Wicked in Winnipeg! (REALLY, REALLY in depth)
Wicked FINALLY made its way to Winnipeg! It was here from Wednesday August 24th through the following Sunday (September 4th.) When it was announced back in spring, I bought tickets for my mom’s birthday (3rd), and then my cousin told me that she was going to buy me tickets for opening night as a thanks for babysitting her kids for a week last March. (They were 5 and 7 at that point. I was going nuts by the end of the week!)
Yay! I had tickets to two performances! Wonderful!
And then I got lotto tickets. Twice.
By the end of the run here, I saw it 4 times, and wish I saw it more! (and I saw it on Broadway in 2006)
Beneath the cut are thoughts from the four times I saw it, in detail. Actually, holy crap did it get long, and wow did I start to ramble. (and wow, did this take a long time to type!) It probably won’t make a lot of sense for those that haven’t seen it. And there are some spoilers, if you’ve never listened to the cast recording.
The first time I saw it (Wednesday, August 24th) it was with the hubby, my cousin, aunt, and a bunch of my cousin’s friends. Then, at the last minute two of her friends had pulled out, and she offered the two extra tickets to me, so I called my best friend who was in from Ottawa, and she took her brother too. Watching it with her one of the things I’ve wanted to do in LIFE. She’s a theatre freak just like me, and I was the one that introduced Wicked to her in... 2005? We had previously gone on road trips and sang RENT from beginning to end at the top of our lungs, and during 2005 when I was getting reacquainted with my Broadway love (I neglected it from 2001-2005 due to university, but then I realized that I needed a creative outlet and jumped back in) she jumped in right after me.
When I gave her my Wicked CD, I put a sticky note in the liner notes that said, “because I know you...”. She found it about 3 months after I gave it to her, on a particularly bad and stressful day for her. Since then, Wicked had somehow become a symbol of our friendship. And it happened so serendipitously that she both came back to town a few days early, and that these 2 extra tickets came up... We watched it with our hands clasped, and reacted to every little riff and thing we forgot about, and I was SO happy to see it with her. (Even if the hubby felt left out.)
Anne Brummel played Elphaba (and it was the only time that I saw her, I wonder if she got sick or something), and Natalie Daradich played Glinda. Anne played it mostly straight for the majority of it, but then she did this one riff at the end of No Good Deed... it was amazing. I looked at my best friend and we just had our eyes wide open like we couldn’t believe it, and we both said it was the best part of the show after. We sat in row 20 orchestra, dead centre. It was also really interesting going opening night, because people were (a) fancier dressed, and (b) kind of in costume..? There were a LOT of people wearing pink and green, and a large group of women all wearing witches hats when they came in. It was pretty awesome. Usually, Winnipeg doesn’t really get excited about a whole lot, but people were really excited about this! Oh, and I was wearing very sparkly shoes. :D
Side note #1: in 2007 our local theatre company that does a musical every summer on this beautiful outdoor stage did Wizard of Oz, and I wore my Popular shirt from when I went to see Wicked in New York. I got some blank stares, but I got about 3 high fives, and then I exclaimed, “solidarity for the witches, bitches.” Well, I thought I was cool.
The second time I went I did the lotto on the Sunday morning (Aug 28th). I had been VERY busy up to that point and it was my first chance back, and I wasn’t even going for myself. My other two best friends were wanting to see it, but one didn’t really have anyone to go with, because the other friend couldn’t afford full price tickets. So I arranged for them to go to the Sunday matinee lotto, and got their boyfriend/husband to come too so we could boost our chances, and then I showed up too to help (I live fairly close to the Concert Hall)... and then there were about 30 people there at the lotto for the 20 tickets they had. I guess people just didn’t know about it? And it was a Sunday matinee, but whatever it was, out of the 5 of us we got pulled 3 times so the boys even said that they would come too, even though they weren’t expecting it, and one of them is a hunting-car-fixing-will-never-admit-to-liking-the-show kind of guy. (and he did like it, even if he didn’t admit it. We know him that well.)
