Oh, I was completely and utterly charmed and entertained throughout. I don't mean to imply it wasn't a fantastic evening of fun and enjoyable theater. It WAS.
I gladly went to see it a second time.
And, as a matter of fact, I
like the songs and have listened to the CD quite a bit (
though I'm certainly long over it).
It's really just the essence of what they did to the story that bugs me - and the dissatisfaction with the seemingly less musical, certainly less fun 2nd act - - that just happened to dispose of the book's most interesting episodes.
(There certainly
was a whole lot of boring Oh Zee politics, so I find discarding one of the story's main virtues a terrible waste.)
Oh, are we talking about movies? Hmmm, well, when they
do finally get around to a movie version of Wicked, I hope they incorporate a bit more of the book when they film the musical.