Review: The spell Wicked casts in Dublin is undeniable

Ed Power reviews Wicked at the BGE Theatre in Dublin.

[rating]4[/rating]

A ridiculous politician, high on bluster, tightens his grip on power by appealing to the worst prejudices of the populace. His hair is silly, but his rhetoric is potent, and he has a powerful aversion to women who know their minds. When Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz debuted Wicked on Broadway, in 2003, little could they have predicted how strongly this fantastic, hyperactive, and thumpingly allegorical Wizard Of Oz prequel would resonate years later.

Yet, the contemporary parallels are undeniable, as the new UK touring production clicks its ruby slippers and materialises at BGE Theatre for a seven-week run.

The politician is the Wizard of Oz. As the 1939 adaptation of the Frank L Baum novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, communicated so iconically, he’s a small man taking refuge in a vainglorious image. But he meets his match, and then some, in Amy Ross’s Elphaba. A green-skinned young woman raised an outcast, she is blessed with magical powers that draw her into conflict with the despicable Wizard (Steven Pinder).

She will become the cackling Wicked Witch of the West, who famously menaced Dorothy and unleashed her flying monkeys in the Hollywood film. Her airhead college roommate (Helen Woolf), meanwhile, is the younger manifestation of the Good Witch Glinda. As is the way with female relationships in teenage dramas, they start off despising one another, but are soon best friends forever, albeit best friends torn by their mutual feelings for Fiyero (Aaron Sidwell), a fly boy terrified that someone might see the substance behind his shallow exterior.

Savaged by critics on its debut, Wicked has become one of the great blockbuster musicals (it is reportedly beloved by teenage girls). It isn’t just the political overtones. An underdog tale spiced with brimstone, Wicked frames Elphaba as the misunderstood heroine, mocked by her classmates at Hogwarts-esque Shiz university and then manipulated — but only a little — by the Wizard.

Taking on a role made famous by Frozen’s Idina Menzel, Ross plays Elphaba with just the right blend of vulnerability and Hermione-esque moxie (though the bespectacled future-witch is really the Harry Potter of the piece). Every centimetre her match is Woolf, as Glinda, a ditzy tornado, who, to her eventual shame, is co-opted as the Wicked Witch’s mortal foe in the Wizard’s propaganda war.

Wicked is a bubbling, broiling concoction, to which can be added flying monkeys, whooshing broomsticks, and lurching mechanical contraptions. The biggest ‘special effect’ is Schwartz’s music and lyrics: a gummy bear blitz of show-stoppers that soar and swoop like cousins once removed to Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’ (the chorus to the Elphaba v Glinda dance-off, ‘What Is This Feeling’? will be rattling around your cranium for weeks). It’s a bit of a sprawl, and sometimes a syrupy mess, but the spell it casts is undeniable.

BGE Theatre Dublin, until September 1