For those of you that are particularly passionate about musical theater, I advise you chain yourself to the nearest, entirely stationary piece of infrastructure before reading on. What you’re about to see may just be an internet video, but the undiluted rage that it’s likely to cause you might just be strong enough to grant you the power to physically attack this Jeopardy! contestant at a mere glance of his image.
During what was probably his short-lived time on the show, Brett selected a $400 question in the “Broadway’s Leading Ladies” category, which read “Betty Buckley introduced the song ‘Memory’on Broadway as Grizabella in this musical.”
Disaster struck immediately, with Brett saying “What is Wicked” in response. As jaws dropped around the world, his fellow player Sophia cleaned up the mess by assuredly claiming the $400 with “What is Cats.”
So no, Brett didn’t take a glimpse at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s platoon of anthropomorphic felines and immediately mistake it for a Wizard of Oz spinoff about a group of college-aged witches indulging in some totalitarian takedown. He merely got his Grizabella and Galinda wires a bit too crossed for his own good, and now he owes Jeopardy $800 (that’s how the show works, right?).
For those of you not in the know, Grizabella is a key character in the Cats musical, and is a former celebrity of sorts who has lost her glamorous allure and is now shunned by the rest of the Jellicle cats. Throughout the musical, she seeks to be accepted by her fellow felines, and is eventually given the honor of journeying to the Heaviside Layer, where she will be reborn as a new cat.
Galinda, by contrast, is one of the leading parts of Wicked, and is a younger version of Glinda the Good Witch that anyone familiar with their Oz lore will recognize immediately. A bubblegum-ish foil to her fellow student Elphaba (who goes on to become the Wicked Witch of the West), Galinda fights with her over love interests, academic favor, and other such high-school coded shenanigans, all while maintaining a rather bizarre friendship that’s earmarked by a shared desire to bring an end to the Wizard’s tyrannical rule of Oz.
Two very different things going on here, as you can see; an observation that will only become more pronounced this time next month when the Wicked film adaptation hits theaters on Nov. 22.
Early reactions from the highly-exclusive Oct. 16 screening have dubbed Wicked as the cinematic powerhouse we’re all expecting it to be, with Grande (who plays Galinda in the film) potentially having a shot at a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. All this, with Wicked Part Two still on the horizon for next year.
As for Cats‘ foray into the land of cinema, it was similarly fantastic in the sense that it could not have possibly made more mistakes throughout the course of its runtime, and subsequently ended as a brand new benchmark for how not to make movies. Say what you will, but that’s an important accomplishment.
