Wicked Game

"Wicked": an unpopular opinion.

Remember that time, back when Obama was President, when the musical “Hamilton” was a huge big deal? Everyone said it was the greatest play ever, and here where I live, the High School kids would incessantly quote the lyrics, write with a quill pen, and sometimes even wear their hair tied with a little black bow at the nape of the neck. They would wear original cast t shirts to class, and since tickets cost $800 – plus, if you were us, a flight to NYC, it generally signaled how well off their families were. I still used to want to see it though, until I actually did. Then I recalled reading Laurie Anderson’s pronouncement upon it. “I was really excited ‘til 30 seconds into it,” she said (I’m paraphrasing.) “Then I realized it’s just a musical and I hate musicals. So I left.”

Other than A-Ham, though, I like musicals. When they are good – A Chorus Line, Hairspray, Hedwig, Matilda – they are an amazing form of storytelling. There was even a time when I was little when I wished we all lived in a world where people burst into song and dance in unison at a moment’s notice, and honestly, I am still kind of sad that we don’t. So yeah, I am OK with musicals, and when I first saw the play “Wicked,” around 2010, I thought it was clever, if not my favorite show ever. The same cannot be said for the movie of the play, however, which I went to this weekend.

Now, if you liked it, I get it. It was well-done and very colorful, but you might want to stop reading here because I took against it. I stopped dunking on music in print a long time ago, when I realized that music was not a contest, and I’m not even sure I should dunk on “Wicked.” But unlike artists who have to survive in the delicate musical eco-system, giant-budget movies that star multi-millionaire singers should be able to withstand some hard knocks. And anyway, criticizing things is fun. For me, at least.

Three things bothered me about “Wicked” and they were as follows. 1) the pace 2) the age of the actors, and 3) the aesthetics. First, the pace, which was: snail’s. It reminded me of the Eagles, in that every single song by the Eagles would only be tolerable to me if the drummer played it twice as fast. Similarly, “Wicked” could have been a lot snappier (like the play is). There’s a scene in a night club, in which Galinda and Elphaba first dance, and my god, it was dirge-like. It took them for-EVER just to check into school on the first day, and then, just before Galinda sings ‘Popular,” the whole film sort of stops and freezes for minutes on end while she winds up her voice or something. It was weird!

Then there was the age problem. The setting for most of the film is “Shiz University,” but everyone who attends this institution of higher learning looks very haggard, in their mid-30s at the very least. This is because they ARE in their mid-30s. Jonathan Bailey: 36. Bowen Yang, 34. Cynthia Erivo is 37. Even Ariana Grande, who looks like a college student, is in real life 31, and the director has cast a whole bunch of older people to play the other students as well, maybe so it won’t stand out so much. But it does. I am not age-shaming here, them all being in their 30s would be totally OK – perhaps they are transfer students – except they all have to wear uniforms of short pants and skirts as if they were in Hogwarts. Or were Angus Young.

“Wicked” first appeared in 2003, six years after the first “Harry Potter” book, and it does feel a little ripped off from that opus, in that Galinda and Elphaba meet at a boarding school for witches with a sorceress head-mistress. Actually, it’s like Harry Potter crossed with “Willie Wonka,” aesthetically, and that was also an issue for me. I didn’t like the color schemes, nor did I like the way the drone camera shot people from above so often, or the fact that, for some reason, the actors pranced about so much. Literally, pranced.

But when I said that to me daughter, she was like, “Mom. Stop.” And she’s right: “Wicked” is fine; it’s me…I’m the problem, it’s me. As I said, I enjoy criticizing things, but I have noticed lately that most young people do not appreciate that impulse, and many of them don’t know how to do it, either. It’s a feature of this age, and I hope it’s just a passing one, because clearly it has consequences.