Sailer: No Rest for the 'Wicked' Audience
The first act of the colossally lucrative Broadway musical is finally a movie.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
No Rest for the Wicked Audience
Steve Sailer
November 27, 2024Your opinion of the hit movie Wicked: Part 1, a 160-minute extrapolation of the 90-minute opening act of the Broadway musical Wicked, depends upon your answer to the question: When it comes to Wicked, can there be too much of a good thing?
Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the freshman year in sorcery school of the rivals Glinda, the Good Witch, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, has made approaching $1.7 billion just in Times Square since opening in 2003. Evidently, a lot of people really like it, the more of it the better, and they can’t wait for the film of the second act next Thanksgiving.
Then again, a lot of people (many of them straight men) think a little Wicked goes a long way.
On the third hand, if you aren’t very familiar with the current platinum age of Broadway, seeing the movie version of Wicked can be a cheap way to familiarize yourself with a representative 21st-century musical.
Read the whole thing there.
Dinklage is a very talented actor and also a hypocrite. He advocated against using dwarfs in the Snow White remake while he continues to book an endless stream of high paying roles.
In (I'm now reminded) 2003, a couple who are friends of ours and live in Concord, MA invited us for early-evening drinks at their suite at the Waldorf Astoria here in NYC. Sounded like fun, and he's a big wine-lover so we thought we'd bring along a very nice bottle we'd gotten as a wedding present the year before--the kind of thing I'd never shell out for myself.
So we arrive at the Waldorf (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens https://lyricstranslate.com/en/wallace-stevens-arrival-waldorf-lyrics.html) and knock on their door to discover like fifteen people somewhat weirdly sitting in a circle and celebrating (as we were soon to discover) the opening of a Broadway show many of them were about to attend, based on a novel by one of the gay guys in the room. This I gather was Gregory Maguire, a friend of the host couple's from up in Concord; reasonably enough I guess, he was gleefully soaking in the attention and obviously psyched for the impending debut of Wicked.
This was not at all what we'd anticipated, and my wife and I undelightedly drank something other than the fancy wine we'd brought while being pretty titanically bored and (in my case at least) annoyed by the monolithic conversation, veering from Broadway-infused excitement to the predictably uniformly prog politics of everyone there: not my jam, nor my wife's.
We fled at the first reasonable moment feeling gypped in more ways than one. But hey: belated congratulations to Mr. Maguire on hatching a dynamite franchise.