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Straw poll: Candy corn — for or against?

Last night, I went to see Wicked on Broadway. It was okay.

This was a company-sponsored event. We had a few rows of seats, free hats, and deeply discounted tickets. (Actually, I think they were deeply discounted. My ticket was $28 for a pretty decent orchestra seat, but I bought it back in March, and I have no clue what the going price for a Wednesday night show in October actually is.) I knew several of the people who attended, at least enough to nod good morning to them in the hallway, but a handful — like my boss, who’s at a conference in Chicago this week — didn’t show up, and a few others were complete strangers. The two older ladies sitting next to me, for instance, who left shortly after the start of the second act, were, I think, from another office entirely.

As for the musical itself…well, it’s fun, if a little loud and unremarkable. It’s basically a revisionist history of The Wizard of Oz, painting the Wicked Witch of the West (Elphaba) as a misunderstood hero. It’s an intriguing idea, and treated with a lot of genuine humor. But, like Gregory Maguire’s original novel — which I read years before adapting it to Broadway was even suggested — I found a lot to like but too little to love. As a whole, I found it vaguely unsatisfying. (Maguire’s gone on to write two sequels — post-musical, it should be noted — and I haven’t had any inclination to read them.)

The musical absolutely belongs to the set design and its two leads, Elphaba and Glinda (“Gah-linda.”). Both actresses (whose names I’m afraid I don’t recall) do a terrific job with the material, but after awhile that thing the New York Times called “the ‘American Idol’ sensibility” — “larynxes stretch[ing] and vibrat[ing] with the pain of being an underdog and the joy of being really loud” — just gets old. I tuned out for a couple of numbers in the second act altogether, and I don’t think I understood much of anything the background players sang. With only one or two possible exceptions, there’s nothing I’d find myself humming afterward. (As a fan of Kristin Chenoweth’s work on Pushing Daises, I’m interested to check out the original cast album, on which she plays Glinda.)

Still, for that price, it was fun. I wish I’d bought a second ticket, since I think my mother would have enjoyed the show. And then I could have had dinner with her instead of wandering around Manhattan for three hours after work. I didn’t get home until after midnight, and I’m still pretty tired this morning, but overall I’m glad I went.

You may notice a “What I’m Doing” feed from my Twitter account in the sidebar. I’m not sure I love how it looks, but I’ve also been thinking about giving the whole website a makeover. Anywho, you can follow my stray observations and the minutiae of my daily life in the sidebar, some of which I’m sure will wind up posted here in fuller form too, or you can follow me at Twitter.

I’m still treating it as an experiment, but I’ve enjoyed using it thus far.

• I’m really not sure how this works, but it supposedly turns any name into a face. Here’s mine.

• Fringe‘s science consultants don’t have a background in science. Yeah, it shows.
• Tor is offering Brian Francis Slattery’s terrific first novel Spaceman Blues as a free e-book.
• I think I’ve mentioned before how I use Facebook mainly as a Scrabble delivery system. (If you’re online, why not let’s play?) So I found this xkcd cartoon especially funny. But is it wrong that the first thing I thought of was Red Dwarf‘s Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society?
• Speaking of xkcd — which seems like a prerequisite for any internet conversation nowadays — here’s creator Randall Munroe’s Cartoon-Off with The New Yorker. I don’t know about you, but I think he won pretty handily.
• So Pixish is closing. I got some really great artwork out of the one assignment I ran there for Kaleidotrope, but I appreciate the concerns over “spec work” — even if I think my assignment steered well clear of that. I agree that soliciting design from several artists for a specific product, which the artists will not be able sell elsewhere if it’s not accepted, is a pretty crummy thing to do. But I’m not convinced that “design contests,” in which artists submit work they think might be a good fit for a product or publication, are equally underhanded. After all, it’s not considered spec work when a writer submits to a contest, loses, and doesn’t get paid.
• It’s not entirely surprising that the architect of the most virulent Obama smears is sort of a scumbag. It’s just sort of amazing how big of one he is.
• This paperback book lounger looks really cool, but also fairly uncomfortable.
• Neil Patrick Harris read for the part of Simon Tam on Firefly?
• Criminal Minds is “an Arthurian romance and a meditation on the existence and evolution of God”? Wow, That almost makes me want to watch it!
• H.P. Lovecraft: stand-up-comedian? Well, not quite.

John Hodgman on his Daily Show appearances: