had been overthrown by the Wizard and sent off in a balloon to work as a streetcar motorman in Topeka; now he was leading a revolution to get his throne back.
"What really pulled it off was the spectacle," Hearn said, going on to describe a famous poppy scene that ended the first act of the 1903 musical.
"It had chorus girls dressed as poppies, and the Witch of the North called the Snow Queen to kill the flowers with a snowstorm. It ended with all these chorus girls throwing snowballs and running free of the deadly poppy field."
Hearn, who lives in New York and is writing a biography of Baum, has not seen Wicked but has listened to the cast album and read Maguire's novel.
"The musical diverges quite a bit from Greg's book, especially in the second act," he said. "It's a different experience from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with different goals in mind. I think it's amusing because there are all kinds of things in there that only Oz people would know, such as the Wicked Witch's name Elphaba being derived from the initials of L. Frank Baum."
Ozians are devoted to Baum's book and the many sequels that he and others wrote. There were 40 books in the Oz series. Purists tend to be divided about anything that strays from the original material, and Maguire's bestselling novel is controversial.
"Wicked is a litmus test for how you think about Oz," said Atticus Gannaway, editor in chief of the Baum Bugle, the magazine of the International Wizard of Oz Club. "The Bugle ran two different reviews of the book when it came out, pro and con."
Gannaway, an editor and writer in New York, began reading the Oz books at age 6. He enjoys the MGM movie and thinks the 1985 movie Return to Oz, which bombed at the box office, "comes the closest as anything on film ever has to capturing the original books." But he couldn't get into Maguire's novel.
"I'd wanted to like Wicked because so many people had a favorable opinion of it, but I'm sorry to say I just couldn't like it, as much as I tried," he said. "The most amazing thing about the book for me was how thoroughly it sucked the whimsicality and joy and life out of Oz."
As for the musical, Gannaway found it worse than the novel, which he at least credits for being true to an author's singular vision. "The musical tries to have it both ways," he said. "It wants to capitalize on our nostalgia for the MGM film that we grew up with, these wonderful warm memories, and then impose on that the deconstructing spirit that Maguire brings to the story. But (Schwartz and Holzman) didn't want to go too far, so they made it into this female bonding, feel-good thing. It sells out from every angle you can imagine."
Nevertheless, a Bugle contributor (not Gannaway) gave a positive review to Wicked. Gannaway did appreciate some of the Ozian touches in the musical, such as appearances by the Saw Horse, from the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and the Hammer-Heads, squat creatures with springy heads from the first book. He admired Eugene Lee's massive, industrial-strength set.
In trying to put his finger on why he disliked Wicked, Gannaway referred to an article he commissioned for the Bugle on the appeal of Oz to the gay community.
"What came out in the article is how gay men have a much more complicated relationship with the concept of home, and where exactly that home is and what it means," he said. "The fact that, in Oz, there are all these freaks, but everybody's accepted. How in the books and in the movie, difference and diversity are respected."
Over the Rainbow and the rest of the songs from the MGM movie are a staple at gay piano bars around the world. Gannaway can't imagine those from Wicked ever achieving the same campy status.
"Those songs from the old musical lend themselves to camp in a way that the sort of self-conscious, hyperemotional Stephen Schwartz stuff could never do," he said. "The definition of camp is the refusal to take anything seriously, and in the end, the problem with Wicked is that it takes itself way too seriously."
At a glance
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