Wicked

Lately I've been to Jerusalem with Edith, The Real Thing with Edith, Wicked with Aggie.
Tickets booked for Penn and Teller - whole family, Proms - a whole weekend Prom Pass, and applied for tickets to WOS for All My Sons.
Wicked was quite an experience as I am not used to going out with Aggie on my own. She is such great company and I am not surprised that she is so popular - she is so much fun to be with. We queued for 2 hours for £25 same-day tickets and were about 5th in the queue, having arrived at 8am. Sat right in the middle of the front row. A very good view of Lee Mead's tight-fitting riding breeches from my POV.
It is an amazing evening, the costumes alone would make the outing. The songs are memorable, I find myself humming a couple of them constantly, but there is a bit too much emotional belting. I thought the cast was pretty high calibre, though I realise I'm not much of a judge. The two leads were really impressive. Lee Mead hadn't been in the show long and it turns out he is not approved of by the hard core of completely obsessed Wicked fans. We sat next to a young woman who had been to see it 166 times, all over the world, but she declared she liked Lee Mead, and he was "a lovely person", so clearly the Wicked fans are not unanimous.
The story does not really quite make sense - especially the strange ending concerning the male love interest, Fiyero. I found this a bit disturbing. In order to save him from torture, Elphaba, the green girl who loves him, casts a spell which turns him into a scarecrow - so he can "feel no pain, his bones will never break, he will never die". A man of straw, a floppy man! It's so Freudian, even Freud would wriggle in his seat and feel it was a bit obvious. To protect her lover from this powerful woman effectively castrates him, emasculates him. Is this meant to be the inevitable fate of men who love strong women?
And anyway, in the movie I seem to remember the Witch set fire to the scarecrow at one point!
But besides that, the portrayal of girls jockeying for position at school rings extremely true for Aggie.