I sat in the 4th row from the stage, in the farthest to stage right seats. I actually loved those seats, because I was trying to peer through the curtains on the side to see MORE of the show, you know? And being so close really made me appreciate some of the subtleties of the acting. We Christine Dwyer was the Elphaba understudy, and it was really interesting to see the differences, especially because I feel like the understudies have pressure to try to be different from the main cast, where if they were the main cast, then they can just be their own character. (did that make sense at all?) Christine Dwyer did a lot of riffs during “No Good Deed”, and most were good, some were whatever. She did a few riffs during “The Wizard and I” too, and those were pretty good. I like those two songs the best for Elphaba, because the actress really has a chance to define herself as different than other Elphabas. At any rate, the show was good, Christine was good, and it was especially cool to try to focus on HOW things were done, instead of just the spectacle.
Also, Michelle London as Nessarose was unreal, especially at this performance. It’s such a pity that “Wicked Witch of the East” isn’t on the cast recording, because it’s such a good song, and she does it SO WELL, especially because she goes SO LOUD when she sings the title lyric, and so quiet and with such a pure sound for the next line’s “we deserve each other...” But this show in particular she was just really ON.
I tried for the lotto on Thursday (Sept 1), and instead of the 30 people there on Sunday, there were over 100, maybe more! What a huge change from Sunday! I didn’t win. So, I tried again on Friday (Sept 2), and with the friend that I wanted to bring, I also brought the hubby and the friend that he was hanging out with that night to help put their names in the draw. The hubby’s name was the LAST one out of the drum, and we proceeded to jump up and down. Yay us!
You know how every group of friends has the one that’s kind of silly and really easily excitable? Usually the one to lighten the mood when others are being too serious? The instigator? In pretty much all of my social groups, that person is me. Well, I know this friend separately from pretty much everyone else (she moved here a few years ago, and I met her through dance class), and to her, I’m the voice of reason. She makes ME look serious. And while she is SUPER book smart (she’s getting her MA in English Lit, and works as a paralegal) she’s pretty much a flake. (but I still love her dearly.)
So, she knew NOTHING about the show, and I told her I was bringing her to the lotto (she wasn’t allowed to say no), and we ended up with basically the same seats I had at the previous lotto, but 2 seats in from the far stage right, and one row back. And let me tell you, bringing her to the show was the right choice. I kept pointing things out to her, like the dragon at the top, when it moved, or when in the emerald city a character was on pointe shoes. After “Wizard and I” she turned to me and exclaimed that her entire body was covered in goose bumps, and she had a HUGE smile on her face the whole time. She laughed at all the right times, and that made it funnier for me and I laughed harder too.
The best was when she figured something out and turned to me, super excited. Like, “That’s the lion!” Or “His heart is SHRINKING? OH! OH!”. And she pretty got everything on cue, right where you’re supposed to figure it out, but she felt so proud. And that made it more awesome. And I guess because I was laughing with her, and pointing neat things out to her, I was being a little bit loud... but at the end of the show the older guy sitting next to me said that he wanted to thank me, because I made the experience more enjoyable for him. I didn’t know what to say... but what a nice compliment.
The other thing about that performance, is that both Christine Dwyer and Natalie Daradich were on FIRE that night. There was just a little something extra to their performance that I couldn’t even put a finger on, but they were UNREAL. All the riffs that Christine did during “No Good Deed” that I just acknowledged before, I instead LOVED. And this was the first time that I really noticed Elphaba’s reaction when Boq says that Fiyero and Glinda are engaged. She just looked so... hurt. And then when Nessa comes over to the table and Elphaba kind of grabs her arm, both to kind of steady herself and comfort Nessa... Christine just did it so well.
The fourth time I saw it was for my mom’s birthday (Saturday, Sept 3rd), and I went with my mom, dad, sister, and sister’s fiancé. (They just got engaged and are getting married next summer -- I’m so excited!) My sister often is skeptical of when I get really excited, and is more of a sarcastic person than I am, but she still really enjoyed it. What was even better was the fiancé, who had NEVER been live theatre before. Not a play, not a musical, nothing. He was blown away by the spectacle of it all, and was in general wonderment of the whole thing. Still, theatre is probably ruined for him now, since he started with Wicked. We sat in the 10th row, dead centre. These were the super expensive tickets that we bought this time for my mom’s birthday, and they were worth it! It was really cool to go back to looking at the whole stage instead of just parts of like I had been for the past 2 performances.
Both understudies were on that night, Christine Dwyer (who continued to be amazing) as Elphaba, and Lisa Livesay as Glinda. Now, it seems that she’s been understudy since April, but I don’t know how often she’s been able to go on... but she was very subdued. It was like she was playing Glinda to the bare minimum and hadn’t made it her own yet. I think it was also hard, because Natalie is SO GOOD at the role, with all the right little quirks and kicks and flicks without being too ridiculous.
