Wicked's Elphaba Is To This Schmutzie What Dorothy Is To Gay Men

Just before I went to BlogHer '11 in San Diego, Broadway Across Canada offered me a couple of tickets to go see Wicked in Saskatoon on August 11th. Would you believe that the last musical I saw just might have been a 1990s high school production of Oklahoma in which my father played a heavy-footed farmer? As soon as I received the invitation, I realized what a cultural troglodyte I was, and so I, of course, had to say yes.

My parents live up in Saskatoon, so I invited my mother along to the performance. As you can see, we both have this problem of looking half asleep, drunk, or crazy in photographs, so I just thought I would include all three attempts at taking our photo and let you piece our various parts together to imagine us as the wide awake, sober, and merely happy individuals that we were on August 11th:



I'll be honest. The reason I haven't been to a musical in so many years is that I am generally annoyed by them. When everyone breaks into song, I want them to shut up and get-the-hell-on-with-the-story-already-sweet-jeebus. Glee? Shut your overly produced yawps and get on with the character and storyline development already. Grease? Get a life, people, and eat a sandwich. Wicked, though? I LOVED WICKED, and I'm not just whistling Dixie.



Wicked is both the back and side story to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It follows the relationship between Glinda (played by Natalie Daradich) and Elphaba (played by Anne Brummel), who start out as diametrically opposed classmates whose lives grow into an intimately intertwined friendship as they mature and are later falsely labelled by the citizenry of Oz as Glinda the good and Elphaba the wicked.

I haven't read Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years), the novel upon which the Broadway musical is based, but I think I'll have to pick up a copy, because Elphaba is to this Schmutzie now what Dorothy is to gay men.



The overarching message that stuck with me is that you can't judge books by their covers. Each of the characters was both an idealist and a pragmatist, good and bad, faulted and brilliant. Glinda suffered from a gross sense of entitlement, but she had a big heart and a sense of civic duty, and Elphaba had low self-esteem and was socially awkward, but she was constitutionally unable not to stand up for what she saw was right. Despite the strengths of both characters, they each feel victim to the oversimplified and extreme labels that the citizens of Oz placed upon them and had to struggle to be true to themselves and to the issues they held dear.

My crush on Elphaba started with Act I's "No One Mourns the Wicked", and I was pretty much a panties-throwing, blushing, fully girl-crushed fan by the end of the performance, without the panties-throwing, of course. I was with my mother, after all.



Wicked has won me over. The incredible voices of Natalie Daradich and Anne Brummel coupled with an engaging storyline, seriously breathtaking light production, and a rich, industrial-flavoured set, brought me out of my troglodytism and into the wicked world of Broadway musicals.

There is a reason that Wicked's North American and international companies have cumulatively grossed over $2.2 billion and have been seen by nearly 28 million people worldwide, and that reason is that the show is more than well worth the ticket price. It is a story that underscores the truth that our individual relationships matter more than the court of popular opinion and that popular opinion is rarely a reflection of the depth, complexity, and courage we each possess as individuals.

In a world where our stories and politics seem to fall more and more to the extreme lefts and rights of the issues, Wicked is a thoughtful center, and, frankly, it made me feel a little more hopeful for our continued ability to embrace diversity and love our fellow human beings with an understanding our public stories often do not admit.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Wonderland Left Me With A Sense of Muddled Disconnection

I forgot to tell you about that time we went to the ballet!



We went to the ballet. I was given a pair of free tickets to go see the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Wonderland, and I hadn't been to the ballet in quite a while, so off we went.

I would like to be able to tell you I loved it! What culture!, because I don't want to look like some kind of uncultured boob and I love Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland and the review in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix was good, but I'm maybe going to have to look like some kind of uncultured boob, because I didn't love it.



The set was amazing. You can't tell from the above picture, because I was a good citizen and put my camera away during the performance. They used panels and gauzy curtains, light and video projection, and wheeled white boxes to create a pared down yet entirely otherworldly set that completely captured me. I've never seen anything quite like it, and the set was marvellous enough that it nearly made the show worth seeing. The choreography, though, left a lot to be desired if you were looking for any clear thread of a storyline or relationships between characters during most of the performance.

The least engaging character throughout the entire ballet was the main character of Alice, which is weird, because she was on the stage most of the time, but half that time was spent either slowly wandering or running from one end to the other while other characters were being far more engaging. Engaging, though, is relative, because, even though I am highly familiar with the characters in the story, I was hard pressed to recognize who many of them were during the performance.

For the most part, the choreography between characters did little to flesh out the relationships between them, and so the storyline was often unclear if completely obscured, even for me, a person who owns several volumes of the story in question. Neither I nor the Palinode even figured out who the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle were until after the ballet was over.



The Queen of Hearts and the Dormouse were the only truly stand-out characters, and they were fabulous. The Queen of Hearts was a large and loud and comical mess of a personality, but the marked strength of her character, although the saving grace of the entire ballet as one of the few characters to have clear relationships within the story, also managed to underscore the weakness of the other roles.

The dancers were more than competent, and the sets were fantastic, but the lacklustre treatment of the character of Alice was not a strong enough thread to pull me through the chaos that was Wonderland. The performances and sets, while beautiful to watch as parts separate from the whole, created little sense of a storyline when strung together, and, as the ballet fell further and further into a sense of muddled disconnection, I fought off the urge to leave.