When the audience cheers for the landing helicopter in ”Miss Saigon” or

the careening chandelier in ”Phantom of the Opera,” it’s applauding eye

candy.

When the awkward, bookish schoolgirl Elphaba mounts her broom and takes to

the sky in ”Wicked,” our rush of emotion is for more than mere spectacle.

Elphaba has found her power as the Wicked Witch.

”Wicked,” a dissenting opinion on conventional ”Wizard of Oz” wisdom,

reveals the plight of a persecuted, scape-goated witch at the hands of a

feeble figurehead, hiding behind an impressive Ozian smokescreen.

A prequel to Baum’s 1900 fantasy, ”Wicked” the novel re-imagines the

witches of Oz as a rumination on the smoke and mirrors wizardry of the

post-9/11 political climate. While the novel’s explicit politics have melted

away like a splashed Wicked Witch of the West, director Joe Mantello’s stage

spectacle packs a wallop.

A breezy spin-off of an iconic classic, ”Wicked” provides tons of campy

fun as well as a fulfilling sense of resolution — a postscript in the form of

a preamble.

Whether they realize it our not, the adult children of repeated ”Wizard of

Oz” movie viewings have a Jungian attachment to characters who have long

inhabited their psyches. There’s a natural curiosity about them.

”Are people born evil or do they have evil thrust upon them?” asks Glinda

the Good Witch, before launching into the most gratifying back story since the

scoop on Darth Vader’s and the Grinch’s childhoods.

Winnie Holtzman’s and Stephen Schwartz’s musical not only quells inquiring

minds, it also uses an icon of evil as a springboard to meditate on the very

nature of evil.

Carol Kane as Madame Morrible, the duplicitous Wizard’s press secretary,

counsels the Wizard to re-brand Elphaba, Oz’s most promising sorcery student,

as its ”Most Wanted” evil-doer. Kane is glorious as a ditzy villain.

David Garrison, as the Wizard, riffs on Baum’s original ”Wizard”-speak,

which in this context recalls Orwell’s ”Newspeak”:

”Where I’m from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call

it ‘history.’ A man’s called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man’s a thief, or

philanthropist. Is one a crusader, or ruthless invader? It’s all in which

label is able to persist.”

The metaphors are delicious, but so is the teen-age angst, replete with

spiteful sparring, petty jealousies and stolen boyfriends, that are the

speciality of Winnie Holtzman, creator of TV’s critically acclaimed but

short-lived drama ”My So-Called Life.”

Before having wickedness thrust upon her, Elphaba was a misanthropic

schoolgirl, who had the twin misfortunes of being born green and getting goody

two shoes Glinda as her roommate.

The verbal dodge ball and hard won friendship between the effervescent

ninny Glinda and the Goth brainiac Elphaba is, camp and politics aside, the

heart and soul of ”Wicked.”

Their female friendship, so rarely depicted in splashy Broadway musicals,

is funny and affecting and performed by super talents.

The grating, Shirley Temple-like Glinda is played with flawless, Id-on-her

sleeve doltishness by Kenda Kassebaum. Kassebaum’s Glinda is a complex

layering of real kindness beneath a facade of goodness that unsuccessfully

conceals an underlying bratty elitism.

Kassebaum has an off-kilter appeal. A supposedly socially appropriate

popular girl, she exhibits the most bizarre quirks. She has this tendency to

pull her dress over her head, like a 3-year-old girl dressing up as a fairy

princess. Kassebaum’s antics are priceless.

Eden Espinosa, believe it or not, has the less interesting role as the girl

who would be the Wicked Witch. The trials (witch trials or otherwise) and

tribulations of the unpopular are now standard issue from the WB network.

Her irresistible Elphaba is a geeky, bespectacled, sardonic and

green-skinned version of Angela Chase on ”My So-Called Life.” The actress’s

potent voice turns some of Stephen Schwartz’s less-than-memorable tunes into

trenchant ballads.

With the music’s clever rhymes, Elphaba pines for acceptance, allows

herself to be subjected to a makeover and falls for the Jordan Catallano of

”Oz,” Derrick Williams as the dreamy but vacant Fiyero.

Vacant though he is at first, Fiyero becomes a martyr who gets a second

chance at a happy ending in this revisionist fairy tale for Blue Staters. With

the captain of the guard bent on capturing the witch, Fiyero sets Elphaba free

and meets a fate eerily reminiscent of Matthew Shepard’s in a heartland

cornfield.

Joe Mantello’s masterful production fuses the chilling with the silly.

There’s much metaphor in the hunt for wickedness and the suppression of herds

of livestock. And there’s a game-like glee in fitting the puzzle piece

together as plotlines of Baum’s ”Oz” match up with this version.

Susan Hilferty’s splendid Rocky Horror chic costumes and Eugene Lees gaudy

spectacular Emerald City and environs create a Tim Burton-like Gothic

fabulousness.

”Wicked” has got a winning and rare alchemy — a sound brain that tempers

its political courage with its laughing heart. It’s a synthesis that soars, a

fizzy, high-flying hot air balloon of a Broadway show.

Erika Milvy, a free-lance writer living in San Francisco, reviews Bay Area

theater for Q

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