#but glinda and elphaba cannot stay separated

[wickedlyqueer]

If you could see one thing turned into a musical (e.g. book, film, history etc.) what would it be?

Okay so this ask has been sitting in my inbox for a good couple a days now, and it’s one of the most fun asks I’ve ever gotten. I’ve looked through my letterboxd for films, got my reading list by my side, and I’m a history nerd so I’m settled there. Andddd I came up empty..

It’s bumming me out! I wish I had a super cool answer for you anon, but I don’t. Musical theatre is it’s own kind of beast which is wonderful but also means it’s very separate from different media.

So to not make this great ask go completely to waste, I’ll just name a few things I think are awesome & unique about musicals and will never get enough of seeing and would totally explore if I would ever work on a play / musical:

1. Musicals are by definition weird. Nobody in the ‘real’ world sings and dance their feels away with an ensemble backing them up. And while this is usually a criticism of musicals, I think it’s fantastic! This is ground for absurd storytelling. TV and film as a platform begs for more realism (which is kind of an amazing contrast, because with todays CGI you’d think it be the opposite) 

So what I mean by that is that even though in movies they might fight giant CGI monsters, we as an audience - generally speaking - expect a certain realism, because we don’t buy it otherwise. Film is cut ‘linear’ which I’ll come back to soon.

Meanwhile, musicals can’t have huge CGI monsters and have to convey a concept or set with just a few props. But that leaves room in which we are willing to accept more because it all happens in one confined space. Can you even imagine the following *movie* pitch:

“Ok so. Founding Forefathers. Rapping.”“Uhmmmm but - nobody rapped back then??”“But we do now. Also no wigs. wigs are dumb. only natural hair pls”“WAIT WHAT!? BUT THEY WORE WIGS BACK THEN MIRANDA!!!”“fuck wigs. fuck realism. oh and all actors have to be people of colour :D”

Honestly, Hollywood wouldn’t be able to sleep for months. This is why I’m super curious how they’re going to tackle Defying Gravity in the Wicked movie. On stage having someone fly and belt high notes? That’s awesome! On a screen it’s kinda... “so this chick is like.. hovering over the Wizard’s Palace..bc she needs to finish the song? What a dramatic fucker???” 

2. Theatre means repetition. It’s one of the main differences that sets it apart from other media. Yes, I can watch a movie or read a book multiple times, but nothing will change, but me. The words on the page stay the same. The images I see on screen I have always seen before.

NOT IN THEATRE! It’s always alive and breathing. It’s the same story, yet I will never see the same story twice. It’s always slightly different. Different line readings, different dynamics, different casts. and I cannot understand why Broadway doesn’t exploit the shit out of that!

Why aren’t their live (audio) recordings of at the very least the songs whenever there are different casts? Can’t they see there will be a huge market for that? Especially in this day and age where you literally can keep your phone in your pocket and record the entire show with decent enough audio quality. I’d still pay a few bucks for a well-mixed audio from different casts just to collect them all. (the dutch revival of the Lion King had a live recording of one of their shows. and I normally hate the dutch translations of songs. but dear GOD the energy in those performances are fan-fucking-tastic that studio albums could only dream off. and guess what? I bought that live recording. What A Concept).

3. The overlap of time/space. So this concept of time/space I’ve kind of borrowed from cartoons where you have something similar. I said earlier that film is linear. What I mean by that is that every cut is followed by another one, kind of like a necklace made of beads: every image is its own and only together in a certain order they make a story.

In theatre, this is a lot more dynamic. For example in Fun Home you can have college-Alison be super excited to have sex for the first time, and simultaneously have adult-Alison walk past that and shudder “ughhhh so embarrassing” and it working! 

A moment like that wouldn’t work the same way on screen. You’d have to have adult-Alison read college-Alison her college diary where she mentions having sex for the first time, and at the memory, Alison shudders with embarrassment. But you can’t have a room in which college-Alison has sex and then adult-Alison be in that same room at the same time. Even if adult-Alison would visit it as a memory, having her in the same space with her past self is really fucking weird. 

So time and space clashes together in theatre, and I find it one of the most fascinating things about theatre. In Wicked you even got three timelines in No One Mourns the Wicked! The present, when Elphaba gets conceived/born, and then, we go to the time when Elphaba and Glinda went to college. (also nerding out moment about how the set up of the bottle works both in the in-universe timeline as well as the story we follow as the audience).

I might have some concepts wrong because I’m very enthusiastic about this and want to talk about everything and might confuse things in the process bUT YOO!!! Theatre is so frigging interesting!! :D