Playwright: music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Winnie Holzman, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire. At: Broadway in Chicago at the Cadillac Palace, 151 W. Randolph. Phone: 800-775-2000; $35-$105. Runs through: Jan. 23, 2011
The appeal of Stephen Schwartz's songs is the intensely personal way they express the passion, exuberance and uncertainty of young people caught at a crisis of identity. Too much spectacle swamps sensitive introspection with a flood of communal ecstasy. (Try to imagine a stadium-sized Godspell, or Pippin.) But patrons of New York's Broadway empire demand big bangs for their big bucks, and sofor the next few years, anywaythis intimate little fable is doomed to be eclipsed by Wagnerian robot dragons, flying chariots and elevator-traps on stages whose sheer expanse swells the show's running time by a good 30 minutes.
Traditional fairy tales typically recount the fortunes of a humble girl or boy who makes good (however their society defines that term). But while the progress of the green-complected Elphaba from lonely waif to triumphant rebel adheres to the reliable formula, Winnie Holzman's book also proffers hope for our heroine's overprivileged adversaries, who find their moral consciousness raised to a level inspiring them to unforeseen philanthropy and compassion. In this fantasyland, the villains are not the rich or comely, but the seductive lure of celebrity and the corrupting artifice required to maintain it. Even its Wizard, previously presented as a Hitler-esque despot (complete with servants garbed as concentration-camp inmatesa motif fortunately missing in this touring production), is now merely another flawed human dazzled by popular adulation.
Repeat viewers will find most of the lyrics more intelligible than in the show's recent incarnation at the Ford Oriental, an improvement owing less to the wider, shallower stage at the Cadillac Palace than to the soloists' propensity for delivering key lines straight downstage into our facesor as close to it as can be accomplished in a 2,500-seat auditorium. Jackie Burns and Chandra Lee Schwartz make a nicely contrasting belter and chirpier duo (though the latter's bubbliness sometimes overwhelms her enunciation). And in a score with not a single tenor-baritone duet, Richard H. Blake's Fiyero, Paul Slade Smith's Dr. Dillamond and Gene Weygandt's Wizard pull their weight with cheerful alacrity.
The Marriott or Drury Lanelet alone Theo UbiqueWicked is still a long ways off. But the hippodrome versionthe only one we have at this timestill defies gravity to proclaim its universally elevating message to audiences throughout the world.