Explaining Wicked’s meteoric success

Wicked the Musical’s spectacular rise to #1 bestselling Broadway show seems almost flukey for those who haven’t seen the show. The book is, however moving, topically relevant, and nearly orphic in its conjurations of a world’s underbelly, a bit cumbersome in detail and rather intimidating were one to attempt the translation onto the stage.

Those who have seen Wicked the Musical know how it was managed.

The Chicago Tribune’s archive article on Wicked’s Cinderella story (too much fairy tale for one article?) takes the show and the politics surrounding the professional reviewers’ world apart from the inside out, showing how the show was initially slighted by a Broadway literati before receiving its due, and why it truly does deserve to be the sensation it is.

Says the Tribune’s Chris Jones, of the climactic build for “Defying Gravity” at the end of the first act, “At that moment in the show, it feels like hundreds of teenagers are about to jump out of their seats in collective solidarity with the Wicked Witch of the West — before the cruel world made her that way. / Suddenly, it seems, everyone is an unpopular girl with a green face. / Talk about a potent metaphor.” (again, the full Chicago Tribune article on the success of Wicked the Musical is here)

And Jones is right. Just as Wicked spoke to difficult and ambiguous political problems facing the world by reinterpreting an old story that itself was very much a political work (I feel a new post coming on…), the musical brought in the anthemic feel of powerful popular music and show tunes, and gave the message a drive it didn’t have in MacGuire’s slower-paced novel. Wicked really connects to teenagers and their parents alike, with its themes of individuality and conformity.

And though the tickets are understandably as hard to get as ever, StubHub.com’s Wicked Tickets forum brings fans together to buy and sell tickets to sold-out shows all over the country.

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