Enjoy your Wicked side

9:19am Wednesday 27th February 2008

FOR all those who loved pulling the legs of crane flies as children, secretly want the bad guys in movies to win or who are just plain Wicked in every way imaginable, I know you're going to love this show.

Wicked is the tale of how the witches in Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz grew into the characters that they did and a brilliantly funny insight into what may have been an alternative to the good triumphs over evil tale that Oz is.

Just say for instance that the Wicked Witch of the East was actually all right, just misunderstood because she was green and flew about on a broomstick.

What if Glinda the Good was actually a spineless prom queen who wanted to be adored by everyone in Munchkin land.

Well that's what we get with Wicked. We also get the disabled sister of the wicked witch magically being granted the gift of walking not long before being crushed under Dorothy's house on her flying visit from Kansas.

Ideas of how the tin man, the cowardly lion and the scarecrow were created are very clever and hilarious, but I won't give it all away.

There is also a great love story entwined in this production and a great development of many other Oz characters that were just bit parts in the original story.

I am not the greatest fan of musicals, and with the witch, the munchkins and everybody else bursting into song at every opportunity I should have been tearing my ears off but I wasn't. And that's because it's brilliant.

Every song is superbly sung - particularly by the pointy-hatted witch - and they all carry the story along.

There are no fillers and the sheer energy of all the performances is a delight to watch.

The songs are funny, tender and even quite scary when they need to be. Before long, it transpires that the 'wicked' characters are not really wicked. In fact, they should have been accepted as the cool ones in the Wizard of Oz, instead of the dorky Dorothy and her silly dog Toto.

And as for the wizard, well he turns out to be the absent father of one of the characters and more of a fraud than he was portrayed in the original film. Wicked is a blast. The stage and sets are absorbing, the acting excellent, the songs are great and the story of evil triumphing over good is just what we all want, isn't it?

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