DIRECTOR Julie Black was nervous when she cast the two witches who are the central characters in Wicked because their ever-changing relationship must keep the audience enthralled.
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She was relieved when subsequently talking to the pair to find that they are best friends and are used to working together. That has been evident in the rehearsals, and it came across when Metropolitan Players launched its season of the show this week at the Civic Theatre, where it will run from August 24 to September 3.
Rachel Davies, as sedate witch Elphaba, and Tayla Choice, as the glamorous Glinda, delivered the duet What is This Feeling, followed by solos.
Metropolitan Players, which has developed a reputation as an amateur company that can give musicals a professional look and sound, is the first NSW non-profit company to be given the staging rights for Wicked.
The musical looks at the backgrounds of two of the witches in the book and film, The Wizard of Oz.
It has been the biggest global musical theatre hit in the past 13 years, with a toe-tapping collection of songs by composer Stephen Schwartz.
The Broadway premiere production opened in October, 2003, and is still running, and a London production has been playing since 2006. The Australian professional production toured for three years after opening in Melbourne in 2008 and was seen by more than 1.3 million people.
It subsequently toured to Asia and New Zealand before folding in 2014. Wicked shows how Elphaba, a quiet girl born with green skin, and Glinda, a glamorous party girl, who shared a room at a university in Oz, developed respectively into the Wicked Witch of the West and good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz.
That story’s Dorothy is seen as a shadowy figure in the tale’s second half after her family’s house lands in Oz.
