On the surface the roots of the musical
Wicked, which imagines life in the land of Oz before Dorothy drops in, lie in the land of the Munchkins. It tells how the film’s two witches split into good and evil: the self- adoring, cosmetically perfect Glinda and the restless, dissatisfied, intelligent Elphaba — the future Wicked Witch of the West — whose green skin has left her ostracised in a white wizard’s world. Yet the roots of this American hit, which opens this week in a £7 million West End production, are far darker.
For the writer Gregory Maguire, on whose novel the musical is based, the film of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland was annual family viewing as a child. Seeing a cackling, broccoli-coloured Margaret Hamilton as the witch with her flying monkeys left a big impression. Then, in the early Nineties, Maguire was living in London when the James Bulger case and the Gulf War got him thinking. “Every day the media was gripped by debate about the root of incomprehensible evil and whether Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler,” he recalls. “I had been toying with ideas about Nixon and Watergate, but within this climate I kept thinking about the Wicked Witch as someone I could use to address notions of good and evil.”
Maguire soon realised that he would not be writing a portrait of pure evil. Elphaba became a bookish outcast stung by the stigma of looking different in a class-based Oz of oppressed animals, with the yellow brick road built by Munchkin slave labour and the flying monkeys the result of animal experimentation.
When the novel was published in 1995, it was optioned by the film producer Marc Platt, but he struggled to turn it into a workable screenplay. “We couldn’t make the book’s inner dialogue work,” he admits. “Stephen Schwartz then suggested this should be a musical. Suddenly it made perfect sense. What better way to bring out the inner feelings than through music.”
For Schwartz, the composer of the Seventies hits Godspell and Pippin and Oscar-winning songs for such animated features as Pocahontas and The Prince of Egypt, Elphaba struck a chord: “I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about outcasts and outsiders. Let’s face it, there’s a green girl in all of us.”
Schwartz found an equally enthusiastic fan of Maguire’s novel in Winnie Holzman, best known as the creator of My So-Called Life, a cult TV series with a sensitive take on alienated youth. Together, they whittled down the forest of plot elements to a more manageable size.
The story now pivots on the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba. The flashback plot tracks their early days at sorcery school, their initial antipathy, overnight friendship, romantic rivalry and a troubled parting of the ways.
“We found early on that people come to this show with the movie in their heads,” Schwartz says, “and we realised we couldn’t do anything that contradicted the film.” But when Holzman and Schwartz started working on their adaptation in early 2001, at the end of the Clinton era, events around them kept informing the story.
“We kept thinking about the fallout to the Lewinsky affair,” Holzman says. “Here was a person who had absurdly squandered so much good.” Then came the election of George W. Bush and, not long after, 9/11. Suddenly the story of a leader who controlled his nation by fear, a world where the colour of your skin determined how you were treated, acquired a sharper edge. “It’s scary to see your worst nightmares coming true,” Holzman says. “Our wizard is a leader who’s a fraud and will do anything to cling to power. Does that sound familiar?”
Yet for all its political undercurrents, Wicked is still a big Broadway show that boasts spectacle and power ballads. The action, framed with an enormous clock-face window and gigantic moving gears, shuttles smoothly from a picturesque school to gaudily green Oz to dungeon, nightclub and nightscape swarming with winged monkeys. An equally commanding presence is Idina Menzel, reprising her award-winning Broadway role as Elphaba, with the kind of powerhouse vocals that can blow the roof off.
“This show kind of wears its heart on its sleeve,” Holzman says. She thinks that’s why, when it opened in New York in 2004, it got mixed reviews. But the show resonated with audiences and led to its $14 million production costs being recouped in little more than a year.
“Wicked is unapologetic about telling a story through music,” Schwartz says. The show originally opened at a time when such shows as The Producers were self-mocking musicals. “At first this was entertaining but it has become repetitive and tedious,” Schwartz says. “It’s very safe ground simply to send everything up.” Holzman adds: “Are you mocking to have fun or afraid to commit to what you actually think and feel even if you risk being mocked?” Maguire had initially been sceptical about turning his novel into a musical: “Then I thought of how the Arthurian legends and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King were turned into Camelot and I thought, ‘This could work’.”
Since its Broadway opening, Wicked has spawned a Chicago staging and a North America touring company with plans for productions in Holland, Germany and Japan. “The show’s success has been heartening,” Maguire says, “but how sad that my kids’ college fund has swollen because my book has become more pertinent over the years.”
Wicked is in preview and opens on Wednesday at the Apollo Victoria, SW1 (0870 4000751)
Hello, yellow brick road: the worlds of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) L. Frank Baum’s children’s fantasy spawned numerous sequels and a stage show in Chicago in 1902 and in New York the following year. A 1910 silent short starred a nine-year-old Bebe Daniels as Dorothy.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) The best remembered screen version has Judy Garland going somewhere over the rainbow and Margaret Hamilton cackling: “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.”
The Wiz (1975) A rock- musical Broadway hit with an all-black cast. It was filmed in 1978 with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.
Return to Oz (1985) Disney’s sequel was too dark for family audiences (Aunt Em takes Dorothy to receive electroshock therapy to cure her of Oz delusions).
