The witch is back: ‘Wicked’ is ready for another clean sweep of Smith Center

By John Katsilometes

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2014 | 5:25 p.m.

In May 2003, David Stone had that feeling, the sort where you feel as if you have been lifted from your moorings by a great tornado, only to be dropped into an environment that is no place like home.

Stone experienced that moment when his world shifted into Technicolor, just like in a movie, when “Wicked” opened for previews in San Francisco. It was May 2003, as the show was being tested at that city’s Curran Theater.

“The first audience’s response to the character Elphaba (portrayed by Idina Menzel) was so powerful that first night,” says Stone, producer of the musical, which is returning to the Smith Center for the Performing Arts from Wednesday through Nov. 9. “They understood the show on a very deep level, and they were wild about it.”

The morning of the next performance — which would be the second showing of “Wicked,” ever — the line from the Curran Theater lobby stretched from the box office, out the door and around the corner.

“I thought, ‘I can’t believe what I am seeing,’ ” Stone says. “When you start a venture like this, you don’t think that type of immediate success is in the realm of possibility. But with ‘Wicked,’ that is what happened. It was an instant hit.”

Stone remembers, too, the first audiences in October 2003 at Gershwin Theater on Broadway. The word-of-mouth accounts he was hearing were, “You will love this! You have to see it! I can’t believe how good it is!”

And that was from the theater. During intermission.

“I didn’t know how big it was going to be at the box office, but we had people lining up after the matinee, in the lobby, to buy tickets to the later performance,” Stone says. “We had the Republican National Convention come to New York in August of 2004, and ‘Wicked’ was the only show that went up in sales. Every other show fell apart because all the residents left to avoid the crush of the convention.”

It is not at all shocking that “Wicked” is among the biggest hits to play the Smith Center. It was the first Broadway musical to play Reynolds Hall, selling every ticket of its run in August and September of 2012. Though Stone is not a Las Vegas resident and has visited the city only enough to see most of the Cirque shows, he has a keen idea of what will and won’t work onstage in our city.

“When we first announced we were coming, we were asked if there was any interest in a permanent show on the Strip — and there was a lot of interest with the different hotels in Las Vegas,” Stone says. “But we wanted to do this show for the people who lived in Las Vegas, who were going to support a new venue that was being built for people in the community.”

The tourists on the Strip? They already had, or would have, a shot at “Wicked” whence they came.

“We visit their cities, too, whether it’s New York, London, Chicago, L.A., even Omaha,” Stone says. “We feel we can reach people who live in Las Vegas at the venue built for them. They want to see the big touring shows, and ‘Wicked’ is one of the big ones.”

Last year the musical surpassed $3 billion in worldwide ticket sales. It reached its original capital investment of $14 million in 2004. It has been the highest-grossing show on Broadway for nine consecutive years and is once more expected to sell out each performance in Las Vegas.

For the uninitiated (on the off chance that anyone who follows pop culture does not know this story), the musical is a prequel of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” book and the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz,” centered on the environment and events that molded the characteristics of the witches living in the Land of Oz: Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the Good Witch.

The original musical was nominated for 10 Tony Awards (with Menzel winning for Best Actress in a Musical and the show receiving honors for set and costume design) and has been met with critical praise from around the world since it began touring in 2005.

“The buzz from before, in its first run here, is still very strong, and people are coming to the box office who have already seen the show and want to see it multiple times,” Smith Center President Myron Martin says. “We’ll have another great, great response during this run.”

Martin is connected to the show in a somewhat random fashion, as Glinda is played by Chandra Lee Schwartz, who in 2006 played Penny Pingleton in “Hairspray” at Luxor. It’s yet another instance where the familiarity of a character only adds to the appeal of “Wicked.”

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.