Side note #2: when I saw it on Broadway it was with Eden Espinosa, who was fantastic, and Kate Reinders, who was a spaz, and TOO over the top. Seriously, during “Popular”, it was like she had epilepsy. Not a fan. However, in bootlegs/youtube videos that I’ve seen of Megan Hilty, she’s also kind of a spaz, but she makes it work. And it’s always so interesting to watch the videos people have taken and compare each actor’s interpretation of the characters. I watched one where Michelle London was the understudy Glinda, and she kind of played her kind of growly and power-hungry, which is more true to the book.
But back to Lisa Livesay - she had the potential to be good. She really did, and still does. Her voice was really pretty and so is she, but it also seemed like she let her character slip whenever she didn’t have a line / the attention wasn’t on her. And really, if you had never seen Wicked before, you still would have thought she was great in the role. I guess, with the Glinda role you have the opportunity to play it in so many different ways, and she just... didn’t do anything extra or special. The Glindas have so much latitude to play with during Popular... and she just kind of sang the song. I’m sure she’ll get into it. I was also happy to see her, though, because it also really made me appreciate how much I enjoyed Natalie, and her extra little nasal laugh that she kept doing. Seriously. SO GOOD. And she’s been in the role for quite a long time now, so I think she’s really perfected how she wants to play it.
UPDATE: I just found out that before the Winnipeg run Lisa had only been on 4 times previous, so when I saw her it was likely only her 5th time on, so her portrayal makes a lot more sense now, and she’ll definitely do better in the future. Also, before the show started, Lisa and Christine did a workshop class with some a teen musical theatre intensive summer class and I knew someone that works at the studio where this happened, and she said that Lisa showed up in a skirt and was very colourful and was giggly and girly, while Christine was in her jeans and a hoodie. She was like, “are you actually your characters?” So when I told her that Lisa’s role kind of slipped sometimes, she responded, “but she actually IS Glinda!” Maybe she was just nervous. They can’t have actually performed too many times together, maybe not at all.
And now Wicked is gone, and I am sad, because I wish I had actually gone to see it more. I should have tried more times for the lotto especially in the beginning of the run, even if I was super busy.
And there ends my really, really in depth Wicked experience.
Yay! I had tickets to two performances! Wonderful!
And then I got lotto tickets. Twice.
By the end of the run here, I saw it 4 times, and wish I saw it more! (and I saw it on Broadway in 2006)
Beneath the cut are thoughts from the four times I saw it, in detail. Actually, holy crap did it get long, and wow did I start to ramble. (and wow, did this take a long time to type!) It probably won’t make a lot of sense for those that haven’t seen it. And there are some spoilers, if you’ve never listened to the cast recording.
The first time I saw it (Wednesday, August 24th) it was with the hubby, my cousin, aunt, and a bunch of my cousin’s friends. Then, at the last minute two of her friends had pulled out, and she offered the two extra tickets to me, so I called my best friend who was in from Ottawa, and she took her brother too. Watching it with her one of the things I’ve wanted to do in LIFE. She’s a theatre freak just like me, and I was the one that introduced Wicked to her in... 2005? We had previously gone on road trips and sang RENT from beginning to end at the top of our lungs, and during 2005 when I was getting reacquainted with my Broadway love (I neglected it from 2001-2005 due to university, but then I realized that I needed a creative outlet and jumped back in) she jumped in right after me.
When I gave her my Wicked CD, I put a sticky note in the liner notes that said, “because I know you...”. She found it about 3 months after I gave it to her, on a particularly bad and stressful day for her. Since then, Wicked had somehow become a symbol of our friendship. And it happened so serendipitously that she both came back to town a few days early, and that these 2 extra tickets came up... We watched it with our hands clasped, and reacted to every little riff and thing we forgot about, and I was SO happy to see it with her. (Even if the hubby felt left out.)
