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WICKED is the biggest thing in musicals since The Phantom of the Opera opened - and other theatres are green with envy.
Sometime today a group of slightly unhinged people, most of them teenage girls, several possibly painted green, will begin to gather on the steps of the Apollo Victoria theatre for an outdoor sleepover. No matter that they will all have seen the show playing inside dozens if not hundreds of times before, no matter that there are better places to camp overnight than Central London in March. There are tickets to be queued for because tomorrow is the final performance by the current cast of Wicked, the musical that re-imagines the back-story to The Wizard of Oz and, oh my god, it would be like, sooooo bad to miss it.
WICKED is the biggest thing in musicals since The Phantom of the Opera opened 24 years ago: a juggernaut that is accelerating all the time and reinventing the business model for theatre in the process. The story of its success involves Facebook, Glee and Saddam Hussein but boils down to the fans, whose loyalty to the show, its characters and its cast, is verging on the manic, even by West End standards.
On Sunday night they helped it to win the Audience Award for the 'Most Popular Show' at the Olivier Awards. Last month the public voted WICKED 'Best West End Show' at the WhatsOnStage awards.
Three and a half years after WICKED arrived in London from Broadway in a season awash with more fancied and now long since departed rivals, the records are piling up. In the next two weeks the production will receive its three millionth visitor and ticket receipts are on course to pass £100 million in the UK by the end of May. It is either the top or the second best-selling show in London most weeks. The global numbers are even more astonishing. There are eight productions running around the world. Altogether WICKED has taken an Avatar-esque £1.2 billion including some £67 million in merchandise revenue alone. After six years it remains the top-selling show on Broadway.
The show’s audience straddles all ages but the ones who have made it stand out are the teenage girls and young women who have never flocked to a musical in such numbers before. They throng the stage door every night, write long letters to the actors about their personal troubles, cheer ex-cast members on in their subsequent shows and stampede down to the Apollo Victoria if they hear that a previously unglimpsed understudy is performing, like moths drawn helplessly to WICKED’s emerald green foyer.
Sitting in a dressing room plastered with fans’ letters and drawings of her, Dianne Pilkington who plays Glinda, the pinker and fluffier of the two lead witches, says that they are "never weird, just incredibly madly supportive".
Their fierce attachment to the show is to do with "how it makes them feel and the way it brings them together with like-minded people. There are worse things for teenage girls to be going out and doing."
WICKED began life as a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire. Living in London in the early 1990s, he was inspired by the demonisation of Saddam Hussein to write a novel exploring the nature of good and evil. Reaching back into his childhood he plucked out the terrifying green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West from the classic 1939 film with Judy Garland.
His book, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, turned the familiar story on its head by suggesting that she is actually an admirable figure whose reputation has been destroyed by a tyrannical Wizard of Oz because she dared to stand up to his sinister regime. Maguire called his heroine Elphaba and imagined a lonely childhood in which she was ostracised because of her green skin. While she becomes the "Wicked Witch" her spoilt friend Glinda becomes the Good Witch of the North. He has described the novel as a tragedy. The musical is more sugarcoated and adds spectacular sets, flying monkeys and a smoke-breathing dragon, as well as the sort of power ballads that play well in a Pop Idol and X Factor world.
It is the central focus on the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda that best explains its strange grip on so many people, though. Most of the regular fans identify with Elphaba, the outsider, though younger girls often prefer Glinda’s sense of humour and princessy frocks.
Michael McCabe, the Executive Producer of the London show, inadvertently nails the formula for a hit on this scale. Shows such as WICKED, Les Misérables and Phantom take root, he says, when they draw out of audiences "a commercial - sorry, an emotional - connection". McCabe knows that securing that emotional connection over time is a license to print money.
WICKED has done this without the reassuring head start of a being a musical adapted from a hit film (such as The Lion King) or the back catalogue of a huge band (such as Mamma Mia!) and despite the withering disdain of at least half the critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Reviews of the Apollo Victoria show ranged from five stars down to no stars.
According to Matt Wolf, the theatre critic of the International Herald Tribune, WICKED is a landmark for the industry. "It’s changed the rules quite dramatically — the critics are no longer the ultimate arbiters. The old theatre model is rapidly unravelling and being replaced by a new viral model."
Earlier this month Andrew Lloyd Webber complained about the malign power of the internet after preview audiences eviscerated his Phantom follow-up Love Never Dies online before opening night. WICKED’s popularity is the other side of that same coin.
There are hundreds of YouTube films linked to the show. The insertion of the song Defying Gravity into the television show Glee, supported by the show’s first UK television advert spot when the episode broadcast here this month, doubled WICKED’s next-day sales. However "if there’s any one thing that really made the difference for WICKED, it’s been social media," McCabe says. "Facebook has been a phenomenon for us."
"We had this extraordinary outpouring of positive word-of-mouth, that would traditionally take weeks and months, happening in minutes. I think we were the first show to really use social media to our advantage. We had a show that appealed to the age group that was using social media and we were just beginning as the whole social networking thing exploded."
The London production has stoked this enthusiasm and sense of ownership by actively engaging with its fans online and supplying them with regular exclusive videos, diaries and clips from backstage, demolishing the fourth wall between performers and audience. That translates into a show that has shifted the lion’s share of 2,292 seats eight times a week for three and a half years, with no sign of slowing down.
Ben Hoyle, 26 March 2010 for
