Wickedly bad... and not 'Good' bad...

I love musicals. LOVE THEM. I guess I expected a lot more from Wicked with the book being so stunningly imaginative. But everything I loved about the book was thrown out and rewritten to subdue the dim-witted masses that clamor for happy endings and for every little freakin detail of a plot to be explained to them at length so that they can be sure they don't have to use their underdeveloped senses of rationalization and theory.
CRIPES!
Don't get me wrong. The acting, for the most part, was good. The costumes were sheer design genius. Some of the music was pretty ok. The 'special effects' and sets are what I would expect of a 14 million dollar stage production. But the story left me in tears. Tears that spill forth when someone has pillaged, raped and utterly dumbed down to oblivion the beauty of the original story.
Marty Hughley of the Oregonian puts it in an equally dispassionate, though more eloquent way: here at this Oregonian review of Wicked

This picture is a perfect depiction of our feelings about the show, even at the intermission.