Let’s face it-evil is much more interesting than good. Dante’s Inferno seduces us like a terza rima thriller; the Paradisio, by contrast, is a snooze. We relish Iago, while Desdemona whiffs of Wonder Bread, and were Little Nell to be surgically extracted from The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens’s oeuvre as a whole would be vastly improved.
No wonder, then, that the allure of Really Bad Beings fires two of the Broadway season’s most highly anticipated musicals-Wicked, a new blockbuster that reimagines Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, and Little Shop of Horrors, the revived 1982 spoof about a man-eating plant. The former balances its singing-dancing-madness on the premise that malignancy is slow-gestating and pretty darn complex, while the latter presents evil as simple, ravenous appetite. Both musicals, in their way, scrutinize the connection, or lack of connection, between goodness and popularity-or, to put it more cynically, goodness and selling out.
The hugely entertaining Little Shop of Horrors revival, directed by Jerry Zaks, tackles these themes most directly. Based on the 1960 Roger Corman movie, with book and lyrics by Howard Ashman and music by Alan Menken, Little Shop tells the story of Seymour (Hunter Foster), a nebbishy worker in a florist shop who gains national attention when he discovers an exotic plant. As the plant burgeons larger and larger, customers flood the shop; more importantly, to Seymour, his new fame earns him the love of his perky coworker, Audrey (Kerry Butler). So he doesn’t confess a terrible secret: Audrey II, as he names the plant, thrives on blood.
Martin P. Robinson (who designed Audrey II in the legendary original production) and the Jim Henson Company have created a spectacular puppet plant that grows to a terrifying size. You know you’re in the presence of puppetry genius when a bunch of fabric leaves and branches can grimace and pout like a human face. The plant’s equally expressive castmates Butler, Foster, and Douglas Sills (as a masochistic dentist and other characters) demonstrate perfect timing as they cavort through their cartoonish roles, and DeQuina Moore, Trisha Jeffrey, and Carla J. Hargrove, as the street urchins who serve as a sort of dancing, doo-wop Greek chorus, are sensational.
So there’s a perfect delivery system for Menken’s peppy 1950s-pastiche tunes and Ashman’s hilarious dialogue and lyrics, which poke fun at various aspects of the American dream. Audrey, for example, aspires to a future in a quiet suburb (“Just off the interstate. Not fancy like Levittown.”) and in the wistful ballad “Somewhere That’s Green” she imagines life with “A fence of real chain link/A grill out on the patio/Disposal in the sink...There’s plastic on our furniture/To keep it neat and clean/In the Pine-Sol scented air.”
But, like Mephistopheles, Audrey II tempts Audrey and Seymour with another possible future: money and celebrity. Seymour weighs offers to appear on TV and to hit the lecture circuit, and the street urchins warble the number “Ya Never Know,” which mocks the notion that failure, in our society, can quickly and painlessly give way to genuine success: “Seymour was/ In a funk/ He was number zero/ Who’da thunk/ He’d become a hero?...All the world used to screw him/ Bif, wham, pow, now they interview him.”
Success, of course, relies on keeping the ravenous plant well fed-that is, abandoning ineffective Good for the sake of the much more glamorous Bad. It’s a mark of Little Shop’s wacky profundity that Audrey and Seymour lose the battle, and the plant conquers the planet. The culture of celebrity has taken firm root. You think you’ve resisted it, then-bif, wham, pow-it has won.
Around the time that Little Shop was settling in to its charming bout of puppetry and pessimism, Wicked hit New York accompanied by a maelstrom of hype. In a marketing coup that was perhaps a little too clever for its own good, Macy’s came up with a Wicked promotion that involved enshrining those naughty-sounding Calvin Klein perfumes-Poison, Hypnotic Poison, etc.-in the windows of its flagship store on 34th Street. The Calvin Klein glamour, however, hardly matches the personality central to Wicked, which is based on Gregory Maguire’s brilliant novel of the same name. Wicked chronicles the life of Elphaba, a sensitive girl who happens to have been born green-a condition that, in conjunction with a sociopolitical crisis in Oz, where she lives, gradually turns her into the enemy of Toto and Dorothy. Elphaba is ugly, an intellectual, a misfit, and ultimately a revolutionary-not what you think of when you contemplate designer perfumes.
Maguire’s novel takes care to craft an intricate reality, complete with politics, racial and regional conflict, environmental pressures, folklore, academic rivalries, and even three competing religions. The musical, which has been smartly adapted by TV writer Winnie Holzman and boasts a score and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin), doesn’t go into this anthropological detail, but it does a good job of conjuring up an Oz that is both alien and familiar, meshing in odd ways with the kingdom in L. Frank Baum’s children’s book (and the classic movie).
Understandably, Holzman has substantially altered the storyline, making it cheerier and less craggy than the book. Most important, the creative team (which includes Joe Mantello as director) has given greater prominence to the character of Elphaba’s one-time college roommate, Glinda. Broadway darling Kristin Chenoweth delivers a spectacular performance as the bubbly, superficial Glinda, a blonde, attention-craving ditz who can twirl her magic wand like a cheerleader’s baton. Chenoweth’s charisma, and her way of fleshing out each Glinda mannerism-the coy pirouette she strikes in her smug solo number, “Popular,” for example-somewhat overshadows the other performers. Still, Idina Menzel makes a persuasive Elphaba and Norbert Leo Butz a winning Fiyero, suitor to the two sorceresses.
Chenoweth’s real rivals are the snazzy costumes by Susan Hilferty-who has intriguingly decided that in Oz, all skirts have raffish, asymmetrical hemlines-and, on a less positive note, the gargantuan proportions of the Gershwin Theatre. One of Broadway’s largest venues, the Gershwin is an intimidating space, that feels rather like strolling onto an aircraft carrier.
Glaring down from above the stage, as if to overwhelm puny humans, are the head and wings of an enormous dragon. This represents the Clock of the Time Dragon, a contraption that (as described in Maguire’s novel) combines religious oracle and Punch-and-Judy show, luring Ozians away from an austere, waning faith that worships an Unnamed God. Although Broadway’s Wicked otherwise ignores the book’s religious elements, Eugene Lee’s sets echo the Time Dragon theme-not only with the dragon’s head, but with enormous cogs that line the sides of the proscenium. Evoking the relentless milling of clockwork, the cogs emphasize the suggestion that Oz is changing-getting worse-as time marches on.
“Our dear Oz is becoming less and less colorful,” Glinda says in Act I. In fact, as Elphaba antagonizes the other characters, her plight becomes increasingly clear: she is fighting a losing battle to keep her individuality, her colorful-ness. Oz labels her “wicked” because she opts out of the superficiality and cheery groupthink that are sweeping the country. The bad being at the center of Wicked, it turns out, is just a loner. She’s a woman who recognizes the phoniness in a world where virtue gets confused with popularity, where goodness has come to mean-to borrow a word the exasperated Fiyero uses at one point-being Glinda-fied. end
