It’s been 21 years since Wicked opened on Broadway and I’ve never had the opportunity to see it. That is, until I went to Part I at the movie theatre last Friday.
I loved it. It’s a spell-binding show, especially in 3D, and Part I, at least, conveys a powerful message. I don’t know how well that will be preserved in Part II but I’m going to worry about Part II next year. For now, Wicked is high on my list of musicals that lift and unite, that will leave you better for having watched them. The following is my spoiler-filled review.
One of the things I love about this show is its delicious use of irony, starting out the gate with the very first song: “No One Mourns the Wicked.” When you first experience it, it’s a little disorienting. Even if you’re like me, and you’ve never read the book or seen the Broadway show, you’ve heard enough of the music to understand that “Glinda the Good” and Elphaba, the “Wicked Witch of the West,” have been genuine friends. So what is Glinda doing celebrating her friend’s death with the Munchkins? But Ariana Grande portrays Glinda’s own disconnect with the situation masterfully. She wears a perfect, superficial smile and pretends to be joyous for the adoring Munchkins, but her eyes betray a grief she’s not allowed to vocalize as they sing, “No-one mourns the wicked… no-one lays a lily on their grave. The good man scorns the wicked.”
Is that goodness – to scorn someone and refuse to remember them with any tenderness? Although Glinda’s composure never cracks, she’s barely holding it together as she sings “Goodness knows the wicked’s lives are lonely; goodness knows the wicked die alone.” But the Munchkins are untroubled by doubts. Glinda recounts how Elphaba, gloriously played by Cynthia Erivo, was rejected at birth by a non-biological father and pleads, “And so, it couldn’t have been easy.” But the Munchkins burst forth in another self-righteous chorus, “And goodness knows we know what goodness is.”
What a beautiful segue into Glinda’s memories, a 2 ½ hour treatise on the fact that the Munchkins do not, in fact, know what goodness is when they call Elphaba wicked and Glinda good.
Synopsis
It’s the story of how Glinda’s and Elphaba’s lives spectacularly collided when they arrived for their first year at Shiz University. Glinda was blonde, beautiful and accustomed to being universally adored. She self-identified as good.
Elphaba was green, unfashionable, and accustomed to being universally shunned. Despite her devotion to Nessa, the disabled younger sister on whom their father lavished all the love of which he deprived Elphaba, she didn’t think of herself as good. She was too troubled by her tendency to wreak havoc with magical abilities she didn’t understand, that got activated when she was upset. So she self-identified as a commotion.
Upon their first meeting, Glinda made a public show of condescending kindness to the green newcomer, but instead of being grateful, Elphaba gave her the cold shoulder. So when the two wound up as roommates, it became a festival of mutual loathing.
Glinda reveled in her social dominance and longed to become a sorceress. She could read a room and get everything she wanted with a sparkling quip, a costume change, or an expert toss of her hair. Everything, that is, except the tutelage of Madame Morrible, the sorcery professor who wouldn’t give her the time of day.
Elphaba longed for belonging, something she started to believe was possible once Morrible took her on with a promise that she could learn to control her gifts and wind up meeting the Wizard of Oz. Everyone knew that if you proved yourself to the Wizard, he would grant you your heart's desire. In Elphaba’s dreams, not only would he make her serviceable to all of Oz, but he would also turn her skin to a normal color.
At first, Elphaba earned the friendship of just two people at Shiz, Morrible and Doctor Dillamond, a goat who taught history and was the only non-human teacher at a school where talking animals had become unfashionable and graffiti appeared saying “animals should be seen and not heard.” Glinda, who liked to undermine Dillamond by poking fun at his inability to correctly pronounce her name, had pretty much everyone else wrapped around her finger.
Things changed the day that “everyone else” expanded just a little to include Nessa. In a stroke of self-serving genius, Glinda had diverted the unwanted attentions of an eager Munchkin toward Nessa, telling him she would admire the hero who took such a tragically beautiful girl to the Ozdust Ballroom. Unaware that she was being used, Nessa told Elphaba of Glinda’s kindness and her undying gratitude. So Elphaba swallowed both her loathing and her mistrust of her roommate and persuaded Morrible to admit Glinda to their private sorcery sessions.
Moments after Morrible advised Glinda that she was taking her on at Elphaba’s insistence, Elphaba entered the ballroom in dowdy black, wearing the atrocious hat Glinda had just given her as a gag. When the assembled students drew away and started mocking her, she began to dance alone, awkward to the extreme but with palpable determination. For perhaps the first time in her life, Glinda let her heart open wide toward somebody else. It wasn’t just guilt that she had set Elphaba up; it was also wonder at Elphaba’s kindness to her, in spite of their rivalry. So she stepped forward from the snickering crowd and danced with her roommate. Soon, the entire ballroom joined them. And from that moment forward, the two were friends.
