Wicked
was
AMAZING.
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| Gershwin Theater illegal picture |
Ok, so I sort of already knew that the musical was going to be awesome. I know all the songs by heart, and I may or may not have seen a short-lived YouTube video of the first half. However, those things still didn't prepare me for the magical experience that is seeing "Wicked" on Broadway.
We wound up leaving the Met later than expected (it's like a maze in there!), and as we were waiting for the C train to take us to 50th St., I started panicking because I was sure we weren't going to make it by 2:00. After a lot of empty threats about my getting a cab, the train finally showed up at 1:40, and I was doing all sorts of really poor math in my head to figure out when we were going to get there. Five stops at two minutes each? Maybe? Who knows! At 1:45, I'm contorting my face into various "stressed out" expressions and cursing Carvaggio for forcing us to stay late at the Met with his stupid awesome painting. 1:50--our stop! There's a mad dash (or as dash-like as you can be when you're not actually running because there may still be some people left in the city that don't know you're a tourist) up one block to 51st, where (luckily) the theater was right off the corner. Ricky and I shared a congratulatory fist bump when we took our seats at 1:55.
I was preparing for the worst once I saw where we were sitting: smack dab in the middle of an enormous school group. ENORMOUS. Complete with parent chaperones who had no idea what was going on, and pre-teens climbing all over everywhere to sit with their friends. Cell phones. Shrieks of laughter. Plaintive wails of "Mooooom!" from the ends of each row. In true old-person fashion, I turned to Ricky and muttered something along the lines of, "When I went to a Broadway show on my 8th grade field trip, my friends and I were much more well behaved," which may or may not be true, because I was 12 and thought everything I did was a cool thing. Go figure. Anyway, once the show started, they all quieted right down, and there were only a couple catcalls from our section during the Fierro/Elphaba "makin' out in the fog" scene. I'll take what I can get.
Our seats were half price because they were supposed to be restricted view--not even! We sat in the far left orchestra seats, and we couldn't see the very back corner of the stage, but literally nothing besides background dancing happened back there anyway. It was perfect, and WAY cheaper than the full price tickets! It was weird knowing the people in the row behind me paid a lot more for their seats, even though I knew they had basically the same view I did. (Theirs just weren't marked as restricted.) Ricky and I gave ourselves a pat on the back for a savvy Broadway-on-a-budget choice.
Speaking of Ricky...
This show wasn't his first choice. He really wanted to see "Death of a Salesman," but he knew how much I wanted to see "Wicked," so he said we would just wait to see if we could get rush tickets to his play when we got to NYC. (We tried--they sold out 3 hours before the box office opened. The line started at 5:00 AM! No thanks.) Ricky loves musicals, but he wasn't totally sold on the "Wicked" premise, so I think he was just expecting to enjoy it for my sake. After the first act, he said it was "pretty good." After the second act, he said it was "AWESOME. HOLY COW." We had two stunningly (stunningly) talented ladies as our main characters, and when you're being compared to Idena Menzel and Kristin Chenowith, that's saying something. The singing was phenomenal and the second act really blew both of us away. I was an easy sell, but they definitely won Ricky over! There's definitely a reason why it's one of the most popular shows on Broadway.
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#14 is FINALLY complete!
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