"Wicked" defies gravity.

 

Stolen from https://www.brit.co/wicked-movie/

I realize I'm about a million years late to the party -- the movie version of Wicked has been out in theaters since Thanksgiving weekend -- but my bottom line still holds: If you haven't seen it already, you should.

It's still playing in theaters, but I chose to pony up $20 to see it on my TV at home. It was definitely worth the cost. 

The story, in one form or another, has been with me for most of my life. When I was a kid, I watched the original movie, The Wizard of Oz, every year when it ran on TV. I also read L. Frank Baum's novel that started everything off (plus a couple of the sequels). Pretty sure I saw The Wiz at some point, too.

Then Gregory Maguire's version of the Wicked Witch's story was published in 1995, and turned the whole thing on its head. One of my daughters read the novel first, then loaned it to me. After decades of rooting for Dorothy, reading the ending of that book seriously messed with my head.

We saw a touring production of Wicked the musical at the Kennedy Center in 2011. So of course I wanted to watch the screen version to see if it matched up. It did not disappoint. Cynthia Erivo is terrific as Elphaba, and Ariana Grande is perfect as Galinda/Glinda. Michelle Yeoh seems to be everywhere these days (Star Trek: Section 31 starts in just a couple of weeks), and she is as wonderful as always as Madame Morrible, both before and after her true nature is revealed. Jeff Goldblum is sorta typecast as the Wizard. Jonathan Bailey does a great job as Fiyero, the bad boy who turns the heads of both Glinda and Elphaba. (I couldn't remember where I'd seen him before; it turns out he plays Anthony on Bridgerton.) 

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the movie has whizbang special effects -- much more so, of course, than the stage version, where Elphaba just flying, live on stage, was impressive. 

Speaking of the casting, there have been some complaints among certain factions, particularly in regard to Erivo as Elphaba -- because Erivo is Black, and there has been no effort to make her appear less so. I think it's important to note that "woke" casting goes way back for this show; the original scriptwriters were Jewish, and Idina Menzel, who is also Jewish, originated the role of Elphaba on Broadway. Elphaba's whole thing is not just her magical ability, but that she's green. She's clearly used to getting a lot of flak for her skin color, and it seems like it would be a no-brainer to cast someone in the role who has lived experience as an "other" throughout her life. Plus Erivo does a great job in the role. So, y'know, whatever.

Grande has also been the target of criticism for being cast as Glinda, but she's not just a pop singer -- she got her start on Broadway.

I'm a bit bummed that the movie only covers the first part of Elphaba's story, although it shouldn't have been unexpected; it seems like Hollywood has lost the ability to wrap up a story in under two hours.  But I get that "Defying Gravity" was written to send the theater audience to intermission on a high, and it would be asking a lot of a movie audience to just pivot to the next scene without some time to catch a breath.

I'll be interested to see how they handle the second half of the story. The material is a lot darker than in the first half; the ending should be absolutely wrenching. I can't help but think of a comment I overheard from someone leaving the movie version of Into the Woods: "They should have stopped it at intermission," or words to that effect. Guaranteed there will be viewers of Wicked: For Good who will feel the same way. Here's hoping they take time to read the book between now and November, so they have some sense of whether to see it at all.

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I may be taking some time off from blogging here shortly. I'm heading into the busy season at work -- the state legislature starts a 60-day session January 21, and we're gearing up for it now. On top of that, I've signed myself up for two online classes. One is a five-session class on the Celtic god Cernunnos offered by John Beckett and Jason Mankey, which starts the week after next. The other one is a seven-week course in beginning Irish that starts next Sunday. Yeah, I'm gonna try learning that blasted language again. I won a contest for a free course from Let's Learn Irish, and I could hardly turn it down. 

Anyway, the point being that it's gonna be a busy winter here at La Casa Cantwell. Something may have to give. If blogging ends up being that something, I'll try to let you know in advance.

I may go mad by mid February. But I might come out the other side with some ideas for another book. Weirder things have happened.

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These moments of musical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Why I'm learning Irish.

"City Wall" in English and Irish, Kilkenny | Copyright Lynne Cantwell

I ran into our Irish instructor on the Metro a few weeks ago. I'd mentioned during the class that I'd studied Czech (more on how it came up below). So when he asked me on the train why I was learning Irish, I said, "Well, I've already studied one useless language, so..."

I was joking, mostly. Czech is a living language (although not for lack of invaders trying to kill it, first the Hapsburgs and later the Nazis), but as the Czech Republic isn't strategically important, studying the language is not likely to get you either a job with the CIA or a promotion at work. But still, about 10.5 million Czechs speak it every day.

Irish, too, is a living language (although not for lack of the English trying to kill it), but the number of those who speak it daily is much smaller -- about 74,000 people, according to Ireland's 2016 census -- and shrinking. Irish children are required to learn the language in school, but most adults say they haven't retained much.

So why am I bothering with these weird languages? The short answer is that it's part of my heritage. My mother's side of the family is all Czech, and a chunk of my father's side is Irish. But there's also the challenge of gaining insights into how people in other countries think, and grammar is one way to do that. No, really. In Czech, for example, you don't say something happens on Tuesday, you say it happens in Tuesday. It's kind of a neat concept, don't you think? Here's Tuesday's bucket, and you put the things that are happening that day inside of it.

It's also fun to see how language has changed over the centuries. All of the languages I speak or have studied -- English, Spanish, Czech, and Irish -- have a common proto-Indo-European root. (In fact, there are only a handful of languages spoken in Europe that aren't Indo-European in origin, Turkish and Finnish being among them.) So some really old words are at least a little similar. The word mother, for instance, is madre (pronounced MAH-dreh) in Spanish, matka (MAHT-kah) in Czech, and máthair (MAW-hirz) in Irish.

Did you notice how the Irish snuck in that z sound after the r? Irish, I'm learning, has two ways to pronounce nearly every consonant: broad and slender. In English, we do this with only a couple of consonants, particularly g (discuss: is gif pronounced with a hard or soft g?), but the Irish go whole hog. And the way you tell whether a particular consonant is broad or slender in Irish is by the vowel next to it.

So the i in máthair is silent -- it's there only to tell you that the r is slender. A slender r sounds kind of like rz in English, and similar to my old Czech friend ř -- r with a caron on top -- except Czech rolls its rs the way Spanish does, and Irish doesn't at all (which is going to take some getting used to).

Anyhow, it was the slender r discussion in which I brought up Czech. Another way Czech and Irish are similar is that nouns are declined in both -- that is, like in Latin, each noun changes in form, depending on what it's doing in the sentence. Irish only has two cases, though, whereas Czech has something like seven. And Irish has only two cases for nouns -- masculine and feminine -- while Czech has three. So Irish should be easier for me, right? Right. Other than all those extra vowels.

I've heard it said on separate occasions that the hardest language for English speakers to learn is either Czech or Irish. Gee, thanks, Mom and Dad.

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These moments of linguistic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.