November 30, 2024

As a lifelong Oz fan (I have 41 of the books in the series, and a miniature Oz flag on my desk), I wasn’t sure if I’d like the new movie Wicked when I went to see it yesterday.

I had seen the Broadway version in New York in 2009, and found the play entertaining but not memorable. The movie and the play tell a story of the rivalry and eventual friendship between two Ozian witches, Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. While both characters were featured in L. Frank Baum’s first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Glinda continued to be a wise and loving presence in all the subsequent Oz books, the movie and the play Wicked invented a relationship between the two women that did not exist in Baum’s books.

As an Oz purist, I found myself initially resisting the revisionism of the Wicked theatrical production and the current film. After all, in Baum’s books, none of the witches were green, the Wizard wasn’t evil, and the primary female friendship was between Dorothy (who returned many times to visit and eventually live in Oz) and Princess Ozma, the fairy ruler of that magical kingdom.

Unlike the Wicked play and movie, the 1939 classic film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy captured the innocence and sweetness of the original Oz stories as written by Baum and his successor as Royal Historian of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson. As Baum wrote in 1900 in his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: “(This book) aspires to be a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

Yet even the 1939 film deviated at times from Baum’s formula for innocence, as over the years some children have found Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the Wicked Witch of the West to be terrifying. Still, I think Baum would have loved that MGM musical, especially Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

I’m not so sure that Baum would have approved of the “modernized fairy tale” of Wicked. He might have felt, as I did at first, that his story was hijacked in order to tell a completely different tale. But in spite of my mixed feelings about Wicked (my comments about Wicked from now on will be about the movie, not the play), I have to admit that overall the high energy, great dance choreography, and excellent acting made for a fun, dynamic show that overcame the darkness of some of the themes.

Was the Wicked Witch of the West really wicked? In Baum’s book, yes, but not in the Wicked movie. In this cinematic version she is given the name Elphaba and a green complexion, and she is bullied by her classmates and rejected by her father because of the color of her skin. Cynthia Erivo, a black actress turned green for this story, does a fine job portraying the misunderstood and mistreated Elphaba. Her opposite is Glinda, played with humor by Ariana Grande as a perky dumb blonde, the Oz version of Barbie. They hate each other until they love each other. Both actresses are terrific singers.

The one truly wicked character is the Wizard of Oz, for reasons that I won’t reveal here. But he unintentionally helps Elphaba to convert her anger into power, and that is a psychological lesson that I appreciate: changing poison into medicine. Our shadow side can serve us if we acknowledge it and harness its energy. Or so I hope, anyway.

Wicked is about 2.5 hours long, and this version is only Part 1; Part 2 comes out a year from now. For some people, five hours of Wicked might constitute one of the “heart-aches and nightmares” that Baum referred to.

Not for this Oz nerd. I’ll come back in a year to experience more of the “wonderment and joy” of this “modernized fairy tale.”