WICKED: Reviews in LONDON

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 9/27/06 at 11:24pm

The Times is fairly negative:

"WHAT next: a show about the young Cruella de Vil that reveals her to be a misunderstood waif who wistfully dreams of breeding Crufts champions?... The big, spectacular, loud and sporadically tuneful Wicked is almost odder. It’s a spin-off from The Wizard of Oz that so thoroughly whitewashes the Wicked Witch of the West that I was left feeling about the show the way Lord Voldemort feels about Harry Potter.

But then Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s show seems aimed less at grouchy warlocks like me than at youngsters with a taste for the upbeat. That is why much of the first half resembles an American high-school flick in which teenage girls spend their days wrangling, making up and ogling the captain of the basketball team.

Here, Helen Dallimore’s vain, pretty and very popular Galinda surprisingly becomes best friends with Idina Menzel’s bashful and very unpopular Elphaba — and both turn out to have a passion for the class Adonis, Adam Garcia’s cheerfully laid-back Fiyero.

So what does this have to do with The Wizard of Oz? Well, Elphaba was born with a green face and is doomed to become the witch whose death the citizens of Oz celebrate at the show’s very start.

“The wickedest witch there ever was is dead,” they sing in a brash variation of the song featured in the film version of The Wizard of Oz, looking as if they have bounced in from The Pickwick Papers and Gormenghast And then all becomes a sentimental, politically correct flashback.

The poor lass is a victim of differentism, uglyism and racism, all of which are bad, especially since she is interested only in curing her sister’s paralysis, protesting when the university fires the genteel goat that teaches her history and rescuing the flying monkeys that the Wizard of Oz has captured.

Yes, she’s a benign animal liberationist and the Emerald City is the centre of a cynical dictatorship that, as Nigel Planer’s bland old wiz explains, has chosen animals as the “really good enemies” any country needs. Something searingly topical and political here, eh? So Elphaba is forced to go on the run, or rather the broomstick, leaving us to follow an increasingly preposterous plot. There’s a dim boy called Boq, who is mistakenly transformed into the Tin Man, while the girl he forlornly loves, Dallimore’s Glinda, evolves from a cutie who skips about uttering chirrups of glee into the Good Fairy of the North and the Queen of Oz. Fiyero turns out to be a dull goody-goody who really loves Elphaba. More happily, Miriam Margolyes puts in a classy appearance as a magic-teacher who resembles a blend of Catherine the Great and a brocaded Victoria sofa.

Need I go on? Songs bang out, along with iffy lyrics and not-so-witty dialogue. Menzel’s Elphaba rises to the flies amid shafts of rainbow light. There are in-jokes about Dorothy, an annoying brat who is justly rebuked by the virtuous Elphaba for stealing her dead sister’s shoes.

But her mention left me feeling one thing only. I’d rather see The Wizard of Oz 20 times than this ersatz show once. "



Updated On: 9/27/06 at 11:24 PM

[Sondheim Geek]

Posted: 9/27/06 at 11:29pm

...should have italicized the fairly

[Becoz_i_knew_you21]

Posted: 9/27/06 at 11:52pm

Just like what happened here, the reviews are going to be teribble but, it's going to be sucessful.

[Becoz_i_knew_you21]

Posted: 9/27/06 at 11:53pm

Just like what happened here, the reviews are going to be teribble but, it's going to be sucessful.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 9/27/06 at 11:59pm

His review is perfect.

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 12:16am

Don't you think the review sort of gives stuff away - like that Boq is the TinMan? I don't think it's that bad of a show. Sure, some of the lyrics are horrible, but for the most part I think it's a good show. People seem to love it and it brings new people to the theater and I'm all for that.

[COOOOLkid]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 12:25am

I'm sure most of the audience doesn't really care. They probably have already read the synopsis and already know (or guessed) that Boq is the Tin Man


Anyways, I LOVE his review! I would liked to have read more about the individual actors/actresses, but overall, I definitely agree with the whole thing.

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 12:28am

Oh, I wouldn't have guessed it at all, but then again, I try not to pick apart a show when I'm seeing it. I'm not one of those people that figures out the end at the begining of the movie, ya know?

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 1:11am

The Independent is negative:

"The broom is such a convenient method of transport these days, given the rigours of airport security. And now flying across the Atlantic astride one such vehicle comes Wicked, a musical prequel and sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Adapted by Winnie Holzman from the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, the show - which has music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz - delves into the back story of the Wicked Witch of the West. In New York, it quickly recouped its $14m (£7.4m) capitalisation costs. There are further productions springing up in major cities and a touring version. On the other side of the pond, there is no rest for Wicked.

