Wicked

No, I have not worked on my writing. And, yes, I am writing a blog. I have to. My husband and I watched the musical Wicked last night, and I have such a mixed response to it, I had to write to make any sense of it.

First, let me qualify my response. I have read the book Wicked, and it was terrible. Despite how poorly it was written, how boring, and how meaningless the whole thing was, I still did read it through to the end, and when the end of the novel occurred, I felt like I had completely wasted my time (and a lot of it, since it took a long time to read). Naturally, I was not certain the musical would be any better, but I'd heard good things, so my hubby and I thought we'd try it (buying the cheapest seats for the production, so we wouldn't be too disappointed). 

The good news? The musical retained few elements of the novel--very few--and invented all sorts of other elements, including changing relationships, changing the ending completely, and taking all sorts of other liberties with it. The characters were infinitely more likable and accessible, and they were funnier (which wouldn't have been hard, since the characters weren't the slightest bit funny in the novel). In fact, Glinda the Good Witch was pretty hilarious and stole the show from Elpheba (The Wicked Witch of the West) pretty handily.

The bad news? Well, it wasn't a very good musical. The music was pretty forgettable (I'd seen the most dramatic part of it on the Tony Awards, but I'd forgotten it completely). Plot lines were slim, and the ending was ridiculous.

Even worse, were I the novelist who penned the original novel, I would have run out of there screaming, and I would likely be in jail for killing the first person I saw. I imagined one of my own novels being turned into utter drivel, and the prospect of it made me cringe. Right now I am still cringing.

What's oddest about this is that I hated the novel--it might be one of the worst novels I've read in years--but I am still defensive about the idea of someone's work being mauled to death for the sake of a musical format. I can only compare it to the travesty that is Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. What Disney execs were thinking when they took the most depressing novel ever (and one I personally love) and turned it into a children's cartoon will be forever a mystery. 

And so will Wicked, I'm afraid. Still, it was fascinating to watch and analyze, from the perspective of both a novelist and a playwright. 

Rather like a train wreck would be fascinating to a railroad engineer.

A Lame Spin on Pride and Prejudice

Don't get your hopes up... I'm not quite human yet. My son went through a hard day yesterday, too, where he did little beyond lie on me and drink water (slowly). Scared me a bit, but I still haven't gotten my appetite back, so I figure he's just fighting what's been attacking me for the last week. 

I said I'd blog on Fairest, but I'm not going to, not yet, anyway. I finally watched the film version of Pride and Prejudice--the Hollywood film--and I was so utterly unimpressed with it I'm not sure what to say. Perhaps it points to what I think makes most pseudo-epic Hollywood films fail miserably: cinematography and soundtrack replace a good script.

You might assume I am a purist, and to a degree you might be right, for I love a good script, love a good story, and love dialogue more than most... but I don't need for everything to reflect a book entirely, or the recent miniseries of Lost in Austen would have been unwatchable. But Lost in Austen, for all the liberties it took with Austen's original, used the original in such a fabulous, engaging, and humorous way that it taught viewers about the characters, paid its homage to a wonderful novel, and reflected the truth of the original, linking it to today's world in a refreshing way. (Can you tell I liked it? I almost sent $80 to the local PBS station so I could get the DVD of the 3-hour series). 

But the film with Keira Knightley did little to reveal any of the characters from the book. Honestly, I blame the director. Some of the actors were completely miscast, or were directed to play people who simply did not exist in the book at all. Bingley was an idiot, simpering, stupid, pathetic in his lack of backbone. Mr. Collins bore absolutely no resemblance to the novel's character at all. He was bland, bland, bland, when he should have been pompous, oily, and smarmy. He should have made us squirm. And Mr. Darcy was neither handsome nor regal... and though Colin Firth was brilliant in the role (and most men would fall by comparison), he cannot be the only capable male actor with a decent face out there. 

Most of all, though, I sensed that the director wanted to make Pride and Prejudice better. But Joe Wright didn't get it (and I must say that most men don't). He neither understood Darcy nor Elizabeth, nor any of the rest, and in the end he created a world as stilted as the entire second Star Wars trilogy. Had I not seen other versions recently, I might wonder what I ever saw in that book at all. Really terrible. Almost as bad as the local theatre company's versions of Shakespeare's plays (I need to blog about that soon). 

I think I'll go back over my DVR and watch the Lost in Austen series again, if only to get the yucky taste out of my brain. Were I Jane Austen, I fear I would have rolled over in my grave from Joe Wright's version. One should understand a work thorough before trying to take liberties with it.