About the author:
He’s a familiar face from TV’s Married With Children, and theater fans know him from musicals such as Titanic, Bells Are Ringing and his Tony-nominated performance in A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. Now the multi-talented David Garrison is back on Broadway as the Wizard in the smash hit musical Wicked, after an extended run in the show’s national tour. Garrison’s nightly trek to Oz has inspired a few musings on whether he’s playing a good Wiz or a bad Wiz—and how his character seems strangely similar to another leader we all know.
On July 4, as we took note of our country’s 230th year, I couldn’t help but wonder how we seem, in a relatively short period of time, to have morphed from a nation having “nothing to fear but fear itself” to one so constantly preoccupied with fear—politically, spiritually and commercially. Remember the run on duct tape at your local hardware store? We’re told to fear the liberal Left, the radical Right. We live in gated communities. We worry about aliens, and terrorists, and mad cow disease in our burgers. We could stand to worry a bit more about glaciers thawing and polar ice caps melting, but that’s a different story. Shakespeare reminds us that our job in the theater is to “hold as t’were the mirror up to nature.” One of the many reasons I’m proud to be part of Wicked is that the show tells the story of what can happen to a society seduced by fear. As the Wizard says: “Where I come from, everybody knows the best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.”
Ring any bells?
I recently played my 500th performance as the Wizard, so I’m getting to know the guy quite well. It seems to me that he’s a decent enough fellow, of limited ability and considerable charm, who one day found himself in a position of great power and prestige, and who then realized that the only way to hold on to that power was to promote the politics of fear. Actually, he employed a Machiavellian accomplice who came up with the idea. And, well, things in Oz were never the same thereafter.
Does any of this seem vaguely familiar?
The Wizard is what they call in Texas a post turtle a turtle balanced on top of a fence post. As the old joke goes: He didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor, stupid bastard get down.
Now, Wicked is more than just politics. It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s a buddy story. It’s a love story. It’s a parable about prejudice. And it’s very, very green. But the politics are there, served up in a spectacular soufflé of song and style, which hopefully makes the dish a bit tastier. When the national tour played Houston last year, George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush were in the audience one night. They visited backstage at intermission. Both were very gracious and, I later learned, not only stayed in the theater for our curtain calls rare, indeed, for folks wrangled by the Secret Service, but also told house management that it was the best show they had ever seen. During our visit, Mrs. Bush remarked to me that she wasn’t quite sure whether the Wizard was a good guy or a bad guy. By the look in her eyes, I’m pretty certain she got the point.
Theater at its best reminds us of how much more alike than different we are. And since Wicked continues to be standing-room-only in both “red” states and “blue” states, and folks from both—and beyond—continue to pack the Gershwin for each of our performances on Broadway, I keep hoping that come future Independence Day celebrations, perhaps everybody’s political color of choice will be, well, green.
