"Wicked" - Baltimore tour
Feb. 29th, 2020 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealLeap day excursion!
-The staging, eh, didn't really do it for me. A lot of steampunk/clock imagery which I think is a nod to the novels but I haven't read them so it didn't really feel like an important motif? And then the backdrop was just various projections and bright colors. (The cyclone was pretty good, though.)
-Speaking of the cyclone, there's rain in the first act "I'm Not That Girl" which seems to just be showing us that actually, Elphaba can survive water, that legend was not based in anything. But it also sets up Morrible's weather powers!
-The scene with Dorothy's house was a little dissonant, one minute Elphaba is mourning Nessa, the next she's cat-fighting with Glinda over Fiyero, the next Fiyero is engineering a hostage situation.
-The fandom is much smaller on Ao3 than FFN, I guess it's one of those like Animorphs where the heyday was pre-Ao3?
-There's a lot of staging of "Elphaba runs into a crowd, people scatter in fear, she glares" in "Dear Old Shiz" and even the setup to "The Wizard and I." I feel like that got a little trite (ditto her father's "you're only here to take care of Nessa!") when it's done well with the ensemble in "What Is This Feeling"...
-but, that begs the question of "aren't musicals supposed to be over-the-top and cheesy anyway? The thing is, I don't really get into a lot of "classic" musicals that are almost exclusively about (contrived) romance.
-Which leads into the "is your story more or less depressing than the musical that's literally called 'the miserable people' litmus test" I've posted about a couple times (maybe not here?) Les Mis--pretty much everybody dies, but, the epilogue skips ahead to Valjean with Fantine and the revolutionaries in the afterlife. Hamilton--dies, but, the epilogue skips ahead to Eliza meeting? Alexander and/or seeing the audience recognize her as part of the narrative.
Wicked--ends with Fiyero and Elphaba escaping together after all, but, Glinda doesn't know they're alive and Fiyero is like "you can never tell her if we want to be safe." Which, one, does Elphaba even care about being safe. Two, I definitely choose to headcanon that Glinda figures it out at some point, life is depressing enough as it is and also there are literal flying monkeys who deliver mail in this setting. Three, I definitely got the vibe the first time I saw it in person (which was...2008?) that Glinda can "hear" her at the end. But IDK, I'm not sure whether it's just a modernist thing to be like "well make it happy, but not too happy!" or "sad, but not too sad!" Or if the artsy-fartsy types who write some of them are like "well only shallow and dumb people believe in an afterlife so those epilogues are not real, what are you thinking about." Which, if you don't like shallow people, I have some bad news for your about your target audience (see, "over-the-top," above.)
-Speaking of which...
Glinda to Dillamond: "Why can't you just teach history instead of going on about the past?"
Fiyero: "There's no pretense! I'm genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow!"
Elphaba: "No you aren't. Or you wouldn't be so unhappy."
I've said before that the Wizard is making a point about revisionist history that's only sort of effective. Well, the whole musical is about revisionist history...except it's really mostly an origin story, the Wizard of Oz timeframe is only a small fraction of what we see in "real-time."
-Do we believe that Glinda, with her social skills, can succeed where Elphaba failed? (And if so, could that facilitate their reunion someday?) I kind of feel like Glinda has her own weaknesses and tendencies toward extremes which might make her vulnerable too.
But I think it's also worth noting that, in spite of all Elphaba's efforts, Glinda is the one who Chistery the monkey talks to at the end.
-The staging, eh, didn't really do it for me. A lot of steampunk/clock imagery which I think is a nod to the novels but I haven't read them so it didn't really feel like an important motif? And then the backdrop was just various projections and bright colors. (The cyclone was pretty good, though.)
-Speaking of the cyclone, there's rain in the first act "I'm Not That Girl" which seems to just be showing us that actually, Elphaba can survive water, that legend was not based in anything. But it also sets up Morrible's weather powers!
-The scene with Dorothy's house was a little dissonant, one minute Elphaba is mourning Nessa, the next she's cat-fighting with Glinda over Fiyero, the next Fiyero is engineering a hostage situation.
-The fandom is much smaller on Ao3 than FFN, I guess it's one of those like Animorphs where the heyday was pre-Ao3?
-There's a lot of staging of "Elphaba runs into a crowd, people scatter in fear, she glares" in "Dear Old Shiz" and even the setup to "The Wizard and I." I feel like that got a little trite (ditto her father's "you're only here to take care of Nessa!") when it's done well with the ensemble in "What Is This Feeling"...
-but, that begs the question of "aren't musicals supposed to be over-the-top and cheesy anyway? The thing is, I don't really get into a lot of "classic" musicals that are almost exclusively about (contrived) romance.
-Which leads into the "is your story more or less depressing than the musical that's literally called 'the miserable people' litmus test" I've posted about a couple times (maybe not here?) Les Mis--pretty much everybody dies, but, the epilogue skips ahead to Valjean with Fantine and the revolutionaries in the afterlife. Hamilton--dies, but, the epilogue skips ahead to Eliza meeting? Alexander and/or seeing the audience recognize her as part of the narrative.
Wicked--ends with Fiyero and Elphaba escaping together after all, but, Glinda doesn't know they're alive and Fiyero is like "you can never tell her if we want to be safe." Which, one, does Elphaba even care about being safe. Two, I definitely choose to headcanon that Glinda figures it out at some point, life is depressing enough as it is and also there are literal flying monkeys who deliver mail in this setting. Three, I definitely got the vibe the first time I saw it in person (which was...2008?) that Glinda can "hear" her at the end. But IDK, I'm not sure whether it's just a modernist thing to be like "well make it happy, but not too happy!" or "sad, but not too sad!" Or if the artsy-fartsy types who write some of them are like "well only shallow and dumb people believe in an afterlife so those epilogues are not real, what are you thinking about." Which, if you don't like shallow people, I have some bad news for your about your target audience (see, "over-the-top," above.)
-Speaking of which...
Glinda to Dillamond: "Why can't you just teach history instead of going on about the past?"
Fiyero: "There's no pretense! I'm genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow!"
Elphaba: "No you aren't. Or you wouldn't be so unhappy."
I've said before that the Wizard is making a point about revisionist history that's only sort of effective. Well, the whole musical is about revisionist history...except it's really mostly an origin story, the Wizard of Oz timeframe is only a small fraction of what we see in "real-time."
-Do we believe that Glinda, with her social skills, can succeed where Elphaba failed? (And if so, could that facilitate their reunion someday?) I kind of feel like Glinda has her own weaknesses and tendencies toward extremes which might make her vulnerable too.
But I think it's also worth noting that, in spite of all Elphaba's efforts, Glinda is the one who Chistery the monkey talks to at the end.
