It was even better than I remembered - I think most of my memories have been superseded by listening to the CD a few hundred times, so I'd forgotten about a lot of the funny dialogue that goes in between.
I know a lot of people aren't fans of the Wicked music, but I love it. Even though it does lose something by not having the choreography, I still love listening to the music.
After I saw Wicked the first time, I bought the novel by Gregory Maguire
, but I found it very disappointing. It's a lot darker than the musical, without any of the humour that really makes the musical, and there are significant divergences in the plot. It's actually quite a literary book - makes me even more impressed that someone was able to look at it and get the idea for a brilliant musical out of it.Overall I was very impressed by the Australian cast - for the most part it was the same as the group I saw in Sydney, but where it differed I think both alternatives were equally strong. Although Bert Newton got a lot of cheers I think he brought down the overall quality of the performance - he can't really sing at a Broadway musical level. I'm also not sure if his voice was still recovering from his bout of pneumonia; it sounded hoarse on some of the low notes and the speech pathologist in me was yelling that he shouldn't singing if his voice sounded like that.
On the whole it was a wonderful night. I hope that someone produces a DVD of Wicked at some point so that I can watch it over and over to my heart's content :)
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