'Wicked' and the Feeling of Sameness

Can this new movie escape the trends of both musicals and movies?

I grew up around a lot of musical theater. A LOT. Like so much. My childhood lullabies included "Edelweiss", "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", "Out of My Dreams" (from Oklahoma), and more. Every Disney movie I grew up with eventually transferred to Broadway - an ouroboros of show tunes I have yet to escape. We had many of the classic Hollywood musicals on VHS and listened to at least a couple musical soundtracks on every road trip.

My grandparents, who would babysit me and my sisters often, met in New York and came of age in the golden era of musical theater. They loved everything from Carousel to Cabaret and would play dress up with us while we sang along to one cast recording or another. My parents were professional dancers and could, with very little prompting, recreate the choreography from A Chorus Line. I did my share of children’s theater, playing bit parts in Damn Yankees, Les Misérables, and Bye Bye Birdie.

Some families watch the Super Bowl, my family watches the Tony Awards. I cannot tell you even one thing about football, I cannot recite any Bible verses, but I can list every Sondheim musical in chronological order. And, perhaps you knew this was coming, I was utterly obsessed with Wicked.

When asked by a family friend at Thanksgiving if we liked the show, I responded, “No, we worship it.” I was ten. It was the event of my young life when my parents took us to see the National Tour in 2005. I taped the playbill to my bedroom wall and poured over every lyric - I even read the book...which was a weird experience for a child, but there you have it.

All that song and dance aside, this is largely a part of my childhood and my personality that I have outgrown. My love for musical theater is confined to the musicals I loved back then, and in adulthood, I have become a bit tepid towards them. I did not jump on the Hamilton bandwagon, I don’t keep up with whatever Pasek and Paul are doing. Though it pains me to admit it, I think most contemporary musicals gracing the stage or screen these days are corny at best and aggravating at worst.

I look back on my years as a musical theater nerd with a mix of fondness and chagrin. Partly because I’ll never forget the look of confused annoyance on other kids’ faces when I belted out a Phantom of the Opera song at summer camp, but also because my tastes have changed and the American musical…kind of hasn’t.

They all sound eerily same-y, and I find very little that feels truly original or novel in most I’ve heard in recent years. Like a Pixar movie, they are engineered to elicit a specific response at a specific time. They are shiny, easy on the eyes and ears, and created not to challenge an audience but to put them at ease. There is still plenty of talent, expert craftsmanship, and enjoyment to be had, but I can’t help but feel there is not enough risk. This extends to every corner of the entertainment industry. There has always been tension between innovation and capitulation, between pleasing the consumer and making them think. And while the best pieces of art are often extremely entertaining, too often it can feel like the powers that be are more interested in profit than in the art of performance.

So with the film adaptation of Wicked now in theaters, I feel a strange mix of emotions muddied with nostalgia and secondhand embarrassment for the theater kid still within me. Perhaps this is an attempt to keep that unbridled joy and lack of self-awareness in the past with my school bullies, but I have hesitated to see it. I know! My ten-year-old self would be embarrassed of me for not seeing it on opening weekend!

This has nothing to do with the movie itself (again, I haven’t seen it yet), and everything to do with my relationship to my childhood self. As an adult, I’ve grown discerning of all things saccharine, suspicious of spectacle, and resentful towards the things that used to bring me joy. I’ll own that this is largely a defense mechanism developed over years of being labeled deeply uncool. But I think my cynicism is somewhat warranted.

The lead-up to the film has been a nonstop marketing campaign unlike any other. Movie press tours have taken on a life of their own in the age of social media, and it can be hard to discern what is real and what is just a reel. My apologies for the pun, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling fatigued by the onslaught of advertising and press coverage of press coverage that is now the norm for big studio offerings. I feel like I can’t even have a relationship to the movie itself, only a relationship to the publicity department’s idea of what the movie is.

But, this Wednesday at 11:15am PST, I will see Wicked at my local AMC. Despite all my trepidation and uncertainty, I want to believe this movie can still move me like the musical once did. I want to believe in musicals and in movie musicals again and still have the capacity for joy that I did then. I still really do love Wicked. It gave me so much strength as a young girl to see this story on stage and I’ll never feel quite that swept up as I did seeing it for the first time. It won’t be the same, but maybe I’ll get a taste of that same rush that used to make me feel like it was me who was defying gravity instead of Elphaba.

So this week, when I sit down in the theater, I won’t be alone even though I only bought one ticket. I’ll be there with my younger self in tow, ready to surrender. After all, everyone deserves a chance to fly.