Wicked

[gafftaper]

Well I finally saw Wicked tonight. Overall, I was glad I saw it and enjoyed it, but I won't be buying the CD or rushing back to see it again. It's beautifully done but it's a little too much of a chick flick. My wife was complaining about it being too chick for her. I loved how well the plot tied into the classic movie and sort of turned it upside down. The Lighting, video, sfx, set, costumes, are all great. Working on small budgets all the time, like most of us do, it's fun to see how it can be done when you have to money to hire an amazing team.

A couple of thoughts:
1) I was a little confused by the set design. They mess around a lot with the concept of a clock. Anytime the scene isn't in OZ, you either see parts of a clock face or gears. At some points there is a 20' high wall of gears on stage. I'm a little confused about the message it's trying to send. There is one line in the show where the wicked witch wishes she could go back and do it all over again... I'm guessing that is where the designer was going. But I'm not really clear. I guess while it looked cool I just didn't get the point.

2) I was disappointed that when the wicked witch turns her sister's shoes from shiny silver to ruby that they don't actually do the trick on stage. For those who haven't seen the show she is wearing these shiny.. mirror ball like... shoes. The wicked witch turns them to ruby and to signify that they shine a lot of red light on them for the rest of the scene. This really disappointed me. With all the money spent on the show you would think they could have hired someone to design a magic trick to actually make the shoes turn. She's sitting this giant overdone wheel chair at the moment of the change. It would have been easy to have fake legs with the silver slippers, a concealed compartment in the chair, flash, bang, a door opens and there are the real legs with the ruby slippers on and the fake legs disappear. Wow I'm a wizard. I was actually sitting there expecting this trick, with my eyes focused on the wheel chair prepared to not be distracted by any diversion so I could see how it worked. But they didn't do it.

3) I LOVED the flying monkeys there were just the right kind of scary. When they started actually flying later in the show it was wild and reckless looking. VERY cool. The program says they had Michael Curry to design the wing device by the way.

4) Flying effects by ZFX. Really nice job with the flight during "defying gravity". It's a really beautiful looking trick.

5) Although the cyc lighting and the texture on set pieces was great. There were times that the lighting was a little too dependent on the follow spots and actors would walk into holes that were a little too dark.

6) I was seated a little over halfway back in a theater where the balcony juts out quite a distance and the sound was pretty good. There were a couple of times when the sound got a bit messed up when two actors were singing face to face at a close distance.

Biggest disappointment... no cool black T-shirts. I love getting show shirts that have some sort of clever phrase on them and a logo. Unfortunately they only had simple logo shirts. Towards the end the wicked witch says to the good witch, "We can't all travel by bubble!" Jackpot... I want a shirt that says that with the wicked logo on the back. Sadly it didn't exist.

[gafftapegreenia]

The clock is a major theme in the book, which is itself much darker and sinister than the musical adaptation. The clock inspired set design made sense to me since I had read the book first but to someone with no prior knowledge I can see the confusion.

[BrianWolfe]

We made the tin man armour for all the productions. We also made a design for the dragon for Eugene Lee, who can't draw to save his life. We asked for a commitment to having us make the full scale dragon before we gave him the design which never happened. He had already decided to send the work to Canada and just wanted the free drawings. Very disappointing to see the finished dragon which looked more like a dog.

You definitely have to read the book for the clock reference which is central to the book and totally unexplained in the show.

[rochem]

Originally Posted by gafftaper

2) I was disappointed that when the wicked witch turns her sister's shoes from shiny silver to ruby that they don't actually do the trick on stage. For those who haven't seen the show she is wearing these shiny.. mirror ball like... shoes. The wicked witch turns them to ruby and to signify that they shine a lot of red light on them for the rest of the scene. This really disappointed me. With all the money spent on the show you would think they could have hired someone to design a magic trick to actually make the shoes turn. She's sitting this giant overdone wheel chair at the moment of the change. It would have been easy to have fake legs with the silver slippers, a concealed compartment in the chair, flash, bang, a door opens and there are the real legs with the ruby slippers on and the fake legs disappear. Wow I'm a wizard. I was actually sitting there expecting this trick, with my eyes focused on the wheel chair prepared to not be distracted by any diversion so I could see how it worked. But they didn't do it.

Did you see this on broadway, or on tour? I haven't seen the show in a couple years, but I can't remember this at all. Where was this red light coming from? Shins, followspot(s), lights hidden in the chair, or something else?

Originally Posted by gafftaper

5) Although the cyc lighting and the texture on set pieces was great. There were times that the lighting was a little too dependent on the follow spots and actors would walk into holes that were a little too dark.

When Wicked came through last season, they were touring with two different ground rows, one just DS of the neutral drop to scrape it from the front, and one hitting the bounce drop more upstage. They also had S4-MultiPAR strips mounted vertically on both sides of the stage washing the bounce from both sides, and another vertical boom which held a bunch of S4s with gobos to scrape across the scrim. It was really nice.

Wicked has a very small FOH, and it isn't used much at all. The vast majority of light on the stage is coming from the tops and sides, with maybe just a little fill from the FOH to kill the shadows. And they have those two side-mounted spots in the proscenium (S4-10 with color scrollers) and three spots FOH.

[gafftaper]

Traveling show. The transformation of the shoes to red was done by turning every light on the entire stage red except the follow spots. It looked ok as long as the follow spots didn't accidentally hit the shoes.

I was really shocked that they didn't change her into red shoes when she returned to the stage in another scene with normal lighting. They were just plain white in that scene. I guess they figured we wouldn't notice?

[shiben]

When I saw it in Chicago, it was quite a bit more polished with the shoes and whatnot, I didnt notice any bad things there. I actually saw it while I was still in Highschool, and it was one of the things that got me into technical theater. The scene in "Defying Gravity" where she gets flown up, and then they had a green, a blue and a white spot from either side triangulate on her from the back, and I was like "I want to do that". It was great. My personal favorite tech thing was that all the sets moved by themselves. I just wish that my college had 1/10th the budget that their show did. Also, I got a black t-shirt that had "Defy Gravity" on it... Did they not have it where you were seeing it?

[Raktor]

Originally Posted by rochem

Wicked has a very small FOH, and it isn't used much at all.

Not when we loaded it out.
Granted, the one here was a permanent professional show (over 12 months before it moved, with a month to load out and load in again), so they had a lot more time to play with.

[gafftaper]

No, sadly no cool "defy gravity" shirt. Just an official tour shirt showing all the stops and some really girly stuff. Nothing that would look good back stage.