What next: a show about the young Cruella de Vil that reveals her to be a misunderstood waif who wistfully dreams of breeding Crufts champions, or a musical prequel in which the infant Cyclops tries to persuade his mother to bake chocolate cookies instead of cannibal kebabs? The big, spectacular, loud and sporadically tuneful Wicked is almost odder. It’s a spin-off from The Wizard of Oz that so thoroughly whitewashes the Wicked Witch of the West that I was left feeling about the show the way Lord Voldemort feels about Harry Potter.

But then Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s show seems aimed less at grouchy warlocks like me than at youngsters with a taste for the upbeat. That is why much of the first half resembles an American high-school flick in which teenage girls spend their days wrangling, making up and ogling the captain of the basketball team.

Here, Helen Dallimore’s vain, pretty and very popular Galinda surprisingly becomes best friends with Idina Menzel’s bashful and very unpopular Elphaba — and both turn out to have a passion for the class Adonis, Adam Garcia’s cheerfully laid-back Fiyero.

So what does this have to do with The Wizard of Oz? Well, Elphaba was born with a green face and is doomed to become the witch whose death the citizens of Oz celebrate at the show’s very start.

“The wickedest witch there ever was is dead,” they sing in a brash variation of the song featured in the film version of The Wizard of Oz, looking as if they have bounced in from The Pickwick Papers and Gormenghast And then all becomes a sentimental, politically correct flashback.

The poor lass is a victim of differentism, uglyism and racism, all of which are bad, especially since she is interested only in curing her sister’s paralysis, protesting when the university fires the genteel goat that teaches her history and rescuing the flying monkeys that the Wizard of Oz has captured.

Yes, she’s a benign animal liberationist and the Emerald City is the centre of a cynical dictatorship that, as Nigel Planer’s bland old wiz explains, has chosen animals as the “really good enemies” any country needs. Something searingly topical and political here, eh? So Elphaba is forced to go on the run, or rather the broomstick, leaving us to follow an increasingly preposterous plot. There’s a dim boy called Boq, who is mistakenly transformed into the Tin Man, while the girl he forlornly loves, Dallimore’s Glinda, evolves from a cutie who skips about uttering chirrups of glee into the Good Fairy of the North and the Queen of Oz. Fiyero turns out to be a dull goody-goody who really loves Elphaba. More happily, Miriam Margolyes puts in a classy appearance as a magic-teacher who resembles a blend of Catherine the Great and a brocaded Victoria sofa.

Need I go on? Songs bang out, along with iffy lyrics and not-so-witty dialogue. Menzel’s Elphaba rises to the flies amid shafts of rainbow light. There are in-jokes about Dorothy, an annoying brat who is justly rebuked by the virtuous Elphaba for stealing her dead sister’s shoes.

But her mention left me feeling one thing only. I’d rather see The Wizard of Oz 20 times than this ersatz show once.



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