So everyone's talking about the Wicked movie, but if you are a true musical theater nerd, you will recognize this.

Littorah, Multum, Ile, et teris, yactatus, et alto, wisuparum, saiweoi, Memoram, Unonis, Obe.

If you can tell me what that's from, then I will truly recognize

your musical theater credentials.

Okay, this is deep musical theater lore for the true nerds out there. If you recognize that

Latin that I read, it's because you, like me, I'm embarrassed to admit, were into Spring Awakening as a kid.

This is sort of around the time when Wicked was also big.

And one reason why I'm a huge hypocrite about Wicked is because it was my peak

musical theater nerd time when Wicked the musical, the stage version, was big on Broadway.

I mean, it was huge. And so if you were into musical theater, you probably knew every word of Wicked. I was no different. I was one of those kids.

And the reason this makes me an enormous hypocrite is because I actually hate the thing where you take the villain of a movie or a play or a book and you turn the villain into the good guy.

You say, oh, actually, he wasn't a villain. She wasn't wicked. She was just misunderstood. I hate this for a couple of reasons.

First of all, there's only really two ways that you can do this story,

where you take a villain and you turn the villain into the good guy.

And one version is where you say,

well, the witch of the West wasn't evil, wasn't the bad guy.

Some other guy was evil. Some other guy was the

bad guy. And that's kind of how wicked works. It's like, it's not the wicked witch of the West.

It's the wizard who turns out to be the evil person. And it's the wizard's minions who turns out to be

evil. And isn't that crazy? Which is like, no, that's not that crazy at all. You just replaced one story with one

villain, with a different story with another villain, and it's not even really a backstory,

because it ends up altering, shifting the moral balance of the story. And every story has

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