20 Magical Facts About ‘Wicked’

This November, movie theaters will finally play host to the event that Broadway fans have been screaming about for years: Wicked, with Ariana Grande in pink, Cynthia Erivo in green, and Jonathan Bailey in between.

The film, part one of two, is Hollywood’s latest big Broadway-musical-to-movie-musical experiment. But before the Wicked Witch of the West’s origin story was a musical, it was a novel written by Gregory Maguire. In honor of this latest adaptation, here are 20 facts about how the book and the musical came to be. 

To avoid spoilers for the book and musical, skip facts 7, 8, and 9.

Wicked was inspired by the Gulf War and a real-life murder.

Anybody who’s read Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West knows that it’s not trite or flippant entertainment centered on a children’s stock villain, but a philosophical investigation of the nature and societal exploitation of evil. Maguire’s inspirations reflect the gravity of that theme.

One was the Gulf War. “At the time, there was so much worry about Saddam Hussein, and I remember seeing a newspaper article that said, ‘Saddam Hussein, the next Hitler?’ ” Maguire told BroadwayWorld. He recognized that invoking Hitler could quell even his own pacifist sensibilities, which got him thinking about how we use evil “as a legitimization of our inclination toward greed and self-involvement and self-rationalization.” It was also in the early 1990s that 2-year-old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-olds boys in Liverpool, England. “Everyone was asking: how could those boys be so villainous? Were they born evil or were there circumstances that pushed them towards behaving like that? It propelled me back to the question of evil that bedevils anybody raised Catholic,” Maguire told The Guardian in 2021.

Maguire, a children’s book author by trade, decided to explore those questions by dismantling a one-dimensionally evil character we’ve all known from youth. “I thought … ‘Who’s the worst of them?’ ” he told BroadwayWorld. “And coming down from the sky on a cloud, approaching me in a heavenly vision, was not the Virgin Mary for whom I’ve been waiting for most of my adult life, but the Wicked Witch of the West, saying, ‘I’ll get you and your little dog!’ And I thought, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’ve had a religious vision, and it’s Elphaba.’ ”

The name Elphaba is a nod to L. Frank Baum.

Maguire created the name Elphaba from the initials of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and the rest of the Oz series). “I tried Lafaba, I tried Lafeyba. And then I tried Elphaba. As soon as I got Elphaba, I thought, oh, that’s it,” he told WGBH’s Morning Edition, explaining in another interview that “It’s clean and simple, but not pretty, and with connotations of otherworldliness.” (The Cowardly Lion’s name, Brrr, evokes the character’s frightened tremors—and it’s also a tribute to Bert Lahr, who played the lion in the film.)

The International Wizard of Oz Club sent a spy to one of Maguire’s book events.

As Maguire said on The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, some “diehard Oz enthusiasts” were wary of his darkly political take on Baum’s whimsical fantasy. The International Wizard of Oz Club went so far as to send a representative to one of his book events seemingly to suss out whether his manipulation of this “sacred material” had been done in bad faith.

“She was very tall, she had a trench coat, a brim-snapped hat on, and she came to me, and she peered down into my face, and she said, ‘I have a confession to make,’” he recalled. “She looked this way, she looked that, she said, ‘I’m from the official International Wizard of Oz Club, and I’ve come to spy on you and report back to our minions, but I’ve become a convert!’ And then she threw off her hat and bought three books and had them all signed for her mother and her husband and her children.”

Maguire had a Hollywood cast in mind as he was writing.

Maguire had a feeling Hollywood would come calling if he could pull off the Wicked Witch’s tale at least “to a minimum level of success,” and he even cast the roles while writing to “help [him] visualize” the story. Elphaba was k.d. lang, who “could sing” and “had a very pointed and spiky kind of individual beauty”; Fiyero was Antonio Banderas; Madame Morrible was Angela Lansbury; and Glinda was Melanie Griffith.

The book was initially supposed to be adapted for film.

Hollywood did come calling: Demi Moore’s production company and Universal Studios optioned the film rights, but their attempts to translate the novel to the screen proved fruitless. As Universal’s then–president of production (and the musical’s eventual producer) Marc Platt explained in David Cote’s Wicked: The Grimmerie, “The screenplay was kind of dense, and I kept wanting to go deeper into the story of the relationship between [Glinda] and Elphaba … we needed inner dialogue, which is very hard to accomplish cinematically.”

