‘Wicked’ has been to Charlotte four times before. But this time will feel different.
In talking about the recent return of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” back on national tour for the first time since COVID struck, Talia Suskauer points to two examples of moments in the smash-hit show that resonate differently now.
The first, says Suskauer, who stars as the green-skinned witch Elphaba, comes right at the beginning, when co-star Allison Bailey (as Glinda) descends from the rafters in her bubble and says:
“It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”
“And the crowd’s just like, ‘Of course it is!’’ says Suskauer. She specifically recalls the tour’s Aug. 3 debut in Dallas, where the touring version of “Wicked” was re-launched — after nearly 17 months on the shelf — as the first touring Broadway production to be resurrected since the pandemic began. “After all of this time, people were waiting for her to say this line, and scream. The audience just responded to her. They were like, ‘YEEEEESSSSSS!’ It was incredible to hear.”
The second moment that strikes a new chord ... well, we’ll get to that one a bit later.
In the meantime, this weekend Suskauer and the rest of the cast and crew will wrap their run in Dallas and head just over a thousand miles east to Charlotte, where “Wicked” will set up camp at Ovens Auditorium starting Wednesday and continuing through Oct. 3. It will be the city’s largest theater event since March 2020, with tens of thousands expected to take in the show at the 2,400-seat venue over the course of the month-long engagement.
This will be the fifth time the national tour has come to Charlotte with “Wicked,” a revisionist tale that explains how Elphaba became “The Wizard of Oz’s” “Wicked Witch of the West” and a production that has been seen by more than 60 million people to the tune of $5 billion in box-office grosses.
But, in myriad ways, this time both the people who make the show happen and the people in the audience will experience it differently than ever before.
‘It started to just make me sad’
“Wicked” was in Madison, Wisc., two Marches ago when theaters across the country first went dark as COVID began to spread widely.
Suskauer flew straight home to Florida, her boyfriend left New York to join her, and her sister came back from college, too; they all moved into her parents’ house, and prepared to weather a quarantine they expected to last a few weeks to a month, maybe a couple months at most.
She tried to stay sharp, she says, by meeting with her voice teacher on Zoom once a week and by speaking through her lines and singing through various songs while playing a recording of the show as she sat in her car.
“Then as ... the light at the end of the tunnel grew very dim, and we really didn’t know when we were gonna come back, it started to just make me sad to do all of these things,” Suskauer says. “It felt like, Why am I doing this? Because if I’m not gonna come back for several months to a year, what’s the point?”
Suskauer had taken over the show’s starring role in September 2019, having realized her childhood dream of playing Elphaba.
“It was a terrible time, for everybody, for a million different reasons,” she says, “but there were times where I was sitting on my couch, you know, the same monotonous day that I had over and over and over again: get up, eat, sit on the couch, think about my life, watch TV, eat some more, go to bed. I would go, What I would do if I could even just do the show one more time. ...”
Finally, this year, hope started to return, as more and more Americans got the vaccine.
And over the course of the first half of 2021, the messaging in the Zoom meetings they’d been having periodically with the show’s producers went from “we just don’t know” to “it’s looking like it might be soon” to “we think that we are going to open in Dallas in August” to “it’s time.”
Getting everyone back together
In a reunion filled with emotions, the “Wicked” team converged on Texas in July, three weeks ahead of the opening, to shake the dust off the sets, the costumes and the characters.
“I was OK until I walked past a door that opened into the theater ... and it was the first time I had been in a theater and seen our set in over a year,” Suskauer says. “I just immediately started crying. ...
“Then I continued on and walked into the lobby and ... everyone was in their masks, everyone was distanced, and everyone was clapping and happy and so happy to see each other — and that was very emotional for me, because it reminds you how many people were affected by this. It wasn’t just the cast, it was the crew, it was the locals in every city that come and help us put on the show. So many people were affected by this shutdown.”
But joy and gratitude weren’t the only emotions in play.
David O’Brien, who has been the tour’s production stage manager since 2012, was feeling frayed nerves.
“I had more anxiety about keeping everyone safe, so that kind of overrode the emotions of being back, because I was just concentrating so hard on making sure that we were doing the right things,” he says.
“You watch the news,” O’Brien continues, “and there’s this monster that’s right behind your back, and you’re going, I just wanna keep ahead of this, I just wanna keep ahead of this. Especially here in Texas, the numbers are skyrocketing.”
Adds longtime “Wicked” company manager Steve Quinn: “We’re doing everything in our power to keep everyone backstage safe and the audience safe ... because we don’t want this —” and here he’s talking about another shutdown — “to happen again.”
.%20Photo%20by%20Joan%20Marcus.jpg "Talia Suskauer as Elphaba in the North American Tour of WICKED (B). Photo by Joan Marcus.jpg")
New protocols across the board
So much is now different than it used to be when it comes to the theater.