It was hard to tell from last night's first night how well it would go down here. The audience was so papered with connected people that everything was greeted with uniform ecstasy. Green-faced and in hideously clashing student clothes, Idina Menzel had merely to walk on stage, as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch, and the roof came off. A friend who'd seen the show in New York told me that this girl can out-sing Streisand. I beg strongly to differ. Her voice is certainly power-packed and tuneful but it is also featureless, lacking Streisand's range of emotional colours.

The first half of Wicked is, however, a bit like the real-life Streisand story translated to Oz and with added chlorophyll. Girl has distinctive feature that makes her an outsider and the butt of taunts. Then she finds that she has wondrous powers (here discovered with the help of a book of spells at magic school) and soon leaves everyone literally standing as she sings of singular flight. Here it's on a broom rather than on a ship. I confess that my tummy lurched pleasurably during the evening's big uplifting number, "I think I'll try/Defying gravity".

The Wonderful Wizard (a very poor Nigel Planer) is exposed early on as fraudulent coward, who because he can't read his own spell-literature, has to unite the country by demonising sections of the community - animals, Munchkins etc. The attempt at topical political allegory is well-meaning but also melodramatic, incoherent and dreadfully superficial. Entangled with this is the story of Elphaba's troubled with her Legally Blonde-style friend and future Good Fairy from the South, Glinda (Helen Dallimore) and their rivalry over the apparently airhead dish, Fyero (Adam Garcia).

I enjoyed very little apart from the delicious Miriam Margolyes, all embonpoint and Barbara Cartland face as Madame Morrible, mistress of the magic academy. The songs sound like dozens you've heard before. The acting is, by and large, appalling. The book is aimed uncertainly at several constituencies. The production manages to feel at once overblown and empty. As the crowds heaved up for air during the interval, a lady next to me asked: "Are you liking it." "I'm afraid I'm not," I replied. There was a ghastly pause. "Well everyone else is!" she barked. I fear the show's message about the need to assert the right to be different may not be getting across."

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/reviews/article1768887.ece

[jimnysf]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 1:28am

WHAT next: a show about the young Cruella de Vil that reveals her to be a misunderstood waif who wistfully dreams of breeding Crufts champions?

Please. Don't give Disney any ideas.

The songs sound like dozens you've heard before. The acting is, by and large, appalling. The production manages to feel at once overblown and empty.

Songs bang out, along with iffy lyrics and not-so-witty dialogue.

Ouch! True as far as the songs go but still...Ouch!

[Christopher Gough]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 2:21am

Michael Billington - 'Guardian'

Friends of Dorothy may be diverted by this musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz. But, although it has been a hit in New York, it seems all too typical of the modern Broadway musical: efficient, knowing and highly professional but more like a piece of industrial product than something that genuinely touches the heart or mind.
Winnie Holzman's crowded book is itself based on a novel by Gregory Maguire that imagines the prehistory of both the Wicked and Good Witches. The former starts out as a green-fleshed, decent-hearted outsider who has wickedness thrust upon her. Glinda, in contrast, is a vain, pushy, ambitious blonde who acquires an aura of goodness only through her solicitude for her maligned, binary opposite, here named Elphaba.

For the first half the story swings along quite merrily. There is a certain zest about the love-hate relationship between the despised Elphaba and the glamorous Glinda, who are college contemporaries. Stephen Schwartz's lyrics even display an unusual literacy, as when Fiyero, the campus stud, attacks scholasticism by urging everyone to "stop studying strife and learn to live the unexamined life." Miriam Margolyes, as a statuesque, magic-dispensing college principal, has a Dickensian exuberance that evokes the world of Boz more than Oz.
Having whetted our appetites, Wicked lapses into knowingness and moralism. As the story edges ever closer to the Baum novel and Victor Fleming movie, characters transmogrify into the Tin Man and Scarecrow and there are endless sly references to the invisible Dorothy, cyclones and shoes. Worse still, the musical decides it has to make a public statement about the importance of sisterhood. In the least beguiling number in the show, Elphaba and Glinda jointly and unconvincingly assert: "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."

Admittedly, the show is well performed. As Elphaba, Idina Menzel possesses lungs of brass and displays the vulnerability of the congenital loner. Helen Dallimore's Glinda is very funny as the peachy blonde who begins by announcing "it's good to see me, isn't it" and gradually evolves into an Evita-style power-broker. Nigel Planer potters around effectively as the not-so-wonderful wizard and Adam Garcia endows the male romantic interest, Fiyero, with a louche charm. Joe Mantello's direction and Eugene Lee's clock-based designs do their work efficiently.

[Al Dente]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 3:15am

They all seem pretty spot on to me.

[algy]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 4:15am

I don't think they're any different to what was expected really are they? Mixed to negative, with praise for the performers. Considering that the best reviewed musical this season has been SITPWG, Wicked was hardly going to push their buttons was it?