It was Stephen Schwartz, composer of Broadway’s Godspell and Pippin—and a collaborator of Alan Menken’s for the music of Pocahontas (1995) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)—who suggested to Platt that Wicked be a musical instead of a movie. Not only had The Wizard of Oz (1939) primed audiences for songs in Oz, but music would also allow the characters to simply sing their inner dialogue. 

Stephen Schwartz convinced Maguire to let him make a musical on the strength of one phrase.

As it turned out, Maguire, a musical theater fan, needed little convincing to green-light a stage production. Schwartz floated his idea for the opening song, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and Maguire was hooked. “With those words, he sold the project to me,” Maguire told The Guardian. “He knew I had not written Wicked to be a parody of The Wizard of Oz but that I wanted to honor and unpack that story instead.”

The musical substantially deviates from the book …

Maguire’s novel is a sweeping Dickensian epic that tracks Elphaba’s life from birth to death in snapshots—her infancy, her college years, her adulthood revolutionary phase and reconnection with Fiyero, etc.—often filling in the gaps later through narration or dialogue. The musical (its flashback of Elphaba’s birth notwithstanding) condenses Elphaba’s wicked descent into her college years and the period immediately after that. It also focuses the plot, as Platt intended, on Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship, centralizing Glinda and inventing a love triangle with Fiyero for added tension and character development. (Stealing her best friend’s boyfriend is pretty much the extent of Elphaba’s wickedness in the musical; she gets to actually kill someone in the book.)

Naturally, there are myriad small differences between the book and musical. In the book, for example, Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose, has no arms; the musical’s Nessarose (who has arms) is in a wheelchair. In the book, the sisters have a little brother (though readers never meet him); Fiyero has a wife and children (whom readers spend ample time with); and Elphaba and Fiyero have a son (whom Fiyero never meets). In the book, Doctor Dillamond, the anthropomorphic goat, is murdered—in the musical, he’s just fired from his teaching post at Shiz University. Book Elphie is no great shakes at magic; musical Elphie is an exceptionally gifted sorcerer. And so on.

Another big difference involves Dorothy’s companions. (Excluding the Cowardly Lion, whose origin story remains more or less the same: Elphie and friends rescue him from inhumane experimentation at Shiz.) In the book, Elphie blames herself for Fiyero’s murder by government agents, and when she sees the Scarecrow, she desperately hopes he’s somehow her lover returned (he’s not). In the musical, Elphie herself saves a tortured Fiyero by transforming him into the Scarecrow. The book’s Tin Woodman is a fleeting aside; the musical’s is Boq, a fairly central character and the victim of a spell gone wrong.

… Especially at the end.

But the starkest departure from page to stage is the ending. In the book, like the film, Dorothy kills the witch by dumping a bucket of water on her (though in much more complex and morally ambiguous circumstances). The musical sends Elphie off with a bittersweet but still somewhat happy ending: After faking her death (again by bucket of water), she and Scarecrow Fiyero escape into the distance. 

While Maguire was always gracious and understanding in letting the musical depart from its source material, finding out during an early workshop that Elphaba would survive made him “initially sorry about agreeing” to the project. “I felt that Wicked the novel was a tragedy.” he said in The Grimmerie. “She’s young, she’s powerful, she’s slightly misguided, but her heart is in the right place. And she dies. And that’s what makes it a tragedy.” But seeing how the finale went over in a crowded theater made him come around to it, partially because the story was still, so to speak, a horse—just a horse of a different color. “[If] you think of Wicked the musical as the story of the friendship between Glinda and Elphaba, then the fact that they are separated from each other, never to speak again, is almost as good as a death. It’s still poignant and dreadful and sad,” he said.

Doctor Dillamond returned in the musical’s original last scene.

The musical’s writer, Winnie Holzman (creator of My So-Called Life), originally finished the script with two scenes playing out simultaneously. Upstage, people celebrate Elphaba’s death at the Wizard’s palace. Downstage, Elphaba runs into Doctor Dillamond on a far-flung farm. He’s now lost all powers of speech—a product of the Wizard’s stripping of animal rights—and Elphie, without her spellbook to help her, must look within to restore them. “I’m limited, I’m sorry, but I’m limited,” she sings, in contrast to her earlier “Unlimited, my future is unlimited.” Dillamond then manages a stilted “El-pha-baaaa.”

