I was hoping there would be one of those cardboard displays to take a picture with outside the theater, but had to settle for me with the popcorn.

I saw ‘Wicked’ - the musical - in New York City, in the theater.

I remember very little about it.

This differentiates me from Kathy, who didn’t remember seeing it in the theater at all. (She told me a few weeks ago, “I’d still like to try to see ‘Wicked’ in the theater with the girls.” But she said it to me in a way that led me to believe she meant for the first time. So I asked her if that was what she meant, and she said, “Yeah. I’ve never seen ‘Wicked.’)

She didn’t remember it so much that I started to doubt that we saw it together.

Recently I did some cleaning and organizing and I found the Playbill and the ticket stubs were in there and it was something like 2009, so thank goodness I got that right.

I was hoping that as I watched the movie more of the show would come back to me but, nope. I remembered the lion cub scene…and I remember there’s kind of an impressive allusion to the overlapping scenes from The Wizard of Oz in the stage show, but that’s about it.

(Minor spoiler alert so skip this sentence if you don’t want any of the move ruined: How is it that the Emerald City has full-on electricity but no one in Oz has seen a cage?)

So there was a little bit of frustration as I watched the movie that not much was coming back to me, but there was also a nice piece to that where it was kind of all new to me.

I enjoyed the movie.

I thought Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were fantastic. I spent most of the movie thinking about what good acting was happening. Not in a distracting way - an appreciative way.

One thing I do remember about the musical in the theater is the stage craft - that's what’s so impressive about some musicals, right? How they do so many creative things to make you feel like you’re not watching something on stage but you’re somewhere else.

A movie can’t compete with that, but obviously it has other advantages, showing you a wider world. I don't remember “Dancing Through Life” from the musical, but I really liked that scene and choreography in the movie. Seems like a movie has a little more opportunity to go big with that dance and set in the movie.

I also kind of appreciated the Part One aspect - I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen more in the movies. Go big, man. Turn a 3-hour musical into a 5-hour movie. Sure, why not. I can get a little long-winded creatively. I understand it. And as far as practical aspects of the longer movies are concerned, I’m a little less unwilling to leave the theater to go to the bathroom if I have to these days.

I did it for the first-time during the most recent Spider-Man. That was a long movie. If I can leave Spider-Man for a couple of minutes, I can leave anything. It’s not the end of the world.

The other nice thing about splitting the movie into two parts is that Part Two is supposedly coming later this year…November, I think?

That seems within a reasonable time frame where at least I won’t forget what I saw now. Which, as we’ve established above, could be a problem for both me and Kathy.

And it works out pretty well for me in terms of this writing as well.

Now I have two Wickeds to write about in 2025.

Kathy and I went to Part One together, along with one of our daughters (who was watching the movie for the third time).

I’ll see some movies by myself this year, but these won’t fall into that category.

One last note - a while back I wrote about how I’ve come to appreciate watching the credits. This is partly because of post-credit scenes from Marvel movies, but I’ve made it a habit for all movies. I also started noticing the MPAA number for movies at the end of the credits. Wicked’s number was 55155, which was a nice little reward for me sitting through the credits. Good number.