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The Decca Broadway Original Cast Recording of Wicked which won a Grammy Award this year, is the best-selling CD in the genre since "Mamma Mia!" and the fastest-selling original cast album since "Rent."
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WICKED, the untold story of the witches of Oz, features music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin, Academy Award winner for Pocahontas and The Prince of Egypt) and book by Winnie Holzman ("My So Called Life," "Once And Again" and "thirtysomething"), and is based on the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire. With musical staging by Tony Award winner Wayne Cilento (Aida, The Who's Tommy, How To Succeed).
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Long before Dorothy dropped in, two other girls meet in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald-green skin, is smart, fiery and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious and very popular.
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The Decca Broadway Original Cast Recording of Wicked which won a Grammy Award this year, is the best-selling CD in the genre since "Mamma Mia!" and the fastest-selling original cast album since "Rent." Wicked, produced for Decca Broadway by composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz, has struck a chord with audiences of all ages. With the first U.S. national touring company under way and a new second home at Chicago’s Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre, Wicked is poised to entrance audiences nationwide with no end in sight.
The album continually receives rave reviews from around the country. Elysa Gardner of USA Today stated that Stephen Schwartz "blends folk, pop and musical-theater influences with grace and vitality." Entertainment Weekly called the album "lushly produced," while Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle rated the album ‘excellent,’ adding that the orchestrations and voices are "dynamic." Lawson Taitte of the Dallas Morning News says, "Judgment doesn’t really begin on a new musical-theater piece until the cast album comes out. The stock of Wicked went through the roof when the cast album appeared."
www.deccabroadway.com
www.wickedthemusical.co.uk
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WICKED, the untold story of the witches of Oz, features music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin, Academy Award winner for Pocahontas and The Prince of Egypt) and book by Winnie Holzman ("My So Called Life," "Once And Again" and "thirtysomething"), and is based on the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire. With musical staging by Tony Award winner Wayne Cilento (Aida, The Who's Tommy, How To Succeed).
"At the end of my 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, an anonymous pair of voices discusses the story that has just concluded.
"And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time."
"And did she ever come out?"
"Not yet."
When I wrote those words, I was consigning the Witch once again into her sorry story, a story I gleaned from all that was left out of the L. Frank Baum novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). What a bundle of unseemly characteristics and personality tics! Her preference for the company of flying monkeys over human beings… her physical ugliness combined with a taste for the flashiest in shoeware… her aversion to water (whatever did she mix with her bourbon?)…
But the Witch returns… She always returns…
In Wicked—the novel first, and now the musical—the Wicked Witch of the West has a name: Elphaba. It’s pronounced EL-phaba, with the pronunciation on the first of the three syllables, the way DOR-othy is (and for that matter, MAR-garet and HAM-ilton, too, though that’s pure coincidence). Elphaba, a name derived from the initials of the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Lyman Frank Baum. L. F. B. Elphaba.
I set out to tell her story from beginning to end. I wanted not so much to explain the Wicked Witch of the West as to deepen her mystery. Yes, I disclosed her reasons for wanting the shoes that had belonged to her sister. But I could not account for the Witch’s passion, nor did I want to: I merely wanted to heighten it.
One way of doing this—in the novel, mind you—was to allow the Witch to have a good voice. In a pub, at an informal memorial service for a dead friend, she agrees to sing to her friends.
Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen….
…The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last…
Everyone else in Oz had a longing: For a heart, for a brain, for courage, for a way home. Surely the Wicked Witch of the West wanted something other than shoes.
What was it? Vengeance? Justice? Love? Death? An accompanist?
"When Stephen Schwartz approached me with the notion of turning Wicked into a musical play, I needed much less persuading than I let on. As a college student I had taught myself to play the piano from the scores for Pippin and Godspell. Stephen saw the comic and the melodramatic possibilities in my sprawling slice-of-Oz-history novel, and he promised that however the plot evolved to suit the stage, the grim themes of the novel would inform the show.
I haven’t seen the annotated score; I can’t cite key signatures or tempi. I do know that from the opening anthem’s foreboding figure of notes—an attempt to step up out of a minor key toward a mode of relief, if not joy, it seems to me—the score for Wicked respects the book’s tensions and ambiguities. Comic numbers harbor sinister or poignant implications. Darker modalities cloak hints of rescue and repair. The music underscores one of the themes of the story: appearances are deceiving.
Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book of the play, has honored the intentions of the original and made Wicked her own. Galinda still becomes Glinda, Elphaba becomes the Witch, and they both grow concerned about each other and their world, in ways that slyly derive from the novel but are enchanted into something else again.
As for the production, I can only say that the principals and the chorus inhabit their roles with a fervor that makes me fear for my sanity at times; they can seem more real than the figures who once lived solely in my head. The special sort of spell the cast can cast will last and last.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published more than a hundred years ago. This means that, after a hundred years, the Wicked Witch of the West, my pretties, is still out there.
I couldn’t be happier."
Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguire is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) as well as other novels, including Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), Lost (2001), and his latest, Mirror Mirror (2003), all published by ReganBooks, HarperCollins.
www.deccabroadway.com
www.wickedthemusical.co.uk
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Long before Dorothy dropped in, two other girls meet in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald-green skin, is smart, fiery and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious and very popular. How these two unlikely friends end up as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch makes for the most spellbinding new musical in years.
www.deccabroadway.com
www.wickedthemusical.co.uk
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1. NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED
2. DEAR OLD SHIZ
3. THE WIZARD AND I
4. WHAT IS THIS FEELING?
5. SOMETHING BAD
6. DANCING THROUGH LIFE
7. POPULAR
8. I’M NOT THAT GIRL
9. ONE SHORT DAY
10. A SENTIMENTAL MAN
11. DEFYING GRAVITY
12. THANK GOODNESS
13. WONDERFUL
14. I’M NOT THAT GIRL (reprise)
15.AS LONG AS YOU’RE MINE
16. NO GOOD DEED
17. MARCH OF THE WITCH HUNTERS
18. FOR GOOD
19. FINALE
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Kristin Chenoweth Glinda
Idina Menzel Elphaba
Joel Grey The Wizard
Carole Shelley Madame Morrible
Norbert Leo Butz Fiyero
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