The tiniest bit unlike I anticipated

Grace and I saw Wicked on Saturday.  We went with a dear friend of mine whose two daughters are close friends of Grace’s as well.  I had heard over and over how marvelous the musical was, and fully expected to enjoy it.

Wow.

I wasn’t, however, expecting to both laugh and cry, nor that I would be left with such weighty, interesting questions and thoughts.  Wicked is a parable about how nobody fits the simplistic labels we like to assign to them, an exploration of two women who are both deeply complicated and profoundly human.   The play also riffs on one of my favorite themes, that we ought to slow down our rush to judgment, take the time to hear the stories of others, and extend kindness whenever we can, because everyone has their private struggles.

The central characters in Wicked are Elphaba, more commonly known as the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the Good Witch.  Both women are revealed to be much more complicated than their good and evil categorization suggests, and ultimately, both are deeply relatable and human characters. Their authentic friendship, which transcends their massive differences, is the beating heart of Wicked.

Elphaba, who is born with green skin and carries with her the heavy weight of her father’s disappointment as well as her own sense of responsibility for her mother’s death, is the obvious heroine of Wicked.  She is the underdog who makes good, the character who grows from nervous, shy little girl to brave, truth-seeking woman.  Elphaba is smart and loyal, compassionate towards all, especially those who are, like her, marked by difference.  The witch’s hat and broom are accidental accoutrements whose power as tropes were unanticipated.  Elphaba transcends awkwardness and ugliness to become a startlingly empowering, beautiful character.  She loses it all to pursue her truth.

Glinda is everything Elphaba is not.  She is pretty and blonde, privileged and conceited, and the most popular girl in school.  She gets the groupies and the boy and almost faints when for the very first time things do not go her way.  Through an accident, she and Elphaba become roommates, and then, improbably, friends.  It is in this, the thawing of her glossy, icy shell as she begins to genuinely care about Elphaba, that we glimpse that there is more to Glinda than we first imagine.  Glinda follows Elphaba as far as she can, though ultimately she turns away and returns to a conventional – and eventually a public – life.  Where Elphaba is a brave rebel, Glinda is more shackled by her fears.  She does not ever shun Elphaba, though, and we witness her deep affection for and commitment to her best friend.

Elphaba is the showier character, the easier one to root for, but it’s Glinda that I find myself thinking about still.  She takes seriously her public role as Glinda the Good (in one scene she, hilariously, mutters to Elphaba that she is expected to be encouraging).  She loses her best friend and the man she loves, and yet she never, not once, becomes bitter.  Glinda is a woman whose life turned out precisely as she planned it, and who tries mightily to put on a happy face about that despite deep hurt inside.  In the song “Thank Goodness,” Glinda is speaking before the crowds in Munchkinland.  She is trying to reassure them that she has never been happier, and that they ought to likewise rejoice, while inside we know she quakes with fear about her fiance and her friend.

That’s why I couldn’t be happier
No, I couldn’t be happier
Though it is, I admit
The tiniest bit
Unlike I anticipated
But I couldn’t be happier
Simply couldn’t be happier
… ‘Cause getting your dreams
It’s strange, but it seems
A little – well – complicated
There’s a kind of a sort of : cost
There’s a couple of things get: lost
There are bridges you cross
You didn’t know you crossed
Until you’ve crossed
And if that joy, that thrill
Doesn’t thrill you like you think it will
Still –
With this perfect finale
The cheers and ballyhoo
Who
Wouldn’t be happier?
So I couldn’t be happier
Because happy is what happens
When all your dreams come true
Well, isn’t it?
Happy is what happens
When your dreams come true!

Glinda represents the imprisonment of the good girl.  She embodies the ambivalence of having your dreams come true, especially when the dreams are both outdated and, possibly, traps.  She is to me, an equal heroine of the story: she accepts what she is and is not able to do, and, bowing her head in the acknowledgment of her private pain, she rises, glittering, to her responsibilities.  Her courage, though different from Elphaba’s, is no less salient.  Glinda grows out of the very shallow girl she is at first to an empathetic character whose fierceness and intelligence are handicapped only by her deep need to play by the rules.