Anne Brummel played Elphaba (and it was the only time that I saw her, I wonder if she got sick or something), and Natalie Daradich played Glinda. Anne played it mostly straight for the majority of it, but then she did this one riff at the end of No Good Deed... it was amazing. I looked at my best friend and we just had our eyes wide open like we couldn’t believe it, and we both said it was the best part of the show after. We sat in row 20 orchestra, dead centre. It was also really interesting going opening night, because people were (a) fancier dressed, and (b) kind of in costume..? There were a LOT of people wearing pink and green, and a large group of women all wearing witches hats when they came in. It was pretty awesome. Usually, Winnipeg doesn’t really get excited about a whole lot, but people were really excited about this! Oh, and I was wearing very sparkly shoes. :D
Side note #1: in 2007 our local theatre company that does a musical every summer on this beautiful outdoor stage did Wizard of Oz, and I wore my Popular shirt from when I went to see Wicked in New York. I got some blank stares, but I got about 3 high fives, and then I exclaimed, “solidarity for the witches, bitches.” Well, I thought I was cool.
The second time I went I did the lotto on the Sunday morning (Aug 28th). I had been VERY busy up to that point and it was my first chance back, and I wasn’t even going for myself. My other two best friends were wanting to see it, but one didn’t really have anyone to go with, because the other friend couldn’t afford full price tickets. So I arranged for them to go to the Sunday matinee lotto, and got their boyfriend/husband to come too so we could boost our chances, and then I showed up too to help (I live fairly close to the Concert Hall)... and then there were about 30 people there at the lotto for the 20 tickets they had. I guess people just didn’t know about it? And it was a Sunday matinee, but whatever it was, out of the 5 of us we got pulled 3 times so the boys even said that they would come too, even though they weren’t expecting it, and one of them is a hunting-car-fixing-will-never-admit-to-liking-the-show kind of guy. (and he did like it, even if he didn’t admit it. We know him that well.)
I sat in the 4th row from the stage, in the farthest to stage right seats. I actually loved those seats, because I was trying to peer through the curtains on the side to see MORE of the show, you know? And being so close really made me appreciate some of the subtleties of the acting. We Christine Dwyer was the Elphaba understudy, and it was really interesting to see the differences, especially because I feel like the understudies have pressure to try to be different from the main cast, where if they were the main cast, then they can just be their own character. (did that make sense at all?) Christine Dwyer did a lot of riffs during “No Good Deed”, and most were good, some were whatever. She did a few riffs during “The Wizard and I” too, and those were pretty good. I like those two songs the best for Elphaba, because the actress really has a chance to define herself as different than other Elphabas. At any rate, the show was good, Christine was good, and it was especially cool to try to focus on HOW things were done, instead of just the spectacle.
Also, Michelle London as Nessarose was unreal, especially at this performance. It’s such a pity that “Wicked Witch of the East” isn’t on the cast recording, because it’s such a good song, and she does it SO WELL, especially because she goes SO LOUD when she sings the title lyric, and so quiet and with such a pure sound for the next line’s “we deserve each other...” But this show in particular she was just really ON.
I tried for the lotto on Thursday (Sept 1), and instead of the 30 people there on Sunday, there were over 100, maybe more! What a huge change from Sunday! I didn’t win. So, I tried again on Friday (Sept 2), and with the friend that I wanted to bring, I also brought the hubby and the friend that he was hanging out with that night to help put their names in the draw. The hubby’s name was the LAST one out of the drum, and we proceeded to jump up and down. Yay us!
You know how every group of friends has the one that’s kind of silly and really easily excitable? Usually the one to lighten the mood when others are being too serious? The instigator? In pretty much all of my social groups, that person is me. Well, I know this friend separately from pretty much everyone else (she moved here a few years ago, and I met her through dance class), and to her, I’m the voice of reason. She makes ME look serious. And while she is SUPER book smart (she’s getting her MA in English Lit, and works as a paralegal) she’s pretty much a flake. (but I still love her dearly.)
So, she knew NOTHING about the show, and I told her I was bringing her to the lotto (she wasn’t allowed to say no), and we ended up with basically the same seats I had at the previous lotto, but 2 seats in from the far stage right, and one row back. And let me tell you, bringing her to the show was the right choice. I kept pointing things out to her, like the dragon at the top, when it moved, or when in the emerald city a character was on pointe shoes. After “Wizard and I” she turned to me and exclaimed that her entire body was covered in goose bumps, and she had a HUGE smile on her face the whole time. She laughed at all the right times, and that made it funnier for me and I laughed harder too.
