Wicked

Not only did Julie, Maria, and I recently go see “Jersey Boys”, but we also saw “Wicked” when it was in town. We may have been the only three people in the theater who did not enjoy it. (My sisters did like Jersey Boys.)

Seriously, the crowd was laughing and clapping and oohing and having a great time. I know a lot of my snobbier acquaintances complain about how Portland audiences are too easy, and give unearned standing ovations, so that could be a factor, or the problem could be me. Well, us, in this case. Towards the end, my sisters needed to go to the bathroom, and they just didn’t come back. I stuck it out, but did notwait for all the curtain calls, because I am evil. (But I am not “Wicked”.)

There are a few reasons it did not work for me. I didn’t mind the steampunk angle. It is a little played out by now, but it is a look that fits in well with Oz, and I didn’t mind that.

What probably would have made everything better is if the music had been great. I remember Maria watching the “Hairspray” DVD, and I was working something so I only caught bits of it, but that music totally got under my skin, and I ended up listening to various songs over and over. There was nothing like that in “Wicked”. “Defying Gravity” got close, but did not make it.

What really got me though was the way it assassinated the characters of everyone you knew and loved from Oz. Okay, I did not just see the movie—I have also read several of the books by L. Frank Baum, so it is a little close to my heart. I don’t mind the idea of giving the Wicked Witch more of a backstory, and developing her character, but couldn’t it have been done without doing dirt to everyone else?

I should have agreed with the messages of equality and justice, but they were too clumsy and heavy-handed, and again, unnecessary character assassination. Yes, if you humanize someone who has a bad end, it can make that end unsatisfactory, so they turned that around, but it was not worth it.

I think the real problem is that Gregory Maguire is a nasty little man, and it came through in the novel, and infected the musical, which needed better music, dialogue, and performance.

The reason I am mentioning this now is to go into the counterpoint to yesterday’s post. The hangups of the writer manifest in the writing, but also the hangups of the reader manifest in the reading.

I noticed this early on (though I did not understand it), when I started reading Bantam Classics. They always included a helpful foreword with literary analysis, and I always disagreed with whatever the analyst was saying. No, that is not it at all. If Mister Rochester is now safe for Jane because he has been castrated, why is it that now he can have children? Look, if he says he was in love with Priscilla and not Xenobia, I believe him. He never acted like he was in love with Xenobia. And going back to Jane Eyre, no, he would not have to have syphilis himself and risk infecting Jane because Bertha was cheating on him after the marriage and she could have contracted it after he had stopped sleeping with her.

Actually, Jane Eyre is a good bridge to the other part of this: parallel fiction. Sometimes readers have such strong reactions to novels that they need to write other novels explaining that everything was wrong.  Therefore, you have books where Maxim De Winter actually truly did love Rebecca, and killed himself to be with her again, and Bertha Mason was a spirited girl driven mad by her husband’s harshness and racial prejudice, and Grendel was not nearly as much of a monster as the people he ate, and Lolita was truly the seducer and controller in the relationship with Humbert Humbert, because you know how sophisticated 12 year old girls are.

I get loving work and being inspired by it, but it seems odd to be when the inspiration seems to be to discount everything that happened. Well, maybe they actually hated the original works, and felt the need to correct them. It seems disrespectful though.

Of course, the obvious point is that even when you enjoy a novel, you may not be enjoying it in the way the author intended. I guess it’s just a chance we have to take. But when you read something and you feel affection for the author, like you could be best friends, it’s not impossible. There could totally be compatibility, or it could all be a delusion.

The fun part of all of this is a lot of my writing about writing makes me feel like my current project is crazy, or at least ill-advised. I think it’s not though, so I will see if I can make a case for that tomorrow.