Not easy bein' green

When theater critic and comic writer Robert Benchley—one of the walking-wounded survivors of the Algonquin Round Table—was still compiling the weekly theater listings at Life magazine, he was annoyed by a play called Abie’s Irish Rose. An amiable, long-running comedy generally enjoyed by everyone except critics, its seemingly endless run meant the play was listed in perpetuity and, in the style of the time (a custom thankfully no longer the norm), a new creative listing was required each week.

Exasperated to revisit Abie and its popularity each week, Benchley eventually leaned on the mantel of sarcasm. The general tone of his brief weekly assessment was usually something like “No worse than a bad cold” or “We understand a modern-dress version of the production is now under way.” But the jewel in his crown was probably the week the listing simply read, “Hebrews 8:13.”

Curious Biblephiles were directed to the New Testament to read Benchley’s exact sentiments: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever.”

Anyone who compiles theater listings knows all too well the kind of curmudgeonly contempt familiarity with long-running shows can breed, and no Chicago show ever bred as much as Wicked. The Wizard of Oz prequel, which plays its final performance at the Oriental Theatre next weekend, generally garnered two kinds of public reactions: enthusiasm over the project’s unprecedented open-run engineering and financial success, and occasional disgruntlement over the show’s lack of creative ambition and big-muscle commercial business tactics in a town previously known mostly for its nonprofit live arts.

Most of what we heard about it came in the form of Broadway in Chicago’s regularly telegraphed smoke signals about the box-office receipts. (The regular feed of the show’s media releases eventually took on the cadence of a Twitter stream: Wicked has a new block of tickets on sale. Wicked grossed $1.5 million last week. Wicked is still on the fence about Mad Men season two. Wicked is excited about cookies.) This was countered in the blogosphere by angry vigilante posts taking digs at the show’s imperial residency. In between, though, there were two key Wicked stories that went remarkably underreported and carry equal weight.

The first is that Wicked made millions of people happy. In an uncommon display of Midwestern showmanship, Broadway in Chicago partnered with New York producer David Stone to provide a musical that thrilled multiple generations. From a personal standpoint, the story of Glinda and Elphaba wasn’t up my alley, but it boasted the same things that a lot of my favorite shows, and most musicals in history, share: a couple of songs you can hum and the makings of a fun night out.

The second aspect of the Wicked experience that bears consideration is that adult civic conversation about the presence of the production in the city was almost entirely absent. As waves of Chicago’s nonprofit-theater scene were about to wash up against New York’s commercial shores, Gotham’s greenest theater enterprise flooded our valley, but to little intelligent acknowledgment.

Without journalists, Mayor Daley’s administrators or the artistic directors of Chicago’s nonprofits engaged in open debate about the role Wicked could have played beyond increasing hotel capacity, we flatly missed the opportunity to lead the 21st-century conversation about how the inevitable rise of pan-global pop theater can also pollinate the local arts scenes in the cities the new stadium musicals will inevitably occupy throughout the world. The forthcoming $686 million, 32-theater complex in Beijing, which Variety reported last week will host Western musicals, is only the beginning of an international producing model Chicago just test-marketed in miniature.

Sadly, when a tectonic shift in Chicago show biz occurred, the scene’s gatekeepers looked the other direction. By skirting a dialogue about the new creative business possibilities Wicked’s exceptional downtown run could have brought to the native theater culture—say, how some of the show’s profits could have fertilized a host of (relatively cheap) public art, all the while earning its producers priceless goodwill and good press for such local investment—those who foster the conversation about art in American life disavowed one of the basic tenets of pubescent parenting: We didn’t talk about the change.

Chicago was more than happy to paint itself green to accommodate Wicked because, to paraphrase the words and spirit of ’80s tycoon Gordon Gekko, green is good. If only Wicked had been the new kind of green—the 21st-century, environmentally conscious green—that makes new things grow.

Wicked closes January 25.