The best was when she figured something out and turned to me, super excited. Like, “That’s the lion!” Or “His heart is SHRINKING? OH! OH!”. And she pretty got everything on cue, right where you’re supposed to figure it out, but she felt so proud. And that made it more awesome. And I guess because I was laughing with her, and pointing neat things out to her, I was being a little bit loud... but at the end of the show the older guy sitting next to me said that he wanted to thank me, because I made the experience more enjoyable for him. I didn’t know what to say... but what a nice compliment.
The other thing about that performance, is that both Christine Dwyer and Natalie Daradich were on FIRE that night. There was just a little something extra to their performance that I couldn’t even put a finger on, but they were UNREAL. All the riffs that Christine did during “No Good Deed” that I just acknowledged before, I instead LOVED. And this was the first time that I really noticed Elphaba’s reaction when Boq says that Fiyero and Glinda are engaged. She just looked so... hurt. And then when Nessa comes over to the table and Elphaba kind of grabs her arm, both to kind of steady herself and comfort Nessa... Christine just did it so well.
The fourth time I saw it was for my mom’s birthday (Saturday, Sept 3rd), and I went with my mom, dad, sister, and sister’s fiancé. (They just got engaged and are getting married next summer -- I’m so excited!) My sister often is skeptical of when I get really excited, and is more of a sarcastic person than I am, but she still really enjoyed it. What was even better was the fiancé, who had NEVER been live theatre before. Not a play, not a musical, nothing. He was blown away by the spectacle of it all, and was in general wonderment of the whole thing. Still, theatre is probably ruined for him now, since he started with Wicked. We sat in the 10th row, dead centre. These were the super expensive tickets that we bought this time for my mom’s birthday, and they were worth it! It was really cool to go back to looking at the whole stage instead of just parts of like I had been for the past 2 performances.
Both understudies were on that night, Christine Dwyer (who continued to be amazing) as Elphaba, and Lisa Livesay as Glinda. Now, it seems that she’s been understudy since April, but I don’t know how often she’s been able to go on... but she was very subdued. It was like she was playing Glinda to the bare minimum and hadn’t made it her own yet. I think it was also hard, because Natalie is SO GOOD at the role, with all the right little quirks and kicks and flicks without being too ridiculous.
Side note #2: when I saw it on Broadway it was with Eden Espinosa, who was fantastic, and Kate Reinders, who was a spaz, and TOO over the top. Seriously, during “Popular”, it was like she had epilepsy. Not a fan. However, in bootlegs/youtube videos that I’ve seen of Megan Hilty, she’s also kind of a spaz, but she makes it work. And it’s always so interesting to watch the videos people have taken and compare each actor’s interpretation of the characters. I watched one where Michelle London was the understudy Glinda, and she kind of played her kind of growly and power-hungry, which is more true to the book.
But back to Lisa Livesay - she had the potential to be good. She really did, and still does. Her voice was really pretty and so is she, but it also seemed like she let her character slip whenever she didn’t have a line / the attention wasn’t on her. And really, if you had never seen Wicked before, you still would have thought she was great in the role. I guess, with the Glinda role you have the opportunity to play it in so many different ways, and she just... didn’t do anything extra or special. The Glindas have so much latitude to play with during Popular... and she just kind of sang the song. I’m sure she’ll get into it. I was also happy to see her, though, because it also really made me appreciate how much I enjoyed Natalie, and her extra little nasal laugh that she kept doing. Seriously. SO GOOD. And she’s been in the role for quite a long time now, so I think she’s really perfected how she wants to play it.
UPDATE: I just found out that before the Winnipeg run Lisa had only been on 4 times previous, so when I saw her it was likely only her 5th time on, so her portrayal makes a lot more sense now, and she’ll definitely do better in the future. Also, before the show started, Lisa and Christine did a workshop class with some a teen musical theatre intensive summer class and I knew someone that works at the studio where this happened, and she said that Lisa showed up in a skirt and was very colourful and was giggly and girly, while Christine was in her jeans and a hoodie. She was like, “are you actually your characters?” So when I told her that Lisa’s role kind of slipped sometimes, she responded, “but she actually IS Glinda!” Maybe she was just nervous. They can’t have actually performed too many times together, maybe not at all.
And now Wicked is gone, and I am sad, because I wish I had actually gone to see it more. I should have tried more times for the lotto especially in the beginning of the run, even if I was super busy.
And there ends my really, really in depth Wicked experience.