Edition: U.S. / Global

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Yellow Brick Road Leads Show Tunes Down a New Path

Published: May 28, 2004

THIS is the year when the popular art form most likely to leave you light-headed and foolishly happy -- the Broadway musical -- flew over the rainbow to visit the Land of Oz. But that enchanted haven dreamt of once in a lullaby isn't what it used to be. Nor do the clever but overblown songs in ''Wicked,'' the hit show bearing that message, stack up as classic show tunes.

In ''Wicked,'' adapted from Gregory Maguire's revisionist riff on L. Frank Baum's ''Wizard of Oz,'' the land of Munchkins and happy little bluebirds is well on its way to becoming a smug, repressive Evil Empire. The songs by Stephen Schwartz are clangorous, strutting, electronically textured pop numbers trumpeting whimsically subversive lyrics.

Those lyrics, the best of which read like sassy light verse, are much clearer when heard on the show's original cast album than in the theater. The recording illustrates how the balance of elements in a show inevitably changes when you listen to the music without the distractions of production, choreography and the physical electricity of a star turn.

Because a recording is in some ways the final word on a show, it casts a longer shadow than lingering word of mouth. If the albums of ''Wicked, ''Avenue Q'' and ''Taboo,'' three of the four shows with Tony nominations for best score, fall short of classic status, they show the once-polite language of theater songs absorbing the slang and attitudes that have long been a hallmark of pop. The delayed recordings of ''Caroline, or Change'' (the fourth nominee for best score, arriving in late June) and of the acclaimed revival of ''Assassins'' (due in late July) suggest the financial risks of recording a cast album. The payoff, if there is one, comes only over time. In both cases, several record companies balked at the expense.

''Wicked,'' which has won 10 Tony nominations, finds good and evil reversed. Glinda the Good is a ruthless alpha girl, embodied by Kristin Chenoweth as the queen of spiteful, popularity-obsessed perk. Her nemesis, Elphaba (Idina Menzel), the Wicked Witch of the West, is an idealistic do-gooder and social pariah with a scary green complexion, who is fanatically intent on liberating Oz's caged animals.

But a common theme that runs through Baum's and Mr. Maguire's mirror images of Oz is seeing through sham. The Wizard, played by Joel Grey, is an affably smooth-talking dumbbell and professed sentimentalist who admits in the song ''Wonderful'' that he's ''a corn-fed hick,'' ''one of your dime-a-dozen mediocrities.'' But he's also addicted to power and not about to give it up.

The show is much smarter than it lets on. The more you study ''Wicked,'' especially Mr. Schwartz's barbed song lyrics, the more the place resembles 21st-century America clenched in post-9/11 apprehension.

The concept of Oz could stand as a metaphor for the musical comedy form itself, tripping uncertainly down the nearly gridlocked Yellow Brick Road of pop culture in search of its future. For the fresh-faced hopefuls who troop to New York each year with footlights in their eyes, of course, Midtown Manhattan will always exert an Emerald City-type magnetic pull.

But for the tourists who throng through the theater district each night, the principal lure is what Ed Sullivan used to call ''a really big shew.'' For younger audiences that would be a more sophisticated New York-style answer to a Las Vegas extravaganza, created for audiences weaned on pop and rock flash. Conditioned by the disco, the mosh pit and the karaoke bar, they expect a deeper sense of participation in the entertainment they're consuming.

The desire for familiarity, for hit songs or pseudo-hit songs, can override narrative coherence without anyone's caring very much. It helps account for the popularity of a show like ''The Boy From Oz'' (or ''Mamma Mia!'' or ''Movin' Out'') in which a story is fashioned around pre-existing songs, although ''The Boy From Oz'' does a better job than most at fitting Peter Allen's often vague, moony sentiments to specific situations.

''The Boy From Oz,'' Allen's biography, also trades directly on the Oz mystique. It tells how none other than Judy Garland, the movie's original Dorothy, discovered Allen, an Australian, and brought him to New York, where he married Liza Minnelli and realized his dream of kicking it up with the Rockettes onstage at the Radio City Music Hall.

In more ways than one ''The Boy From Oz'' is a posthumous dream come true. Onstage, its phenomenal Australian star, Hugh Jackman, is an ur-Peter Allen, better looking, a better dancer, with more charisma, who replicates Allen's shimmying body language with a more forceful zest than the original ever exhibited. While not a critical hit or a box-office blockbuster, ''The Boy From Oz'' is itself at least more successful than Allen's one shot at a Broadway show, the disastrous ''Legs Diamond.'' And like so many shows these days in the age of the superstar, it is celebrity driven. Its fate after Mr. Jackman exits in September is anybody's guess.

Galaxy of Stars