(left: November 2008; right: March 2019)
when i try to explain why Katie's Glinda is so special my default words tend to be "weird," or "alien," or "fucking look at her. just fucking--why is she LIKE this." of course i stand by all that, but if i were to doff my facile and irreverent hat at last i'd probably say something like: Katie's Glinda, to me, represents a kind of artistic transgression which can never be fully captured by the institution of Wicked. she might as well be Frank fucking Abagnale given how hard the show has tried, alternately banning or legitimizing what she's done; this kind of granular approach, though, is never going to work. like--yes, it was the individual gestures and line reads which got her in trouble (according to her. it's possible Joe Mantello did a frown in her direction once), but in isolation those things mean very little. the whole of Katie's performance, which drives and always exceeds the sum of its parts, comes down to how Glinda is simultaneously the woman behind the curtain, and the curtain itself. Glinda is shallow artifice at the same time Glinda is complex depth. it's all truth; it's all real.
(it's all lies; it's all pretend. how could it not be? she's the one telling the story. she's the only one here.)
over and over Katie's Glinda feels sharply and just as sharply rejects the feeling; papers over it, squares it away. the Wizard's chamber scene in 2008 is one of her starkest approaches to this. Glinda knows exactly what is happening. what's more--Glinda knows better. (Katie has never allowed Glinda the grace of not knowing, or not knowing better.) she has a strong enough moral compass to react to the Wizard's offer with revulsion and horror, almost as if she were...oh, eighteen years old and intimately discovering she lives in a fascist regime built on a mountain of subaltern corpses. but she only shows it once the Wizard has finally turned away from her and even then, only for an instant. once she catches sight of Elphaba she wrenches herself into damage control mode, and the most important thing, the ONLY important thing, becomes getting them both out of here no matter the collateral.
Glinda in the same scene in 2019 is...pretty different! any disgust or moral conflict is completely wiped, and if Glinda has any feelings pertaining to what just happened it's relief and delight that they can get back on track after all that unpleasantness. even the reach for Elphaba at the end has changed in tone: now she's more authoritative--maybe even a little impatient--for Elphie to get with the program.
on the one hand it's like: okay, well, Katie's Glinda is normal now. she's the MOST normal Broadway Glinda during this period, and this is the typical way for Glindas to behave during this scene. even weirder, more conscientious Glindas aren't as bold about showing their moral quandaries as Katie's Glinda was in 2008, so we can read this as part of 2019 Glinda's overall deal, which is that she is very normal and her actress is very thankful she was invited back to make Wicked levels of money.
on the other: said actress is 👏🏼KATIE👏🏼ROSE👏🏼CLARKE, who has taken to straight up telling her directors she's never going to do the same thing night-to-night. so obviously she couldn't even swan through her (hopefully lucrative) Wicked victory lap without turning yet again into some bizarre outlier. part of this was done by digging Normal Galinda up from her shallow grave, but the other, larger part comes from what has stayed the same. because Katie's Glinda in 2019 remains, at her core, Katie's Glinda. she's the same person from 2008. still sensitive, still trusting, still smart in a way which only brings her grief, because once again Katie is not interested in letting Glinda off that particular hook. still autistic and gay as hell. 2019 Glinda is better at masking; maybe because she learned earlier that her preternatural charisma can only get her so far, and sometimes you HAVE to conform. 2019 Glinda comes from a more cynical world, even before she came to Shiz, which makes her more suited to accept the cynicism to come.
but not more suited to actually live in it, because the significant adjustments to 2019 Galinda's behavior become kinda irrelevant right around the time she changes her name. technically this is something we already know: from the moment she descends in the bubble in NOMTW, 2019 Glinda is just as miserable as she had been in 2008. (Act Two demonstrates that if anything 2019 Glinda might be even MORE miserable, but we'll get there when we get there.) and she's not even really better at hiding it! if Normal Glinda is emotionally devastated in the exact same way as Space Alien Glinda at the end of it all, then why change so much of the lead up? what does it even matter?
well. it's Glinda, so (appropriately) it matters because it's the way you're viewed. while we're inside the Wizard's chamber it matters, which is why even 2008 Glinda tries very hard to at least pretend she's onboard with all the scandalacious villainy. and outside of the Wizard's chamber--in Glinda's present, as she tells the story to her real and fictional audience--it matters, because it tells us how to feel about Glinda, and how Glinda feels about Glinda.
in 2008 Glinda beseeches empathy. the visceral sharpness of her body language and facial expression feels like an implicit interjection from Glinda the narrator: she was so scared. what else could she have done? what could you have done, had you been this scared? but in 2019 the same moment--with almost entirely the same Glinda, doing almost entirely the same motions--is treated so unsparingly it borders on self-abuse. Glinda in 2019, looking back on what happened, recounting it; alternately framing, hiding, and exposing her past self; within and between texts, says: who cares what she felt? who cares what she believed? this is what she DID. and look how good she is at it! if she had been pretending she's only getting what she wanted. this is what everyone saw. this is the only truth anyone should know. how in Oz can her feelings matter in the face of all she has done? all the harm she's dealt? all the people she's abandoned? all the bodies left in her wake?
how could anyone forgive her?
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