With “Wicked,” everyone in the cast and crew was required to be vaccinated, and masks are worn backstage unless a performer who’s just come off the stage is about to go right back on. All of the box office and all of the billing is now done electronically, everyone scans a QR code when they arrive at the theater to access a digital sign-in sheet as opposed to the old pen and paper, and there’s a lot more text-messaging among crew members on show nights in lieu of having face-to-face interactions.
There’s more hand-washing, less hugging.
Cast and crew members must also submit to a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for COVID once a week, and contact with audience members before and after performances — often the norm, pre-pandemic — is for now prohibited.
Meanwhile, here in Charlotte, all audience members will be required to wear masks inside Ovens except when consuming food or drinks in designated areas. Unlike in the past, refreshments will not be allowed in the auditorium.
In case you’re wondering, though, presenter Blumenthal Performing Arts will not require theatergoers to be vaccinated. (Broadway shows in New York City do require proof of vaccination, but that’s due to a city mandate.)
“For Blumenthal generally, and ‘Wicked’ specifically, it’s not being actively discussed,” says Blumenthal president Tom Gabbard. “But we always keep an open mind about these things, and that’s one thing we’ve been pretty good about is to watch the science. ... If we need to adapt our policy to new information, we’ll do it.”
As for the venue itself, earlier this year, the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, which manages Ovens, added a new technology to the venue’s HVAC system called needlepoint bipolar ionization; according to information provided by Global Plasma Solutions, which developed it, “the technology delivers safer, cleaner indoor air by reducing harmful particles and pathogens like mold, bacteria, allergens and viruses, and is highly effective in eliminating disease-causing pathogens, such as those responsible for COVID-19.”
Gabbard and his team also have had Honeywell inspect Ovens and recommend improvements for mitigating risk; on top of that, a large number of HEPA air filter units have been distributed throughout the venue to improve air circulation everywhere from dressing rooms to near where patrons might be standing in line for the restroom.
“I’ve approached it from this vantage,” Gabbard says, “that COVID, or something like it, is something we just need to learn to live with, and that this is not something that just goes away and then we can forget about safe practices. We need to redefine how we do some of these things.
“It’s a little bit like changing your wardrobe when you go to a different part of the country. My wife and I are Californians, and ... when we went from Malibu to Green Bay, we learned that we could still have this great, full life if we just put on a coat and a sweater. I think the same thing applies to this, you know? You do a couple of smart things like wear a mask when you need to, and you’re mindful of good hygiene and distancing — you do a couple of things and you can still have a great, full life.”
‘The audience went bananas’
On the Sunday before opening night in Dallas, “Wicked” staged a dress rehearsal for frontline workers. Once again, for the first time in more than a year and a half, Stephen Schwartz’s electrifying music and lyrics and Winnie Holzman’s enchanting book — with Joe Mantello directing — were ringing in a theater.
And once again, Suskauer lost it.
“I’d imagined that moment for so long, hearing the roar of the audience as the house lights go down and the show begins,” she says. “As that’s happening, I’m thinking about the fact that we had an audience full of frontline workers, and then on top of that them being our first audience ... it tore me up. I was absolutely a wreck, trying not to cry and ruin my makeup. ... It was just incredibly special.”
Then on the actual official opening night, the performance reportedly ran several minutes longer than normal because of all the various loud and extended reactions from the audience.
“The audience started cheering at the first note,” recalls Clifton Davis, the 75-year-old theater veteran who plays the talking goat/professor Dr. Dillamond. “Then they calmed down to listen to the overture, and then the curtain went up, and there was a roar that came out. But I thought that was deafening? No.
“When Glinda flies in and appeared in the bubble, that was a roar I’d never heard. That was a cheer — she couldn’t get her line out. They cheered so much at that first moment, and after she said her line, ‘It’s good to see me, isn’t it?’ The audience went bananas. It was a great, great night. And I’m hoping to see the same kind of thing in Charlotte.”
Which brings us back to the beginning, and the second example of a moment from “Wicked” that Suskauer says just seems to resonate differently now than it might have in the past — because of the fact that the country endured a pandemic, a racial reckoning and a time of great political division while theaters were dark.
“At the end of the show, Glinda says, ‘We have been through a frightening time.’ She has this whole speech about how there will be other times and other things that frighten us, but we just have to get through it,” Suskauer says. “I hear that moment every night on stage, and I let that wash over me. I feel the energy of the audience. They feel it, too. And we’re all going on the journey together.
“We all have been through a frightening time. We are continuing to go through a frightening time. As a nation, as a global community. So we have this shared bond — a trauma bond, almost — that we didn’t necessarily have before.
“I think that brings us together. And it’s a very cool thing.”
If you go: ‘Wicked’ in Charlotte
“Wicked” will run at Ovens Auditorium from Sept. 8 to Oct. 3. Performances are: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays (with an extra show at 2 p.m. this Thursday); 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays.
Tickets: www.BlumenthalArts.org. Details: www.WickedTheMusical.com.
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 1:51 PM.