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 5:33am

I adore how evil London theatre critics can be. All of these are right on the money. I love the "Well, everyone else is!" story.
Updated On: 9/28/06 at 05:33 AM

[Kevinoes]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 6:41am

These don't look all that different from the New York premiere, but maybe I'm just a little surprised that London critics aren't embracing the show after such anticipation.

[EponineAmneris]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 7:52am

I would like to thank you all for ruining my day with these

[Incognito]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 7:55am

"As the crowds heaved up for air during the interval, a lady next to me asked: "Are you liking it." "I'm afraid I'm not," I replied. There was a ghastly pause. "Well everyone else is!" she barked."

I read this, and thought of a circus monkey. The higher he climbs the pole, the more of his ass is seen: - )

[Princeton78]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 7:58am

Lord, this show really is indestructable.
It'll outrun "The Mousetrap."

[Claire2141]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 8:15am

While the reviews aren't great (the one from the London Paper is ok-ish) I doubt it'll dampen the love for it here. WWRY got awful reviews yet it's still going strong.

Quite angry with them in a way, it's like they want to go against public opinion or something. Oh well, the show is a bit kitsch and toung in cheek in parts...plus very 'easy'.

At the end of the day here, it's not so much critics reviews that get 'bums on seats' it's word of mouth. And everyone (minus critics) love it.

[actorgaedu]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 8:32am

Really? Why did the critics even bother? I mean, everyone who is supposed to be informed on theater hates this show, but it is a monster hit. Sure it has moments that could be better, but it is entertaining and I thought fun. I mean who is laughing all the way to the bank here? Certainly not the critics. What is next? I guess we will have to start having public executions on stage under a $20 million budget so the critics can possibly write something meaningful. The only word that comes to my mind over the latest theater reviews is pathetic.

[Claire2141]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 8:38am

This is London Review....bit more like it....

No musical as weird or steeped in fairy-tale magic as Wicked has cast its multi-million pound spell upon the London stage in decades.

I pleasurably recall the climactic, closing minutes of the first act when Idina Menzel's spectacular, green-faced Wicked Witch of the West, who slips easily into a pointy black hat, shoots into the rainbow-coloured air on her broomstick.

She sings, as she goes, a hymn to getting the better of the world - Defying Gravity - while her black cloak grows at least 12 feet tall. She is poised to lead the fight against Nigel Planer's bland but sinister Wizard of Oz who looks like George Bush and whose mission to cage all animals has made him her public enemy number one.

You think you detect an adult, political satirical allegory simmering away beneath the magical surface? You are right to. The musical's chief concern is to warn adults in the audience against simplistic (Bush-like) concepts of good and evil, but you would need to have read Gregory Maguire's recent adult novel on which Wicked's own, less politicised but amusing book is based, to be able to pick up or savour the serious nuances.

Meanwhile the impressive and not untypical scene which I describe is designed to make children of us all and persuade us to pack up all our real-life troubles.

Yet Defying Gravity, with unexceptional musical accompaniment and just competent lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, has already left my mind. For Wicked, it turns out, belongs in a rare pantheon of musicals in which the music does not matter much. Only Dancing Through Life, with lyrics that urge you to keep smiling through, ranks as memorable.

Otherwise it is the spectacle, the experience of a magical mystery tour through the fantasy land of Oz that takes and holds attention. If Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are far more to my deeply juvenile tastes, when it comes to inventive make believe Wicked more than lives up to its name.

Sailing on the waves of escapist fantasy on which many of us depend for pleasure, the musical tracks back to the celluloid Wizard of Oz. It begins where the movie ends and dreams up a fresh narrative from the witches' viewpoints. Dying, danger and the shock of weirdness are faced in this land where monkeys have wings and animals teach humans.

Wayne Cilento's set reeks of magic potential. A winged dragon looks down from the rafters. A giant clock with huge wheels of time frames the action. The Wizard exists on a throne protected by a giant, gold face mask whose features shimmer. Idina Menzel's bespectacled "wicked" Witch of the West Elphaba, sports plaited hair, a turban and charisma, though her singing voice is not consistently audible.

Elphaba seems an absolute outsider at Shiz University where Miriam Margolyes's gorgeously comic Madame Morrible recommends her for sorcery studies. In comparison Helen Dallimore's squeaky-voiced blonde Glinda reeks of goodness.

The arrival of Adam Garcia's unnecessarily dull Prince Fiyero, whom each girl longs to marry, precipitates a clash of wills and wiles in Oz that involve Elphaba's wheelchair-bound sister, Nessarosa (Katie Rowley Jones) and the realisation that neither people nor the world itself are quite what they seem.

Joe Mantello's production expertly marshals this remarkable kaleidoscope of magical shocks, surprises and sensations. Wicked works like a dream.


A bit better - well a lot better compared to some of the others.

