It’s good for the towns as well. Downtown Dayton Partnership spokeswoman Kristen Wicker says downtown businesses love it when big shows like “Wicked” come to town.
“Tens of thousands of people will head for center city to experience some of the best that downtown has to offer,” she said. “We already have 21 businesses offering special discounts, extended hours or themed menu items.”
Why is the show returning so soon? The theater association’s president said producers were so enthused by the audience response to the initial run in Dayton they wanted to return as soon as possible.
“A show like Wicked is scheduled many years in advance and to be able to schedule a return engagement 27 months after its first run is a great opportunity for Dayton audiences to see this show either for the first time or again,” Neufeld said.
Over six million people have seen Wicked on Broadway since it opened in the fall of 2003 and nearly 10 million have seen the show on national tour. It’s grossed a combined total of $1.8 billion for its North American companies and continues to travel the world as well.
Wicked 101
The inspiration for “Wicked” can be traced back to “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the Frank Baum classic novel that spawned a series of Oz books and earned five Academy Award nominations when it was turned into a film in 1939. Judy Garland won a Juvenile Academy Award for her role as Dorothy, and the film quickly became one of America’s best-loved movies.
The story was first staged on Broadway in 1903.
The current musical theater production is rooted in a book by Gregory Maguire, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” The novel, which visits Oz before Dorothy arrives on the scene, introduces the character of Elphaba, a green-skinned outspoken witch willing to fight for causes in which she believes. The musical explores the developing friendship between Glinda and Elphaba and has been running on Broadway since 2003. The first national tour kicked off in 2005.
When television writer Winnie Holzman was asked by composer/lyricist Stephen Schwatz to help turn Gregory Maguire’s 400-page novel into a Broadway musical, she agreed immediately.
“We both knew it was a brilliant idea that Gregory Maguire had in his novel — that there is more to the wicked witch than we know,” said Holzman, best known at the time for her work on “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life.”
The Wicked Witch of the West, she says, is one of the world’s most famous female villains, wicked through and through.
“You think you know her whole story backward and forward and then suddenly you’re told you don’t know the whole story,” Holzman said.
Audiences, she believes, connect to the girls and their story.
“These two young women are standing up to a very dark power in their midst and have two different ways of handling it because they are two completely different people,” she said. “ But they end up coming into their own and speaking their truths to this darkness ... standing up and not being afraid to be who they really are.”
Why it’s a hit
Howard Kurtz, a professor of musical theater at George Mason University near Washington, D.C., said “Wicked” may be one of the last shows to reflect the best of American musical theater tradition.
“It has a storyline and a plot that’s accessible, it engages the audience and there are points in the story where an actor can’t express anything more in words so it turns into a song,” he explained in a phone interview. “When Nellie Forbush (in “South Pacific”) is so in love with a man and wants to tell her friends, she bursts into song.”
Kurtz said he thinks that’s why so many plays from the past are being revived on Broadway.
“We still yearn for that Golden Age of musical theater,” he said. “The young people who come to the theater to see ‘Wicked’ may not know it, but what they’re seeing is a traditional musical of the 1950s or 1960s. ‘Wicked’ is in that tradition, but with added spectacle.”
Kurtz, who worked as a designer on the 50th Anniversary for Macy’s “Wizard of Oz,” said another draw is that the play is based on an iconic story with which all of us are familiar.
In a tough economy, he added, audiences want to get as much as they can get for their money. “Wicked,” he said, will deliver.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or MMoss@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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