{"id":4474,"date":"2011-03-19T12:56:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T02:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4474"},"modified":"2014-08-21T20:09:38","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T10:09:38","slug":"wicked-the-untold-story-of-the-witches-of-oz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4474","title":{"rendered":"Wicked – The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jen and I recently went to check out the Australian stage production of Wicked – The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz<\/em>.\u00a0 The Australian adaptation of the enourmously popular Broadway musical boasts an impressive cast of young local talent, television icon Bert Newton performing as The Wizard and big budget production values.\u00a0 Just how big is the budget?\u00a0 The stage has a giant mechanical dragon rigged above it that bellows and roars at the start of the show.\u00a0 It serves no other function and isn’t related to the story whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Jen and I went into the show not knowing what to expect, with both of us having little to no knowledge of the story and songs beforehand.<\/p>\n

We came away disappointed and a tad underwhelmed.<\/p>\n

The two lead girls Lucy Durack (Galinda) and Jemma Rix (Elphaba) were both excellent performers with impressive vocal range and a solid sense of comic timing.\u00a0 The set designs were excellent.\u00a0 The supporting cast decent.\u00a0 So what went wrong?<\/p>\n

Wicked<\/em> is written and performed in the style of an American rom-com.\u00a0 The story arc, the character archetypes and the set up for the gags all have a familiar feel.\u00a0 Even Lucy Durack appears to be channelling Megan Mullaley<\/a> with her performance.\u00a0 The story of the lime-skinned social outcast Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, plays out in a highschool setting that is highly evocative of She’s All That<\/em> and 10 Things I Hate About You<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Only this is a three hour theatre production.\u00a0 No matter how polished the presentation, 180 minutes is a veeeeerrry long running time for the material they’re working with.\u00a0 Brevity is the soul of wit after all.<\/p>\n

Another criticism I had about the show which might be specific to the Australia production is the incredibly pedestrian stage direction.\u00a0 There are a lot of musical numbers where the cast are simply rooted to the spot, standing or sitting, for the entire duration of the song.\u00a0 Given the lavish set design, it would’ve been nice to see them interact with it a bit more, moving around, or doing something<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve only seen a handful of musical productions in the last few years at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre but I’d still comfortably place Avenue Q<\/em> and Euro Beat<\/em> above Wicked <\/em>as superior shows.\u00a0 Ultimately, I felt the story was pretty bland and the songs mostly forgettable.\u00a0 For that I blame the source material.\u00a0 I don’t know if there is a name given to the sub-genre of ‘novelty literary spin-offs’ that include Wicked<\/em>, Rozenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/em> and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters <\/em>but I’m yet to be convinced that any of them are any good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jen and I recently went to check out the Australian stage production of Wicked – The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz.\u00a0 The Australian adaptation of the enourmously popular Broadway musical boasts an impressive cast of young local talent, television icon Bert Newton performing as The Wizard and big budget production values.\u00a0 Just how …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[819,2072,818],"class_list":["post-4474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-qpac","tag-theatre","tag-wicked"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4474"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16259,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions\/16259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}