“As white theatergoers were lining up for ‘Wicked’ at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center across town, the audience filling up the Lyric, a slightly larger theater, was almost exclusively black, mostly middle-aged women. Many said they had heard about the play through the traditional lines of the circuit’s promotion: radio ads, fliers in local business and church parking lots and an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth network that precedes the show from city to city.”