Kathy decided a few months ago that she wanted to take us to see a musical called Wicked. I said sure. It never occurred to me, at the time, to ask what it was about.
As it got close though, Kathy told me what it was about and it turns out I knew all about it because I read the book that the musical was based on.
The musical is based on a book called Wicked which is about the Witches of Oz before Dorothy arrives. The lead character is Alphaba (the evil witch) who turns out to not really be evil and her best friend Glinda who meet at school.
The weakness of the book was that it was dry and missed much of the humor that I had hoped that would be there. It was focused on the book and not the movie (that is not a weakness) so perhaps that was why is was dry because Baum’s original Oz books were a bit dry too. There was a lot of politics which could have been good but pressed on slow and dry.
The play on the other hand had what I thought the book was missing, it still had sad elements that the book had (though they changed the story from what I remember, quite a bit too) but it also had bunch of humor and great music.
We got to see the traveling troupe (I don’t know much about how play’s and musical’s are made and produced but I believe that there is the original troupe and a traveling one for successful shows). If these are the traveling performers, I don’t think that the original stars can be much better because these performers were just outstanding. Their voices rocked you to your soul. Great stuff.
I think the run time was almost 3 hours but there is no way, I felt like I was there very long. I was just enjoying the story, music, artistry that time just flew by. This was great stuff.