Good is still not as good as it looks, evil is not as wicked as it seems and the wizard isn’t nearly as wonderful as he appears as Wicked returns to Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, Wednesday-Oct. 6.
The 2nd National Tour’s first Little Rock run of the three-Tony Award-winning musical, Nov. 3-14, 2010, sold out.
Not quite a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked is set in the magical land a little before the action of the 1939 movie. Young Elphaba (Jennifer DiNoia), facing a lifetime of discrimination for her green skin, and pretty, popular, privileged, ambitious and slightly air-headed Galinda (Hayley Podschun) become unlikely friends until circumstances, a series of personal choices and bad public relations turn them, respectively, into the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good.
FIVE COMPANIES
DiNoia has played Elphaba on Broadway and in the Chicago, Sydney and Seoul, South Korea, sit-down companies. Podschun is playing Glinda for the first time on this tour. Opening night was April 3 in Rochester, N.Y.
They met for the first time last spring. Next spring, Podschun will be a bridesmaid at DiNoia’s wedding.
“We didn’t know each other at all, but I had heard good things about her,” Podschun says. “It’s so fun. We’re the bestest of friends.”
“She’s become such a great friend of mine,” DiNoia adds. “I’m getting married in April and she’s going to be one of my bridesmaids, which I am so happy about.”
DiNoia started out as the Elphaba standby (she went on when the “principal” Elphaba took a night off ) seven years ago in a Chicago company, then moved to Broadway. When the Australian company needed an Elphaba in a hurry, DiNoia was dispatched down under for a couple of months before returning to Broadway. She later joined that Aussie company when it moved to South Korea.
It’s a role lots of actresses covet, and DiNoia, who says she started in the business as a dancer who could sing, had wanted to play it from the very start.
“I first heard the cast recording when it came out in 2003,” she explains. “When I heard Idina [Menzel, Broadway’s original Elphaba], I thought, ‘My God, I have to play this role.’ And now I’m doing it. I’m living the dream of many people and I’m very aware of that.”
So now she’s a singer who can also dance?
“I focused more on my voice in the last five years than my dancing skills, because your breathing is so important in playing this role,” DiNoia explains, doubly important for a role where she has to belt out “Defying Gravity,” the show’s big hit, eight times a week.
Unlike some Elphabas, DiNoia doesn’t regularly turn over one show a week to her standby.
“For the most part, I do all eight all the time,” she says. “I take a show off when I feel tired; I have personal days built into my contract. But I try to push through.
“I find something new in the show every night. I’ve learned so much about Elphaba in the last seven years. I don’t think I could ever get tired of it.” On days when DiNoia is in a bad mood, “being onstage and doing this show takes me to another place, another world. It’s actually very therapeutic. Elphaba gets to go through so many emotional turns; it’s made me a stronger person in life.”
MAJOR OZ LINKS
Podschun has a long-standing family connection to the land of Oz. “I’m originally from Kansas, and it’s one of my mom’s favorite movies,” she says. “Our guest room, growing up, was filled with all of her Wizard of Oz memorabilia.
“I saw the original [Broadway] company in previews 10 years ago; I was on the front row. And as soon as I saw it, I said, ‘I have to play this role.’ I’ve been auditioning for Glinda, on and off, for six years. It was the right time for me to be doing it now and I’m really happy.”
Sometimes, however, Glinda is not quite as good as her sobriquet would suggest.
“She’s just a privileged girl and she’s never been told no,” Podschun says in defending her character. “She has her way of doing things, and when things don’t go her way, she may need a little bit of a lesson. From an audience perspective there are things that she might do that are not too kind, but in her way, that’s the correct way of doing things.”
Podschun came to Wicked almost directly after finishing a run on Broadway as Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin’s first wife, in the musical Chaplin.
“Musically it was the first time to show my soprano voice,” says Podschun, whose Broadway credits also include Anything Goes, Pal Joey, Sunday in the Park With George, Hairspray (she was also on the first national tour) and The Sound of Music.
“I didn’t sing that much; I did more scene work and a little bit of dancing with Rob McClure, who played Chaplin,” she says. “It was a really lovely experience for all of us. It was the first time I got to do a show from a workshop starting point to table reads to a presentation for producers, to more table reads, to then going to Broadway. To originate a role and then to do an original-cast recording was like a dream come true.”
Wicked
7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday and Oct. 1-4; 8 p.m. Friday and Oct. 4; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and Oct. 5; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sept. 29 and Oct. 6; special matinee 2 p.m. Thursday, Robinson Center Music Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock. Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Winnie Holzman, based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 best-seller Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Tickets: $43-$144; a day of-show lottery will be held for a limited number of $25 orchestra seats
(501) 244-8800; (800) 982-2787
ticketmaster.com/wicked
Style, Pages 51 on 09/22/2013