When Some Feel Sheepish About Loving 'Wicked'

Don't be shy

I wasn’t planning on writing a Wicked review, but here I am, still dealing with a bit of jet lag (I do love waking up fully refreshed at 1 AM with all the quiet twilight hours ahead of me, no joking) and unable to stop listening to the soundtrack. I’ve long been a fan of musicals, which I touched upon in my recent piece, All the World’s a Stage.¹ But I’m no expert and I figured I wouldn’t have much to contribute except applause and spreading word of mouth.

But then, I came upon this Youtube video from the Critical Drinker After Hours channel, which I thought was worth discussing.² In case you don’t know, Critical Drinker is a popular Scottish-accented Youtuber who does anti-woke takedowns of pop culture like the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars run and the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney saga. It seems that this After Hours channel is one where he hosts panels with other like-minded people.

The notable segment of this video consists of a guy named Chris Gore who, despite his prefacing that Wicked is “super gay” and “very female-centric,” can’t help but go gaga over how much he loves the movie. And not just the movie, but he also loves the musical because it’s a powerful story about friendship with absolutely “no gay undertones” since both Elphaba and Glinda have a boy they like.

Guess how many times he’s seen the musical? Once? Twice? Thrice? No, four times! Four! How many of us have seen even our favourite movies that many times? In fact, he loves the musical so much that he laments how if only the Star Wars prequels treated Anakin and Obi-Wan’s friendship with as much depth and love as Wicked does with that of Elphaba and Glinda, then those prequels wouldn’t have ended up the jokes they are today.

It's endearing how Gore just adores Wicked so much that despite his cultural ideology, he still fanboys over it. He even tries to rationalize this by equating the Wizard with Joe Biden because they’re both deceitful figures. Take that, they/thems.

Ultimately though, it’s sad how this guy feels compelled to attach so many caveats to something he clearly cherishes so much. Besides, with Trump’s infamous infatuation with The Phantom of the Opera, the gayest musical that’s not about gays, shouldn’t Broadway now be up there with guns and Zyn as anti-woke emblems?

We think of the poor repressed people of the past, like some blue-collar war veteran in the 1950s who always kept his mouth shut, rarely smiled, and definitely never cried. But upon his quiet death, his family learns that he was a lifelong fan of the ballet and every year on his so-called fishing trip, he’d actually been secretly going to the local theatre where he’d shed tears while watching Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, Giselle… Years from now, we’ll look back at the profoundly stupid woke-vs.-anti-woke era as one where some people had to justify their Wicked standom by claiming that Elphaba is Trump (yes, Gore does say this).

As for my thoughts, I loved the movie. I’d never seen the musical before, though I knew the general story about how the Wicked Witch of the West was actually misunderstood. I only knew Defying Gravity because I’d watched the first couple of seasons of Glee when it first aired. Since then, I’d liked and listened to that song many times without fully knowing what exactly was going on in the song. So I finally got to see it in context in the wonderfully exuberant climax of the movie. Ah, so that’s why Elphaba says to look to her in the western sky! I was all smiles through the whole number (my friend Rachel, whom I watched the movie with, was crying, I think).

Everyone’s great in the movie, but I want to note Cynthia Erivo’s performance in particular because before this, all I’d seen her in was in the horrible and twisted Harriet that weirdly injected superhero elements, a master/slave semi-romance, and a made-up black male villain into a supposed biopic of Harriet Tubman. But she’s so good here that Harriet has been banished from my memory. Like Elphaba, so many of us feel underappreciated regarding some aspect of ourselves. In order to make Wicked work, the actor playing her has to not only connect with that feeling, but also, at the end, triumphantly convince us that she’s exorcised that lifetime of pain, suffering, and resentment with heroic bravura. Erivo does this so well.

After the movie, I texted my friend Adam, who’s a decent singer, that though I am not some voice coach, Erivo could be Whitney Houston tier, at which he scoffed as blasphemy. But then he watched a Youtube clip of Erivo singing and conceded I wasn’t being totally crazy.

I’m also happy for the director, Jon Chu, because though it has become fashionable to sneer at Crazy Rich Asians, it’s a fine movie that turned out much better than I expected. Also, beneath the materialism and painfully earnest representation politics of the movie, the underlying story has a rather subversive message that for culturally adrift 2^nd generation Asian Americans (like the protagonist, Rachel Chu), their dream future is in Asia, which is ascendant over the West. This, I suspect, was the real reason that many liberal assimilationist Asian Americans in—or hovering about—the culture class felt the need to criticize the movie, supposedly on class grounds.

To my disappointment, nobody sang along at the showing. But I suppose we’d all been thoroughly warned to not do that. A pity, I thought. After all, haven’t the theatre freaks waited a lifetime for this? And against all odds, the Wicked movie doesn’t suck? We’re on their territory here, at least on opening weekend. Don’t gentrify it! Abide by their rules! Then again, it’s maybe not so bad, because I can just use this as an excuse to go watch Wicked a second time when the singalongs begin, and after I learn all the lyrics better.

1. All the World’s a Stage by me

2. Drinker’s Chasers - Wicked Is Actually Good? | Youtube