A Wicked Good Night in NYC - 5/12/09

I just saw Wicked on Broadway. What a profound and moving work of art. The adolescent in me wants to say its message is “It’s not easy being green.” But the theologian in me knows there’s much more to it than that.

It’s about diversity and learning to accept others - and ourselves - for who we are. It’s about the value of being friends with someone you don’t always understand and rarely agree with. It’s about the truth, who gets to define it, and the cost of standing up for it when everyone else clearly prefers the lie. It’s about how badly people need to believe in some things and how tempting it is for others to conjure accordingly.

The show is full of life, laughter, love, and loss. Every one of the principle characters grows, coming to a deeper understanding of themselves and of one another. But their growth comes at tremendous cost. Ephie even says at one point in her confrontation with the Wizard, “Don’t you think I want to go back to the way things were before?” But she knows she can’t. None of us can.

The real brilliance of this prequel to The Wizard of Oz is its unfolding of the character of one we’ve already written off as “wicked.” We see her goodness, her desire to help and not hurt, to liberate and not imprison. We ache for her when none of her good deeds go unpunished and when the corrupt work of spin doctors seems so much more believable than the truth. Wicked leaves us wondering what we are to do when, as another playwright put it, “fair is foul and foul is fair.”

I am so grateful for Gregory Macguire’s novel, Winnie Holzman’s book, and Stephen Schwartz’s music and lyrics. What a gift they have given to the world .