A re-post after 2 months of taking a break while I heal. Next up, the new Star Wars film, which I will see this coming week. Thanks for staying tuned; this is a labor of love and of hope…easing my way back.
Republished with an update, now that I have seen it!
Wicked
I admit it! I tried to read the novel but it didn’t grab my attention. I wanted to see the musical when in New York but tickets were not happening. When it came to town, for some reason, I wasn’t inclined to buy tickets. I’d lost interest on everything but the songs from the play. But, it is about the legends of Oz told in a new way.
Did it have an impact on you or your original feeling about Oz? With the synopsis below many personal feelings could arise. This story fascinates me in how it affected others. Maybe I’ll reconsider the next time it comes to town.
It came back around to my town and I received a ticket to the theater to see it. It did not disappoint. Just as every new Star Wars film has it’s dis-tractors, being a purist isn’t my vibe….hope and strong women are. I’d like to hear from you and your thoughts on Wicked. Entertaining and engaging it was and I can now add this to my “Oz” repertoire.
From Publishers Weekly
Born with green skin and huge teeth, like a dragon, the free-spirited Elphaba grows up to be an anti-totalitarian agitator, an animal-rights activist, a nun, then a nurse who tends the dying and, ultimately, the headstrong Wicked Witch of the West in the land of Oz. Maguire’s strange and imaginative postmodernist fable uses L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a springboard to create a tense realm inhabited by humans, talking animals (a rhino librarian, a goat physician), Munchkinlanders, dwarves and various tribes. The Wizard of Oz, emperor of this dystopian dictatorship, promotes Industrial Modern architecture and restricts animals’ right to freedom of travel; his holy book is an ancient manuscript of magic that was clairvoyantly located by Madam Blavatsky 40 years earlier. Much of the narrative concerns Elphaba’s troubled youth (she is raised by a giddy alcoholic mother and a hermitlike minister father who transmits to her his habits of loathing and self-hatred) and with her student years. Dorothy appears only near novel’s end, as her house crash-lands on Elphaba’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, in an accident that sets Elphaba on the trail of the girl from Kansas as well as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Lion and her fabulous new shoes. Maguire combines puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, which should, despite being far removed in spirit from the Baum books, captivate devotees of fantasy.
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