[swerve]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 9:18am

Flawed, but witches' spell still works First night
By Charles Spencer
The Daily Telegraph

APOLLO VICTORIA

DESPITE all my best endeavours, I have never found myself capable of becoming a friend of Dorothy.

The much loved 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz gives me the creeps and as Dorothy and her cute male friends wend their way along the yellow brick road, I feel more like throwing up than applauding.

Those ghastly Munchkins, the tooth-rotting sweetness of the Good Witch, the ghastly cracker-barrel wisdom - all of it torture, like slowly drowning in a sea of Technicolor kitsch. This surely is a film for girls and gays.

So it was with no great hopes that I made my way to this stage prequel, which tells the back-story of the good witch Glinda, and of her malevolent green-faced rival, Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.

Despite receiving indifferent reviews, Wicked, based on a novel by Gregory Maguire and with songs by Stephen Schwartz of Godspell fame, has become an enduringly lucrative hit in New York. It is apparently especially favoured by adolescent girls and watching this unexpectedly witty, enjoyable though far from flawless show it's easy to see why.

Essentially Wicked tells the story of two archetypal young women who meet at Shiz university (which bears a strong similarity to Harry Potter's Hogwarts) and graduate to the wider world of Oz where life is turning decidedly sinister.

Glinda is a beautiful, spoilt blonde airhead, popular with everyone, almost always getting her own way, and inclined to stamp her feet when she doesn't. Elphaba in contrast, is an outcast, because she was born with green skin, distrusted and mocked by everyone except her crippled sister. Needless to say the pair become deadly rivals before they discover that they are actually bosom buddies, and the account of fickle girly relationships is told with wit and panache.

But the piece is also a faintly paranoid allegory of present-day America. The folksy Wizard of Oz bears a more than passing resemblance to George W Bush in Nigel Planer's performance, and in his persecution of Oz's talking animals we are surely meant to discern parallels with America's current bellicosity and its fear of alien cultures as it wages its war against terror.

The popular Glinda tries to stay out of trouble and find romance with Adam Garcia's prince. The "wicked' Elphaba, in contrast, becomes a broom-flying freedom fighter on behalf of Oz's dispossessed. Gradually however the roles are reversed.

At times the show undoubtedly slips into the preachy, but mercifully Winnie Holzman's script keeps the gags coming as it cleverly subverts the film that spawned it. And Joe Mantello's production, on a Heath Robinsonish design by Eugene Lee, is packed with spectacular coups de theatre and some magical lighting effects by Kenneth Posner.

Stephen Schwartz's lyrics are occasionally touched with wit, but what he really specialises in are big gloopy power ballads that allow the two female leads to stand centre stage and soar into the stratospheric. This they do with some style.

Idina Menzel, visiting from Broadway where she won a Tony for her performance, offers a winning powerhouse performance as Elphaba, a green, female Harry Potter who suffers dreadfully as she tries to do magical good, and sings of her trials and tribulations with astonishing displays of vocal power.

Helen Dallimore is at times laugh-out-loud funny as the pert, preening Glinda, who loves no one quite as much as herself, and these two performers create a genuinely warm and sparky on-stage relationship.

No one could accuse Wicked of being a great musical - indeed at times it's a bit of a mess - but it proves far more enjoyable than I had dared to hope, and deserves a wider audience than adolescent schoolgirls.




A lot like New York. Mixed to negative for the show, better for the leads.

[Becoz_i_knew_you21]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 11:05am

"I would like to thank you all for ruining my day with these"

C'mon everyone knew it was going to get bad review like it did in the U.S.

[Fosse76]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 11:14am

"It is apparently especially favoured by adolescent girls and watching this unexpectedly witty, enjoyable though far from flawless show it's easy to see why."

The thing is, this is false. There was an article in the Times a few months ago that disproved that young girls were seeing the show in droves. In fact, it even surprised the producers. The audience make-up of Wicked is no different than that of Phantom, Mamma Mia, Sweeney Todd, The History Boys, etc.

[landryjames2]

Posted: 9/28/06 at 11:30am

Honestly, I think that reviews a few years ago when it premiered on Broadway were actually mixed to positive. It seems to have grown into hyper-myth that they were all negative. Even Brantley at the New York Times was not all negative. Even though his review of the overall show was mediocre, he spent half of the article writing a euphoric and splendid review of Kristin Chenoweth's personal performance within the show.

This thread reminds of the reviews for The Wizard of Oz. For years, the myth pervaded that The Wizard of Oz opened to very negative reviews in 1939. In reality, it was really just a few reviews out of literally dozens that did not exalt the movie.

And regards to the reviewer who wants to throw up every time he watches The Wizard of Oz--why the hell was he commissioned to write a review on Wicked? I dismissed his review out of hand.