Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz,
book by Winnie Holzman, directed by Joe Mantello
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
October 10-December 31, 2006
The good news is that Stephen Schwartz’s popular musical Wicked is back in Toronto with the same dazzling sets and costumes as in its sold-out run last year. The bad news is that with two exceptions the new cast of this touring production is distinctly inferior to the previous one.
Based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, the musical depicts the friendship in pre-Dorothy Oz of Glinda (Megan Hilty) and Elphaba (Shoshana Bean), who will become the good and wicked witches of the Oz we know. The main surprise in the new cast is Hilty, who far outshines Kendra Kassebaum of last year. She brings together Glinda’s disparate traits of ditziness, egocentricity, power-hungriness and actual perception into one delightful confection that steals every scene. Alma Cuervo is a much more dangerous Madame Morrible than was Carole Kane and can actually sing. Bean, unfortunately, pales in comparison with Stephanie J. Block of last year. She captures Elphaba’s intelligence but not the mental instability that finally leads her to “wickedness”. Worse, she has a small voice that loses out in every duet and can’t give the show’s big power ballad “Defying Gravity” the intensity it needs. Cliffton Hall’s Fiyero, the love interest, has a voice nasal enough to induce headaches.
On second viewing you wish even more that Schwartz could somehow think beyond routine Seventies pop-rock riffs and that Winnie Holzman’s book had trusted Maguire and not concocted a phony feel-good ending.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-10-19.
Photo: Megan Hilty and Shoshana Bean in foreground. ©Peter Vidani.
2006-10-19
Wicked