To Schwartz, it regrounded Elphie in a way that perfectly culminated her arc. “It’s the fact that it’s completely anonymous and she’ll never get any credit for it and she’ll never get any public affection for it, but she does it anyway,” he said in Carol de Giere’s Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz, From Godspell to Wicked. But director Joe Mantello, realizing the scene would bloat an already busy denouement, decided it was best left on the cutting room floor. “The musical structuralist in me knew it had to go, but the philosopher in me really misses it,” Schwartz said.

Legal concerns caused creators to cut some fun movie callbacks.

Because Baum’s book was in the public domain, the musical’s creators were free to use and remix its content with abandon—but anything that originated in MGM’s film was strictly off limits. Just a week before previews began in San Francisco, the legal team delivered a list of lines and scenes that were too close to violating copyright law for comfort. The creators were told to cut them or shut down the show.

Most of the casualties were winking movie references made by Glinda. “Making poppy fields for people to fall asleep in; what was that all about?” she uttered at one point. She could also no longer say “Goodbye, Dorothy,” or mention Elphaba’s disappearance “in a puff of nasty-smelling smoke.” As these moments always garnered lots of laughter during read-throughs and rehearsals, the creators—and Kristin Chenoweth, who had played Glinda from the very first workshop—were incredibly upset.

There’s a recurring reference to “Over the Rainbow.”

But they did prevail in saving a few oblique nods to the film. Though Wicked’s ruby-red slippers couldn’t actually be red (they’re silver in Baum’s book), the bejeweled shoes are illuminated by red spotlights. And when Nessarose asks Boq what’s in the punch at a party, Boq says, “Lemons, and melons, and pears!” “Oh my!” Nessarose replies. 

Schwartz also used the first seven notes of “Over the Rainbow,” albeit with a different rhythm, as a leitmotif throughout the show. For example, the lyric “Unlimited, my future” in “The Wizard and I” matches “Somewhere over the rainbow.”

Kristin Chenoweth is the reason Glinda gets operatic.

With Chenoweth in mind for Glinda from the get-go, Schwartz had started writing music for her as a “high belter.” But once Chenoweth actually signed on to the project, she expressed that she’d also love to use her impressive operatic soprano. Integrating a whole other vocal style in a way that made sense for the character initially stumped Schwartz.

“I didn’t know how you can come out and belt sometimes and then all of a sudden sing [Candide’s] ‘Glitter and Be Gay,’ ” he said. “And then one day I had a concept.” Glinda’s soprano could be her public-facing voice—her mask of perfection when singing to a crowd—which she drops to a lower, more natural register in her regular life. “I would never have conceived of doing soprano material for this character if it hadn’t been for the fact that Kristin Chenoweth was cast,” Schwartz said.

Idina Menzel showed up to her audition in green makeup.

Though Stephanie J. Block played Elphaba during Wicked’s workshops, she’d never performed on a Broadway stage, and producers wanted someone more seasoned to carry the production. Idina Menzel, already acclaimed for Rent, was the first to audition (the date was rescheduled from September 12, 2001, to later that month). “[I] wore green eye shadow and some green lipstick and made myself look kind of dreary: smoky black eyes, dark, ratty clothes, to feel a little grungy,” she said in The Grimmerie. 

The creators loved her, but while singing “Defying Gravity” during her second audition, her “voice cracked really badly,” Mantello recalled. “[I] actually swore in the middle of the song because I cracked,” Menzel said. “I thought, ‘Either they’ll love it and think, ‘Boy, that’s one good witch there.’ Or they’ll think I was completely inappropriate. So I left kicking myself.” Mantello said it “sort of made her more endearing.” (Menzel won the role, but Block got to play Elphaba on the national tour and also later on Broadway.)

The creators know “Popular” as “the Clueless section.”

To showcase Glinda’s lack of depth early on in her arc, Schwartz wanted an “empty calories” song. It was Holzman and Platt’s idea to accomplish that by having her—pretty, popular, and blonde—give her uncool roommate a makeover, à la 1995’s Clueless (itself playing off Jane Austen’s Emma). Holzman eavesdropped on teen girls in coffee shops to nail the scene’s dialogue, and Schwartz wrote “Popular,” Glinda’s standout solo, in part based on his own memories of a perky-nosed, blonde homecoming queen in high school. “So we call this the Clueless section,” Schwartz said.

“Dancing Through Life” is Sting-coded.

