Things in Print Thursday :: Gregory Maguire’s rabbit hole

So I never read anything about suicide in September, and I didn’t read anything about domestic violence in October. I will own up to this. What I learned from looking at Goodreads lists is that most of the books that are fictional and about protagonists that are not white cis men that are about both of these subjects… just seemed too depressing for me or are either thrillers, which don’t usually interest me, or are heterosexual romances, which don’t usually interest me. Or I’ve read them before, like Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina. I’ve been busy, because Halloween preparations and all that (I’ll show y’all pictures soon), but I’ve done plenty of reading that’s not as per my assigned list.

Imagine my delight when I discovered a new Gregory Maguire. After Alice, this one is, and as with his others it’s a riff on a classic fantasy world, this one Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The perspective is not, in keeping with said others, that of an antagonist-turned-protagonist (or at least given three dimensions), but instead (after my own heart) that of a random who was mentioned once in the original, Alice’s friend Ada.

In contrast to the classically winsome, perpetually curious Alice, Ada is practical and ungainly, hampered by various infirmities and a decidedly less creative mind, yet she goes looking for Alice in the “real world” and stumbles into Wonderland all the same. Meanwhile, others in said “real world” are also searching and reacting, including members of both girls’ families and, on the periphery, Charles Darwin.

Yes, Charles Darwin.

One of the conceits of the book – I use the word conceit in the least derisive way possible, mind – is attempts to reconcile the fantastical with the practical and even scientific. Alice’s mother has died recently, leaving an imbalance in that household; Ada’s has recently borne another son, to similarly disorienting effect. (I will confess that I frequently lost track of whose adults were whose, as the narrative traveled back and forth and also the grown-ups were Mr. and Mrs. and Miss and so-on instead of first names; this is not a failing of the story so much as of my own concentration, but there you have it.) Alice’s sister Lydia is petulant; Ada’s governess Miss Armstrong is stubborn. Victorian social mores abound, but with them come rational concerns, reminders of real-world events (the abolitionist movement in America, for example), tangents on spirituality and logic.

It’s sort of hard to explain, honestly.

That’s not a dismissal of the book! Just… you’ll know within about a chapter whether this is a book for you. It’s got all sorts of clever wordplay, all sorts of social commentary, cutting observations cloaked with innocent perspectives. There are wild Wonderland creatures and adventures. But while I enjoyed myself, I won’t presume that you might do the same.

–your fangirl heroine.

Theatre / Things in Print Thursday :: 5 musicals based on works of literature

I thought of a few of these on my head and went looking for a Wikipedia list to round it out.  And then I remembered there are actually a lot of these.  Musical theatre, even more than film and television, tends to be like a giant fanfiction, a collection of riffs on a particular preexisting theme.  Nowadays the thing is to turn movies, originally musical or not, into stage musicals; I don’t inherently dislike this practice, good things can come of it, but some sort of silly things can come of it too.  And silly isn’t bad.  Silly is fine sometimes.  Sometimes it’s not to my tastes personally, but it could be to someone else’s.  Still, though, there’s a reason I freak out over truly original musicals: there really aren’t that many.

So tonight, I begin to discuss musicals based on the written word.  In high school, when I fell in love with a musical and it was based in something written, I immediately set about acquiring the written, so I’m going to limit this list tonight to ones I have standing knowledge of.  And most likely have personal experiences with.

5, 4.  The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March (musicals by Michael John LaChiusa and by Andrew Lippa)
I’ve discussed my Wild Party thing at length before, but not in these terms necessarily.  I first got the Lippa album sophomore year because it had Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs on it, and I had been in a Rent phase for a year or more already.  I’d decided I absolutely needed to acquire every obscure theatre album I could, and I’d heard “The Juggernaut” on Sirius satellite radio and swooned deeply.  As I’ve before said, I fell in love with it; I then proceeded to check the poem out from the library.  For my birthday that year, a dear friend of mine found the poem on the internet and purchased me my own copy, and because sophomore year was the year I routinely memorized things for fun (I wasn’t in any productions until the spring and didn’t yet have extraneous responsibilities to my school paper or a membership on the mock trial team, I needed a hobby) I spent a disproportionate amount of my spare time memorizing parts of the poem.  It’s a long poem, the length of a small book, and the parts I did commit to memory were easily done; though all that remains is the couplet “the only one not on hand was Kate / she was Queenie’s red-headed running mate,” I did at one point have multiple limerick-type sections as well as the entire page and a half devoted to Kate’s entrance memorized.  As I’ve said, the LaChiusa recording (which I got a few months later) is closer to the poem, dealing more with characters, though both have a reasonable amount of extrapolation.  I can’t say how much this affects the plot, having not actually seen the show, but this also may have been my first successful attempt at appreciating source material and adaptation equally on different levels.

3. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber)
The movie, as I’ve said, came out when I was a freshman in high school; I got my hands on the book a few months later.  The above-mentioned friend and I read it around the same time and proceeded to be insufferable know-it-alls about it amongst our friends (we were those kinds of people, though harmlessly).  Differences in plot were discussed frequently and with anyone (amongst our friends) who would listen; we regularly made reference to obscure details that weren’t in the musical, and though I’m not exactly proud of this, in more than one frustrating social situation did we turn to each other and then proclaim for the benefit of the others in earshot, “did you know that in the book of Phantom Christine tries to harm herself by repeatedly banging her head against a wall?” and then approximating said action ourselves.  We and our social group as a whole were obsessed with Phantom, though the musical was always second (the book was darker, we liked darker), and I also committed to memory the phrase “il est ici, le fantôme de l’opéra!”  (I spoke no proper French at the time, but I internet-translated that and liked to exclaim it at regular intervals.)

