Wicked!

There’s the Sky Tower all lit up to celebrate the opening night of a touring company production of Wicked.

We attended, having gotten access to opening night seats because we bought tickets over a year ago for a date that was cancelled due to COVID. As a consolation they gave us early access to the rescheduled premiere.

Although several of the songs were at least a little familiar to me … they’ve made the leap from the stage to any number of other venues… we’d never seen the show. We did read the book way back when it came out.

With both the book Wicked and the original Wizard of Oz books, I remember feeling a real sense of strangeness. The Land of Oz is a profoundly weird place, and scary. And the Wizard of Oz movie preserves at least some of that strangeness, or at least that’s the impression I got watching it as a small child. I mean… little people!

But the Broadway show? It felt so rigidly conformant to the expectations of the teenage angst story that Lee in particular didn’t really enjoy it. I did enjoy the show more in the moment, fully caught up in the singing and dancing and flying. In retrospect, though, I too may be over the basic Broadway plot.