Word: broadway
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There's nothing Broadway loves better than a juicy backstage drama. And Taboo - the musical about '80s rock star Boy George, with music by the grownup Boy, George O?Dowd, and produced by talk-show diva Rosie O'Donnell - offered plenty of fodder. There were cancelled performances, reports of backstage fights, a star who walked out of a rehearsal, a director nearly fired. All that and a producer shuttling between the theater and a Manhattan courthouse, where she was involved in a lawsuit with the former publisher of her defunct magazine, Rosie...
...mourns the wicked," goes one big number in the new Broadway musical Wicked. But in this shrewd and enjoyable retelling of the Wizard of Oz story from the witches' point of view, they get something better: understanding. Turns out that Elphaba, better known to us as the Wicked Witch of the West, was born green, and that caused her to be shunned by the popular kids at school. The most popular of them all is Glinda, a perky prom queen used to getting her own way. The two become unlikely friends. But things go awry when Elphaba finds herself...
Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore--or at your usual Broadway musical. Wicked flouts nearly every rule of hitmaking in the post--Andrew Lloyd Webber age. The sets, despite an irrelevant smoke-breathing dragon looming at the top of the curtain, are big but blah. Stephen Schwartz's songs are unmemorable. Splashy, dance-filled production numbers keep threatening to break out but remain elusively somewhere over the rainbow...
...Wicked works because it has something Broadway musicals, so addicted to facetiousness and camp, have largely given up on: a story that adults can take seriously. Adapted by Winnie Holzman from the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire (whose latest novel, Mirror, Mirror, is a reworking of Snow White), the musical reimagines a children's tale in grownup psychopolitical terms a lot more successfully than, say, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine did for Into the Woods. Elphaba is a misunderstood social reformer who threatens the rulers of Oz; her "wickedness" is their creation, not hers. As the Wizard (Joel Grey) puts...
Which isn't to say Wicked, under Joe Mantello's assured direction, lacks fun. The show gets laughs by playing off famous bits from the movie. ("What's in the punch?" "Lemons and melons and pears." "Oh my!") It also provides a showcase for two fabulous Broadway stars. Kristin Chenoweth, the Kewpie doll who won a Tony for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, is a perfect delight as Glinda. In the tougher role of Elphaba, Idina Menzel is possibly even better, a mix of vulnerability and feminist passion, with a rock voice to raise the roof. With...