WICKED – the blockbuster musical that imagines the back stories of the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West and her opponent, Glinda the Good from L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz – turns 21 this coming year.
This much-loved prequel – created by composer and librettist Stephen Schwartz and dramatist Winnie Holzman (after the novel by Gregory Maguire) – made its world premiere on Broadway in June 2003.
The audience acclaim for Wicked has spread across the globe, with millions flocking to theatres throughout the world to hear such famous songs as Defying Gravity, Popular and I’m Not That Girl.
So successful is the show, in fact, that it is soon to spawn two major movies. Directed by Jon M. Chu (the man behind the screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical In The Heights), the films are set for release in November of this year and late 2025.
If you can’t wait until November, worry not. Scottish audiences still have a week to catch the Edinburgh leg of the new UK and Ireland touring production.
The Edinburgh Playhouse was given the honour of being the first stop on a major tour that takes in venues from Bristol to Dublin and Manchester, and many other places besides. If the run in Scotland’s capital is anything to go by, it is going to be a fabulous success.
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Casting director Jim Arnold has knocked the ball out of the proverbial park by securing the services of Laura Pick as Elphaba (as Maguire named the Wicked Witch of the West) and Sarah O’Connor as Glinda. Pick is fantastically sympathetic as the outsider at university, who is ostracised because of her green skin (which, Maguire tells us, was caused by an elixir given to her mother by Elphaba’s mysterious birth father).
Fighting against the persecution of animals (which, prior to the metaphysical persecution, had the power of speech), the emerald-skinned sorcerer is much misunderstood and unjustly maligned. All of which is conveyed brilliantly in Pick’s deliberately awkward and heroically gutsy performance.
Crucially, the performer has a tremendously powerful voice, as evinced in her singing of the show’s most famous song, the much-loved Defying Gravity, at the end of Act One. On press night – flying around on her broomstick, courtesy of the production’s spectacular stage technology – Pick nailed the song so emphatically that the rapturous audience seemed to make the walls shudder.
O’Connor’s Glinda is gorgeously ironic in her vanity (as if her character was a forerunner to Margot Robbie in the Barbie movie). Carl Man’s playing of the not-as-shallow-as-he-seems university heartthrob, Fiyero, is also deliciously tongue-in-cheek.
Indeed, excellent performances abound (as, of course, do the Flying Monkeys). Simeon Truby (who also plays the Wizard of Oz himself) is surprisingly emotive in his playing of Doctor Dillamond, the professorial goat who is the last animal teaching at Shiz University.
The production values are, needless to say, superb in what is a top-class rendering of this evergreen musical.
Wicked is playing at Edinburgh Playhouse until January 14, then touring until January 12, 2025.
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