They were not alike, though. Glinda still wanted to be the best and Elphaba still longed for belonging while striving to care for others. When Dillamond was captured and carried away from his class because talking animals were no longer permitted at Shiz, Glinda was unconcerned while Elphaba was horrified and tried to resist. Her distress was so profound that Morrible was able to use it to unblock her powers. Soon afterwards, with unprecedented control, Elphaba put everyone but Glinda’s supposedly shallow boyfriend, Fiyero, into an enchanted sleep so they could rescue a lion cub from being caged. She realized then that Fiyero was more than he pretended and mattered to her, but she schooled her heart not to dream or hope, because he had chosen “gold hair with a gentle curl” and she was not that girl.
Yet, when Elphaba’s show of controlled power earned her a non-transferable, one-person pass to see the Wizard, she impulsively brought her friend along. Their interview with the awesome ruler of Oz started out terrifying then turned delightful. When at last he asked her about her heart’s desire and hinted that he could turn her skin to a normal color, she decided she was okay with being green and petitioned him instead to help the animals who were being persecuted and mysteriously losing the gift of speech. He pretended to be onboard.
Then Morrible arrived, and together, they tricked Elphaba into using her unparalleled abilities to give wings to the Wizard’s monkey guards. She was shocked when the transformation was tortuous for them and they acted as if they wanted the wings gone. But now she learned that any spell done by the Grimmerie, the fabled book of magic, was irreversible. And then, one of them let slip that monkeys would be much more useful spies in the air, and Elphaba realized that the Wizard and Morrible were the ones behind the animal persecutions. The Wizard explained, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.” Elphaba seized the Grimmerie and fled – she and the book would not be used as weapons against innocents. Glinda stayed behind with the power brokers, who then sent her to find Elphaba and bring her back. But Elphaba was having none of that. There was a moment when Glinda almost agreed to join her, but they could already hear Morrible denouncing Elphaba as a wicked witch, and Glinda had always cared a great deal less about the peoplehood of talking animals than she did about how she was viewed. So they shared a heartfelt goodbye and parted, with Elphaba defying gravity on a newly enchanted broom and vowing to fight the Wizard’s campaign, while Glinda remained in the domain of the powerful people who were universally admired and eager to use whatever tools they had to preserve their position.
Analysis
So ends the movie. But my thinking about it has just begun. And when I revisit “No One Mourns the Wicked” I see a counter-message brilliantly conveyed in what Glinda says, and what she doesn’t. It’s the Munchkins who sing “Good news! She's dead!/The Witch of the West is dead!/ The wickedest witch there ever was/ The enemy of all of us here in Oz/ Is Dead!”
Glinda arrives on the scene as messenger of her powerful masters and sings, “Let us rejoicify that goodness could subdue/ The wicked workings of you-know-who.” She can't even name Elphaba or call her a wicked witch. Then she goes on, “Isn't it nice to know/ That good will conquer evil?" Those words can't taste good, not with what she knows about how Elphaba, Morrible and the Wizard. She carries on: "The truth we all believe'll by and by/ Outlive a lie/ For you and -” but she’s cut off before she can sing “I”. She knows full well that the “truth” they all believe is really the lie, and it's a lie that is falling apart for her, even while she's trying to perpetuate it for them.
It’s the Munchkins who sing that no-one mourns the wicked. Glinda offers, “And Goodness knows/ The Wicked's lives are lonely/ Goodness knows/ The Wicked die alone/ It just shows when you're Wicked/ You're left only/ On your own.” Is she singing about Elphaba, or about herself? She’s surrounded by adoring Munchkins, but they don’t know her. She has almost everyone’s uncritical admiration, but no real friends. She is completely isolated in her grief, a grief she's not even allowed to admit to. And she can’t let anyone close or they’ll learn that she’s a fraud.
The theme of dying alone returns after Glinda recounts Elphaba’s being rejected at birth. Now, when the Munchkins sing, “the Wicked die alone,” Glinda repeats “She died alone,” in a descant that sounds achingly close to a scream.
“No-One Mourns the Wicked” is meant, by the Munchkins, to be an admonition against doing what society says you oughtn’t. But Glinda knows the dark secrets about their society that they do not, and singing it causes her self-delusions to come apart. So, when a Munchkin finally asks if it is true that they were friends, she answers haltingly at first, and then the whole story spills out.
Message
Wicked tells us that if we’re focused on appearances and if we judge by the good opinions of others, we don’t know what goodness is. It says that goodness is about caring for others and doing what we know is right, no matter what others think. It prioritizes gratitude over grudges and people over popularity.
Wicked also suggests that, in a world where the unscrupulous dominate, the pressure to be less than good can seem as irresistible as the force that causes that which goes up to come back down. But that’s not a limit we need to accept. Together, you and I, let’s defy gravity.
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