Wicked!

All photos from the Souvenir Program!

Well, my pretties, I had a GREAT time!  The costumes!  The choreography!  The music!  The color!  BRAVO! ! ! !

By now, we all know the story of The Wizard of Oz, but do we all know what happened prior to Dorothy's little sojourn there?  Wicked is the prequel to TWOO.  And, probably everyone but me has already seen it, but this was my first time and I absolutely love-love-loved it!  Now I know how the tin man, the lion and the scarecrow came to be and more importantly, the backstory to The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch.  Things are not always what they seem, are they?  "Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?" muses Glinda.

You take a bored housewife, mixing it up with a traveling salesman from Kansas, who's pushing a green elixir and you end up with a child who comes out with a distinctly emerald complexion, whom the husband abhors.  She was named Elphaba, as in EL-faba.  When they find out they are expecting again, the husband is so worried the next child will also come out green, that he forces his wife to chew milk flowers, but that ended up causing the baby to come early with legs that did not form properly and caused complications that ended up taking the life of the mother.  This daughter was confined to a wheel-chair.

As kids do, the poor girl with the emerald skin felt her mother's death and her sister's deformity was all her fault and really took it to heart when her father charged her with the care of her younger sister.  

Now, send both girls to school (one to care for the other) and add one shallow, extremely pretty, spoiled and self-absorbed room-mate and you get sparks.  Galinda, that's Galinda with a Ga, is the popular one, whose sole aim seems to be to embarrass and taunt Elphaba, but slowly, she begins to change because of Elphaba's influence.

Eventually, they end up being good friends.  That is, until you add in a boy.  Galinda had her sights set on Fiyero, the new boy in school, who on the surface, appears to be just as shallow as Galinda, but he seems to have his sights set on Elphaba.  But, more on that later . . .

One of the instructors in the school is a goat.  Prior to the arrival of the Wizard during the great drought, animals always spoke and everyone got along.  But, something happened and animals were starting to be persecuted and caged.  Once caged, they began to lose their ability to speak.  Elphaba was speaking out in their defense.  The instructor was taken away and a new professor came in with a caged lion cub and began extolling the virtues of caging animals and taking away their ability to speak.  (This cub later became the cowardly lion.)  Galinda, loses the GA and just becomes Glinda when she decides to show her solidarity for the animals for her friend, as the goat professor could not say the name Galinda correctly.

Elphaba and Glinda end up going to the Emerald City to meet with the Wizard (who, unbeknownst to any of them was Elphaba's father), which is when Elphaba found out that he was not the great wizard everyone thought him to be and that it was him who was behind the caging and persecution of animals.  He gave her a book to see if she could read the spells in it and in doing so, she was tricked into casting a spell that caused the monkeys to grow wings.  (Flying monkeys, oh my!)  She was horrified at the pain she had caused them during the transformation.  When the Wizard found he could not control Elphaba, he sent his guards to kill her, but she escaped, and became known as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Cut to the younger daughter, Nessa, who had fallen in love with Boq, the munchkin boy who was, in turn, in love with Glinda.  Elphaba had gone to visit her sister and fix her legs with a spell so she could walk.  The jeweled slippers her father had given Nessa as a gift for going to school, were turned into ruby slippers in the process.  But, then Nessa became enraged when she found out Boq did not love her and cast a spell from Elphaba's spell book that cause his heart to shrink and disappear.  Elphaba tries to save him, but in doing so, he was turned into a tin man and Nessa blamed Elphaba for it.

When the guards captured Elphaba, Fiyero came to her rescue and she was able to escape, but he was then taken into custody and punished for helping her.  Elphaba cast a spell to keep him from being killed, but it caused him to be turned into a scarecrow.

And, at some point in there, Elphaba discovers the travel charms of the broomstick and mysteriously Glinda begins to transport herself via bubble, which, when Glinda disparages the broomstick transport allows Elphaba the great retort:  "Well, we can't all come and go by bubble."

Then the brat from Kansas (and her dog Do-Do, as Glinda called him in Wicked), landed her house on Elphaba's sister, killing her and stole the ruby slippers and set off for Oz to see the wizard.  And, well, you know the rest . . . or . . . do, you?  Is Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, really melted?  Or, was that just an elaborate ruse so that she and Fiyero could steal away to live the rest of their lives in peace?  Hmmmmmmm . . . . 

If you haven't seen it, go see it.  If you have seen it, go see it again!  It's that good!  Really!  Here is a link to the script.  And, another one here.  I just wish I had the video of it to share with you, too!  It was simply fantabulicious!  No wonder it is so pop-pu-lar!