2. The Light in the Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer (musical by Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel)
Of all of these discussed tonight, this is the adaptation that would seem to be the closest.  It’s a novella, so there was no need to condense plot or any such, really; it’s been years since I read it, so I don’t remember every detail.  But Wikipedia just pointed out something to me, something that of course I knew, but I hadn’t really thought of in these terms: “it is also perhaps the only bilingual Broadway musical.  Many of the lyrics are in Italian or broken English, as many of the characters are fluent only in Italian.”  I think that, regardless of source material, this is one of the reasons the show is so special: it’s genuine.  This show makes me feel quite a lot of feelings, as it were; I have never cried at it, but I’ve gotten fairly close to choked up, for sure.  I remember the book being similarly affecting, so that’s something.

1. Wicked by Gregory Maguire (musical by Stephen Schwartz)
As I before discussed.

–your fangirl heroine.

Things in Print Thursday :: me and Gregory Maguire’s Oz

Freshman year of high school, I got the Wicked cast album for my birthday.  I also got book money, and because this was back in the day, I went to the Borders in my local mall and picked up the book of Wicked that weekend.  So my order of exposure was album, book, actual show.  I liked the music a whole hell of a lot, I still do, but I am sometimes a spectacular cynic and also I just loved the book because it was dark and sort of screwed up, so the way the show’s plot goes still makes me a little cranky sometimes.  Feelsy, but cranky.

I should clarify, too, that I have pretty much always hated The Wizard of Oz.  I owned an old VHS of it when I was a kid, but I’m pretty sure it was a gift, and I really don’t care.  I always sort of despised Dorothy, and I just didn’t give a damn about anyone else, really.  I had a very difficult time connecting to male characters when I was a child, shock though that may be, so if I didn’t like the female characters, I had a hard time caring at all.  Glinda was pouffy and pink, so that was cool when I was six, but she was kind of chipper and flat; now I look back and she is absolutely not a good person at all in the original.  And the Witch was just cackly and flat, because movies back them were very cut and dry This Is The Bad Person, They Will Have No Redeeming Qualities.  So that wasn’t going to happen.

Wicked was somewhat of a revelation for me: the way that Gregory Maguire wrote the Witch, wrote Elphaba, made me sort of adore her.  Not necessarily in the pure, unadulterated, I-am-there-with-you-forever way that I fall for some fictional characters, but definitely in a pretty serious way.  This was a character who was complex, screwed up, intricate, intelligent, screwed up (twice for good measure).  I didn’t hate G(a)linda either.  I sort of pitied Nessarose at first, then I hated her a little, but for valid reasons, which just completely stinks, because I happened to think (and still somewhat do) that Nessarose is a ridiculously beautiful name, but I can’t name things after people I hate.

Some of my friends borrowed it, borrowed the album; I have mentioned before that Wicked was sort of a thing for us in the high school years, yes.  (Some preferred the stage version, some preferred the book.  All of us indulged in both.)  I may or may not have a terrible tiny camcordered tape of a friend and I, me in black, her in pink, waving frilly pens at each other and lip syncing various of the songs.  We were like that.  My mom read the entire book one Thanksgiving weekend while my friends and I decorated the Christmas tree, eyes wide as she turned pages compulsively; these books have always been an “us” thing, too.

I’m glad I didn’t have to wait so very many years for Son of a Witch; anyone who read Wicked when it was first published would have had to, but me being the late bloomer I was, I had it pretty easy.  I didn’t really have a whole lot of feelings feelings about the book, though I found it interesting; I continue to love that Liir was written bisexual, I thought it was an adventure of a read, I still remember lending it to my mother when I was done and watching her sit there reading the ending and getting to the last page and just crying her eyes out.  (My mother can actually cry at fiction, which I envy sometimes.)

I had even fewer actual feelings about A Lion Among Men, though I found it interesting enough too, but then we heard tell of the release of the fourth book in the series, Out of Oz.  Allegedly it’s the last of them, which I understand; Gregory Maguire’s Oz is ridiculously expansive, politically intriguing, but I think it’s wrapped up neatly enough with this book.

This one follows the adventures of Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, daughter of Liir and Candle; there are still a few pretty significant questions I have about certain things, some of them involving Glinda, some of them involving Rain herself, but it was a very proper conclusion.  I have never really been one of the shippers of Elphaba/Glinda, but I had a few inklings of it here, and also… things I won’t say for spoilers, but yes, Gregory Maguire and gender, sometimes I do greatly approve.  I love that the Dorothy of Maguire’s Oz just walks around singing and everyone goes “whaaat?”

I can’t actually say too much about the plot of Out of Oz without being a spoilery deathfest.  Even saying the word deathfest is maybe too spoilery, but I really would recommend it.  I think it’s my second-favorite of the series, favorite of the sequels, and it’s fascinating to say the least.  A very good end to a significant chapter of my literary life.

–your fangirl heroine.