What's Bad about Wicked
[Trivia: Each hemisphere of a human brain is divided into what 4 lobes?]
Careful followers of pop culture might be aware that a film adaptation of the musical Wicked is hitting theaters this month. Really careful followers might be aware that it’s premiering on November 22, and is not out yet. Because it’s topical, though, I wanted to comment on the number one shortcoming of the stage production. (I haven’t read the book, and don’t intend to see the movie, directed by Jon M. Chu.1)
The musical does a lot of things right—in particular, it nails the music. The musical runs the gamut of the different kinds of musical numbers that shows include—solos, duets, ensembles, ballads, a show-stopping number at intermission—and handles them all well. They have strong musical identities, they resonate with the particular characters who sing them, and they dramatize the important facets of characters and/or inflections in the story.
Nor is the premise itself bad. The fairytale subversion with a misunderstood villain sets itself up for obvious attacks about glamorizing witchcraft, and this at the height of the Harry Potter scare, but it’s good for what it is. It is, for sure, disorienting on first viewing when the opening number has the Good Witch of the North promise the townsfolk and the audience that we’re about to see the development of a wicked individual, rather than a misfit wind up widely slandered and vilified, but that’s not a bad story to tell. It reminds me of Kant’s reimagining of the Garden of Eden story: it’s not canon, but it’s a fun and impressive exercise of creativity, adopting some different axioms and then lining everything up in some way or other.
The problem is that there’s a huge gap in the storytelling. The green witch Elphaba is, we learn, not wicked; instead she’s the product of … manufactured race wars and propagandistic conspiracy?
It’s not perfectly clear who’s doing what that’s actually wicked or why. The actual wickedness central to the plot—the reason why there’s any conflict or animosity outside of Elphaba’s being a misfit, which truth be told promised to afford enough of a character study on its own—is extremely vague.
Like I said, I haven’t read the book, so maybe the musical has the vestiges of a plot that made sense. Or maybe the story always hinged on allusions to then-common stock villainy. But the former means that it fails as an adaptation, and either mean that it fails as a musical. Musicals are supposed to accentuate the key parts of characters and the story into musical numbers, but there is no antagonist song here. The closest, a song of the Wizard’s (and he is aligned with the antagonists), is 100% sympathetic. Vaudevillian, even. I own the CD for this show and one day it occurred to me that, despite knowing the soundtrack well, I didn’t really understand how the story turned out the way it did. The music doesn’t dramatize it and the references are given such short shrift onstage that my memory had totally faded.
The first half of the show is a dynamic setup for a character study—it separates out virtue, courage, popularity, and resentment in a school context (which is apt) with a bunch of people bouncing off of each other. But then it turns in a different direction where it doesn’t have anything to say about mob psychology, or reputation, or the machinations that slander people for convenience. It’s just a sympathy story for someone being treated unfairly by society.
Wicked comes close to being a great show but it fails to fire on this important cylinder.
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Answer: Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital.
If the name rings a bell, he’s the man who directed Crazy Rich Asians as well as Now You See Me 2, that magicians movie with all those actors. Jon M. Chu was also the former roommate of Jason Russell, the guy who did Kony 2012. Oh and Jason Russell has a sister who married the actor who played Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars.