Brace yourself for a very deep, very nerdy musical theatre cut.
I was walking the dog at lunchtime, listening to the Wicked soundtrack because we’re going to the movies with our son and his (wonderful) theatre-kid girlfriend tonight and I needed a refresher on the story.
In the song “What is This Feeling?” the lyrics describe Elphaba thusly:
“She’s a terror,
she’s a tartar…”
Wait a second, why did that sound familiar?
In high school, I was an usher at the Confederation Centre of the Arts here in Prince Edward Island, and as a result saw the show Anne of Green Gables: The Musical so many times that the lyrics got written into my DNA.
Sure enough, in the song “Did You Hear?”, Anne is described as such:
“She’s a terror!
She’s a tartar!”
Can this be? Is this a knowing callback from the creators of Wicked to an earlier strong-willed, misunderstood female character? I can’t believe this is an accident.
Okay, I promise to say something meaningfully on-topic sometime soon, but this stupid factoid set my ADHD brain on fire and I couldn’t be alone with it.
Anne: “Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn’t mean to be wicked. It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it?”