And the last reviews are in along with the Sunday Papers:
The Sunday Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2774-2377669,00.html Wicked
Apollo Victoria
There is already one, fairly well-known, musical set in the land of Oz, and perhaps the most telling thing about Wicked is that it gets its biggest laughs simply by quoting its predecessor. Wicked tells the story of Elphaba, the green-skinned girl who became the Witch of the West, and her unlikely best friend, Glinda the Good. It will certainly delight anyone who wants to know where the flying monkeys came from, how the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion got their peculiar disabilities, or why the witch was so obsessed with the ruby slippers — but it’s not just for Judy Garland fans.
Winnie Holzman, who adapted Gregory Maguire’s bestselling novel for the stage, was once responsible for that masterpiece of teen angst, My So-Called Life. And the cleverest thing about a show slightly too pleased with its own cleverness is how it appropriates that most rudely vital of 21st-century genres, the high-school comedy, to win a younger, straighter, less sentimental demographic than most other musicals. Wicked is inspired by Clueless as much as it is by L Frank Baum.
Idina Menzel’s young Elphaba is a stubborn, moralistic outcast with a profile you could use for chopping wood, who nevertheless wilts like a piece of overcooked asparagus at the thought that anyone might actually like her. From Elphaba’s lips, there is no crueller epithet than “blonde”. On Broadway, Menzel was matched note for note by Kristin Chenoweth, a task that proves beyond Helen Dallimore as the prom-queen-in-waiting, Galinda. But Dallimore makes a convincing, if slightly squeaky, ascent up the ladder of girl-power iconography — from a kind of bleached baby Edna Everage to an air-head Evita to an apotheosis as that tinkly, terrifying amalgam of Princess Di and Shirley Temple, Glinda the Good.
Despite their eventual friendship, Glinda becomes the figurehead, and Elphaba the scapegoat, of a corrupt regime. Nigel Planer’s wizard, a self-styled “sentimental man”, is a greying, aw-shucks despot who knows that “the best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy”. There also appear to be digs at the Bush environmental record. Eugene Lee’s set is full of rusting cogs, like the inner workings of an apocalyptic clock, with a great red-eyed dragon dangling over the proscenium in lieu of a cuckoo. However, except for a couple of brief allusions, the rationale for this seems to have been lost during edits.
Telling a complicated story was obviously the priority. Stephen Schwartz’s songs are at their sharpest when they concentrate on doing that, and at their flabbiest when they’re supposed to be stopping the show. Luckily, Wicked picks up such emotional and narrative momentum that even the latter numbers punch above their mawkish, metaphor-larded weight. This show often succeeds only by defying its own musical limitations, but succeed it certainly does.
Four stars CB
