📅 Wednesday, November 6th – Sunday, December 1st
📍 The Paramount Theatre: 911 Pine Street, Seattle
Look to the western sky! It’s the wicked witch! Run for your lives!
Okay, this joke would’ve played better 21 years ago, when composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz (Godspell), playwright Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life), and actor/director Joe Mantello (Love! Valour! Compassion!) first premiered Wicked in San Francisco. A musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s much more adult book, it brought us back to the Land of Oz and considered the relationship between popular “good witch” Galinda and green-skinned outcast “bad witch” Elphaba before and after the events of The Wizard of Oz. What could have been a failed out-of-town tryout for an expensive bit of fan fiction became, well, one of the most popular plays in Broadway history, still playing to sold-out houses at the gargantuan Gershwin Theatre in New York and on tours around the world in perpetuity. Sure, it lost the Best Musical Tony Award to fringe theatre darling Avenue Q, but to quote Don Draper, “That’s what the money’s for.”
The North American tour is making one short stop in the Emerald City just in time for the release of the long-awaited Universal movie adaptation, which more or less covers the play’s first act. (You’ll have to wait a year for Part 2.) Consider this a chance to brush up on the lore before you head to the cinemas to catch Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande kill it in the latest from underrated showman director Jon M. Chu (In the Heights). And though you won’t catch, say, OG stars Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth as the witches anymore, give it up for touring leads Lauren Samuels and Austen Danielle Bohmer, who will, without doubt, hold their own against one of modern musical theatre’s busiest stagings.
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