Douglas McEwan came up with an answer that had not occurred to me as to how those autograph-seekers knew to be outside with Star Wars posters after the play last night…
There's no mystery to how those people found out Harrison Ford was there. Twitter. No, as you said, he didn't tweet where he was going, but I'd guess somewhere between 10 and 100, or given the size of the Pantages, maybe 1000, people inside the theater did tweet: "OMG Harrison Ford is HERE!" All their followers retweeted it, and it spreads like wildfire.
Twitter is a disaster for celebrities hoping to go out in public unmolested. Also, Wicked's huge success is due in large part to it connecting with teenage girls. It gets the Twilight audience. When I saw it, several years ago (From the back row of the top balcony. It was Wicked's first L.A. engagement and tickets were hard to come by. Fortunately, I was dead center, so at least I had a good view of Eugene Lee's work.) and I had never before seen so many teenage girls in a theater audience. Every single one of them would be carrying a phone, and tweeting their brains out. Every one of them that spotted Harrison Ford undoubtedly tweeted about it.
You think Wicked is a prequel to the movie? I don't, though it's just an opinion, not any kind of factual knowledge of what Gregory Maguire had in mind when he wrote the book. It struck me as a prequel to the book far more than to the movie. I had read the novel first, which is darker, more complex, and more of a downer. The novel definitely reaches to be a prequel to the book, I think, but it's really more related to Maguire's now four-book series of adult Oz Books, and they've strayed so far from Baum or MGM that it can really only be consdered a prequel to his own Oz saga.
I tried to read the second, but got bummed and bored quickly, and abandoned it around Chapter Three. Have not read the other two. I was very impressed with how extremely well Winnie Holzman (married to Paul Dooley) managed to winnow down that sprawling, complicated book into a plotline that worked. I think the musical improves a lot on the book. And I agree that the look of it was magnificent. Given how extreme its popularity is, and that the stage production was partly financed by a movie studio (Universal, if I remember right), I can not fathom why they haven't filmed it yet. They should do it before their core audience outgrows it. Tweens can be fickle fans.
You may be right about the Twitterings but the folks who showed up outside last night were not Harrison Ford fans or teenage girls or anyone you'd think would be wired into a network with the kind of folks inside. The more I think about it, the more I think there was one person who'd passed around the posters for others to get signed, probably (as I theorized earlier) for small fees if they succeeded. From where I could see/hear, the signature-cravers did not even have anything fannish to say to Mr. Ford. No one said, "Oh, I'm such an admirer of your work" or "I loved the Star Wars movies." They just stood there with the posters and pens muttering, "Will you sign this?" It would not surprise me if some of them didn't know who Harrison Ford was.
I'm not really sure what Wicked was intended to be a prequel to — book or movie. I'm guessing that for legal reasons, they'd say it was the book (which is public domain) and opposed to the movie (which isn't) — but most of the attendees were obviously referencing the movie even if some of the plot details suggested the book. Actually, I haven't read Maguire's Oz books and it's been a long time since I read Baum's.
I can sure fathom why they haven't filmed this show yet: The play is still raking in money and they fear a movie will interfere with that. But once the show closes on Broadway and the touring companies go away, they'll get to work on it. That day may be a while off. Even in the huge Gershwin Theater, the Broadway play is still playing to 90%+ capacity after more than eight years. And in addition to the New York company, there are two touring companies in the U.S. that are scheduled through early 2013 and there are at least four international productions. It could easily be another eight years before that revenue slows to a trickle and Universal decides it's time to make a movie.
Someone who signs his e-mails "Jethro" writes to ask…
So why do some theaters put row AA in the front and some put it way in the back behind row X? Why isn't that kind of thing standardized?
It's probably not standardized because there's no controlling authority to standardize it. As for why they do it, I'd assume the problem is that some theaters have rows of seats in the front that can be removed if they need space there for performing or for an orchestra. So they name the front row of fixed seats "Row A" and then when the removable rows are inserted, the only way they can suggest they're closer than "A" is to call them AA, BB and so on. But then you have a place like the Pantages that has 52 fixed rows in its orchestra…and I think you can see the problem.
The Internet has made all this less of a problem — or it should have — because all the seating charts are online and sometimes, you even click on one to select your seats when you order tickets online. That's how I got pretty good seats to Wicked. I've learned the hard way to check before I buy.