Theatre reviews: Wicked | Beauty and the Beast
Wicked, Playhouse, Edinburgh *****
Beauty and the Beast, Beacon Arts, Greenock ***
Every festive season, in the 2020s, sees theatres packed with clever new takes on traditional stories that challenge all the assumptions about gender and class on which they are often built.
When it comes to powerful rewrites of familiar tales, though, the 2003 musical Wicked – with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and script by Winnie Holzman – must be the queen of them all. Loosely based on a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, it sets out to give us the back-story to the famous Wizard Of Oz narrative, and to challenge the simple binaries between good and evil on which it depends; as Glinda the Good Witch confesses, while the people of Oz are celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West, whose name is Elphaba, the two were once friends, and went to college together.
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Hide AdForced to share a room, the two young trainee witches gradually grow closer, despite the fact that Elphaba has been born a vivid shade of green; and the story soon develops a powerful political undertow, as we begin to understand that Oz is on a path from a magically diverse past – full of people of all colours, mythical creatures, and magnificent talking animals – to an enforced monocultural future, where everyone will be, or try to be, like the wealthy, beautiful and perfect blonde, Glinda. And when the two visit Oz – and finally realise what the weak and self-pitying Wizard is up to, in trying to shore up his regime – Elphaba takes the road of rebellious opposition, and soon becomes painted as a terrorist enemy of Oz, while Glinda decides to stay, and to try to modify and improve the regime from within.
It is, in other words, a terrific, complex and hugely insightful story about good governance and bad, and people caught up in the struggle between them; yet throughout, it remains full of all the magic of fairytale, and – in the terrific UK touring production currently at the Playhouse – all the fabulous visual and musical values of music theatre at its very best. At the performance I saw, Laura Pick, who plays Elphaba, was unable to appear; but it’s a measure of the quality of this 30-strong company that without missing a beat, superb understudy Casey Al-Shaqsy took her place alongside Sarah O’Connor’s magnificent Glinda to roars of approval from the audience, in a show – backed a fine 14-piece live orchestra – that shines with pure storytelling brilliance, from beginning to end.
At the Beacon in Greenock, meanwhile – one of Scotland’s most beautiful venues, with its fabulous views north across the Clyde to the Highlands – this year’s panto, Beauty and the Beast, tells a story old as time, and leaves its traditional shape largely undisturbed; although swathed in so much daft and raucous comedy, in this new version by Alan McHugh, with sets and costumes by Imagine Theatre, that it manages to seem fairly subversive anyway.
In truth, Beth Morton’s jolly Greenock production misses a few tricks, in strict panto terms. The best pantos need some strong local input to the script that seems to be slightly missing here, despite a few passing references to Skelmorlie and Kilmacolm; and there are gaps in the storytelling around the relationship between Shannon Swan’s Beauty and Sam Wilson’s fine-voiced Beast through which a whole pack of dancing wolves could fall.
The show has a delicious Dame in Jimmy Chisholm, though, skipping around the stage in delightfully skittish form, with strong support from a hilarious Mark Cox as castle retainer Angus McFungus; and the show twinkles to a conclusion in suitably jolly style, to a roar of cheerful audience approval.
Wicked is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh, until 14 January. Beauty And The Beast is at the Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 31 January.