A FEAT OF MUSICAL ENGINEERING
Green is the primary colour of our age. We’ve got the environmental movement to thank for that, I guess. Where once we talked about people who were ‘True Blue’ or ‘Reds’, nowadays it’s all about being ‘Green’ or not. ‘We’re very green’ doesn’t, as you might think if you were visiting Earth for the first time, mean ‘We look like Martians’, it means, of course, ‘We care about the planet, we’re morally decent folk, we’re in the right camp’. It’s a figure of speech and a badge of pride.
One of the fantastic things about Stephen Schwartz’s hit musical WICKED, based on the 1990 novel by Gregory Maguire, is that it puts that coded and loaded colour centre-stage and asks us to reflect upon it. Once upon a time, when MGM turned L. Frank Baum’s children’s tale The Wizard of Oz into the stuff of elaborate cinematic possibility, green was the colour that could keep tender minds awake at night. It was the hue of horror - the defining feature of the cackling Wicked Witch of the West, as she roved after Dorothy on her broomstick, shrieking that chilling curse ‘I’ll get you my pretty and your little dog too!’. Green was emblematic of ugliness and, well, wickedness.
WICKED goes back in time way before the events of The Wizard of Oz to fill us in on the witch’s untold story and abusive, warping upbringing. Watching the show, now firmly enthroned at an Apollo Victoria that has been specially greened-up round its frontage and in its foyers for the event, it’s hard not to recoil instinctively at the sight of witch-in-the-making Elphaba.
The triumph of the evening is that it takes that automatic shudder and re-programmes it until it becomes a shiver of admiration. Battling against the nefarious schemes of the Wizard, standing her ground in the face of open, pitiless discrimination, little Elphaba proves to be the smartest and nicest gal in the room. In short, WICKED doesn’t just use green for showbiz effect - it makes you think about how showbiz effects have embedded certain assumptions within us.
You can call that preachy if you like - and certainly WICKED wins hands-down the award for most politically correct musical of the past decade (of course, racism and disability are more than being nodded to here) but I call it darned clever. To be uplifting and subversive, schmaltzy and wise all at the same time is quite a feat of musical engineering.
Green, then, is for ‘Go!’
Dominic Cavendish
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