Review: Wicked
The green witch pulls the rug from under the blonde’s feet and crosses gravity
Theatre: Wicked kicks off the musical autumn with a big sledgehammer
What are young maidens made of? No more sugar and cinnamon, not even from stables or kennels. Now witches, vampires and fairies are rampant.
The borderline fantasy sells, and young people draw their own cone hats reminiscing about Harry Potter and Narnia.
But where did it all start? Yes, it was the American Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, shortly after Alice. This is how a familiar-sounding kind girl is snatched from the earth to the heavens with her dogs during the downpours.
Wicked , on the other hand, spins the Wizard of Oz into a daughter, Elphaba.
However, a person born green has a completely different idea of his origins and eternal guilt for crippling his sister.
Nessarose, who is in a wheelchair, is sent to university, where even the green sister is allowed to go mainly to guard her younger one.
If The Wizard of Oz was a story of heart, courage, and intellect, Wicked is a guide to friendship, tolerance, and sharing. Of course, there are flashes of tin guys and scares here as well, but the main focus is on the girls’ growth.
I greet with joy all performances that fillet forms of bullying – and that’s what Wicked is.
Just the right guys
As the opening game of the autumn season at the Helsinki City Theatre, Wicked hits the biggest possible sledgehammer with the biggest possible sledgehammer. This implementation is difficult to beat.
Director Hans Berndtsson managed to thrill already three years ago in Beauty and the Beast. Now he has gathered just the right guys to machine stage magic.
Mikael Varhelyi stages a giant chronometer-compass in a dense stage opening, in which time and spatial transitions are condensed. Insects and skulls float behind it as a projection.
The movement required by the dances is helped by two wooden speaker cabinets, a structure that looks a bit like the wooden cladding of old radios. Efficient, beautiful, functional!
Palle Palmé’s lighting design works incredibly inventively.
In a more obvious way: Elphaba really can be melted away by a torrent of water.
In Wicked’s green, Maria Ylipää is musical down to her fingertips. In general, it is at the level at which people go to London to ask for work, for example.
In the course of the story, Elphaba becomes a person, discriminated against and loved, and finally persecuted. Anna-Maija Tuokko fills the curly Glinda with self-irony, but she also masters the more serious twists. An absolutely great pair!
Ursula Salo’s Madame Morrible, a two-faced teacher, smoothly transforms Oz’s public image into a polisher. Salo is a stunningly impressive actor in his original voice.
Antti Langin Boq, who worships Glinda, gets to dance a wheelchair girl from the armrests – and look at what legs!
Tuukka Leppänen’s Prince Fiyero between two women makes the cheeks of both a prepubescent girl child and a menopausal mother red – to counterbalance all that green.