Fiyero’s musical introduction as the irresistible playboy prince went through a number of iterations (rejects included “Who Could Say No to You?” and “Easy As Winkie Wine”) before Schwartz landed on a dance number as the right approach. The version seen at San Francisco previews, with Adam Garcia as Fiyero, was “Which Way’s the Party?”, which evolved into “Dancing Through Life” before Wicked’s Broadway debut with Norbert Leo Butz in the role.

But even once Schwartz had settled on lyrics that clarified Fiyero’s philosophy “to party through life,” he struggled to choose the ideal musical vibe for Butz. “I did one that sounded like a Frank Sinatra tune; one that was a little bit like ‘They Can’t Take that Away From Me’ sung by Fred Astaire; one that was Billy Joel–esque; one that was atonal, but people felt it was too much like Stephen Sondheim,” Schwartz explained, “and then I did what I called the ‘Sting’ version. It has a steady bass line, like in ‘Every Breath You Take.’ ” The Sting version won out, in part because it was best suited for choreography.

Schwartz’s daughter helped write “For Good.”

Glinda and Elphaba’s farewell song about changing each other “for good”—both for the better and forever—grew out of a conversation Schwartz had with his daughter. He asked her to imagine what she’d say to her long-distance childhood best friend if they knew they’d never speak again. “Pretty much the entire first verse of ‘For Good’ is what she said: People come into our lives for a reason, there are things we learn from each other, and we help each other to grow,” Schwartz said.

Wicked shared a production designer with Saturday Night Live.

Eugene Lee was Saturday Night Live’s production designer from its premiere in 1975 to his death in 2023 (save for a half-decade hiatus in the 1980s that corresponded with Lorne Michaels’s). Lee also had a storied Broadway career building sets for the likes of Sweeney Todd, Ragtime, and Wicked.

For Wicked, he drew inspiration from W.W. Denslow’s original illustrations in Baum’s series and also plenty of detail from Maguire’s novel—especially for the mechanical smoking dragon and the clock gears and cogs that form the bulk of the set. In the book, Lee explained in The Grimmerie, this Clock of the Time Dragon is “a kind of medieval pageant wagon with small doors and prosceniums, pushed around by dwarves and clowns. Although they don’t go into this in the show, the Clock of the Time Dragon is part of a kind of heretical religion in Maguire’s version of Oz.” The fact that this had no place in the musical was a sticking point for its creators. “They really fought the dragon over the proscenium,” Lee remembered. 

“The first thing you see is this great big dragon hanging over the set, and what the hell is it?” Schwartz said. Instead of scrapping the beast, they decided to just work it into the script: In one of Glinda’s very first lines, she mentions that “According to the Time Dragon Clock, The Melting occurred at the thirteenth hour.”

The flying monkey sounds are creaky wood.

Though a lot of the animal sound effects didn’t make it past previews, the flying monkeys are still loud and clear on Broadway. But they’re not actually monkey noises. “We created those by recording creaking wood,” sound designer Tony Meola said. “When I saw Eugene’s set, with all that wood, I started playing around with different types of wood: creaking, crunching, twisting it. Taking balsa wood and crunching [it] in your fist in front of a microphone, or stepping on it. It’s amazing the sounds you can create to represent a thing that looks nothing like the thing itself.”

The Emerald City costumes are more morbid than they look.

Since the Wizard appears in Oz during the early 20th century, costume designer Susan Hilferty developed a slightly askew sartorial universe she dubbed “twisted Edwardian.” “It’s Edwardian-era suits and dresses, but asymmetrical—the collar might be off center, or the cut of the dress twists around crazily,” she said. These elements are on spectacular display among the occupants of Emerald City, but the glitz and glamour of those ensembles obscures something pretty grotesque.

“If you look closely, many of the costumes have fur and feathers. Thematically, I thought it was important to show how people in the Emerald City, who have money and live the high life, have animal remnants in their couture. It’s despicable, like having somebody’s scalps on your sleeves,” Hilferty explained. “Animals’ rights are being taken away, but the people of Oz let it happen because the Wizard keeps them wealthy and entertained.”

Wicked didn’t win the Tony for Best Musical.

More than two decades after its 2003 Broadway premiere, Wicked is now considered a modern classic. It’s the fourth longest-running Broadway show in history, after The Phantom of the Opera, the 1996 revival of Chicago, and The Lion King. But while Hilferty, Lee, and Menzel all took home Tonys for their work on the production, Wicked itself left empty-handed: The Best Musical award went to Avenue Q.

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