Fin: Let people sing at 'Wicked'!

Plus: Trump's very famous cabinet, see 'Rap World,' talking to Shyne, the return of the podcast, and more in this week's notes column.

The Wicked movie — the first half of it, anyway — comes out today, and it’s looking from early box office tracking like a big hit, and the critics like it, with the Rotten Tomatoes critics score at a better-than-I-would-have-expected 90. (I reviewed it here, and discussed it on a podcast here- more on that below.)

But there’s an unexpected controversy with the movie’s release: At AMC theaters, audiences going to see Wicked are specifically being asked not to sing along to the film’s musical score:

“At AMC Theatres, silence is golden,” says an advisory, tweaking the theater’s usual warning and Wicked-specific imagery. “No talking. No texting. No singing. No wailing. No flirting. And absolutely no name-calling. Enjoy the magic of movies.”

I’m with them on all the other things, but… why not let people sing along?

If you’re in one of those theaters, especially during a massive musical number of movies like Wicked, the movie itself is really loud- loud enough to almost certainly drown out the sound of committed theater kids singing along to “Popular” and “Defying Gravity.” No one complains when the audience at a concert sings along, because the concert is so loud that no one can hear the fans over it.

I don’t think this has anything to do with the cinematic experience — and besides, I don’t think anyone is getting kicked out of a movie theater auditorium just for singing. I think it’s because theaters are hosting sing-along screenings for Wicked starting on Christmas Day, and they want to sell more tickets for those.

When it comes to bad movie theater behavior, singing along energetically to a musical is pretty far down the list.

Now, this thing people have been doing where they film entire musical numbers and post them to social media? Absolutely not.

Trump’s very famous cabinet

Not to get all political, but…