By Luisa Terzulli
So? Where are the songs, the music, the emeralds?! Okay, the show is over and this is London, but after nearly three hours of musical I want, I demand, I expect a yellow brick road leading me home from the Apollo Victoria Theatre, and as Christmas has just passed by I also want a witch on a broomstick showing me the way like the Star of Bethlehem.
If it was not clear enough from the vaguely biased comment, Wicked – set in the fantastic Reign of Oz – is a pleasantly shocking show that is well worth a night out instead of sitting home in front of the TV.
Directly from Broadway and landed at London only few months ago, Wicked is already an enormous success, able to fill up a hall that seats 2,300 people even on a Tuesday night. It is a tale for all the ages, with a fairytale stage designing as a set for the adventure, and marvellous costumes to accompany the enthralling performance of the cast. No words are enough for masterly Idina Menzel, from the original American cast and at her last performances before passing the broomstick, in January, to the new witch Elphaba. How not to praise, then, superlative Hellen Dallimore, playing the role of the good witch Glinda, and to the sketches and gags the two “rivals” give life to when they share the stage?
Wicked is all a sparkling and dazzling of colours and sounds, choreographies and voices, songs, intense acting and quips. And if you will go, as I did, to watch it without having had dinner first, it will involve you so much that you will notice the pangs of hunger during the interval only… and at the exit from the theatre, of course, where you will not find a yellow brick road waiting for you.
Well? What are you doing still there?! Do you want to spend the whole day reading? Hurry up, because the Apollo Victoria is always crowded, and latecomers are not very welcome!
Ah, I was forgetting… If you think to go and watch a toddling Dorothy towards the Emerald City you make a blunder, because there is not even the shadow (or the shadow only, at the most) of the lively girl in question. And if you thought to know the story of the Reign of Oz, Wicked will turn upside down your certainties and will teach you that things are not always what they seem…
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