Everything you need to know about Wicked, explained by a Wicked know-it-all

Welcome to Know-It-All. In the age of intellectual property grabs, docudramas, and so very many sequels, it can be difficult to find a way into the complicated worlds we see on screen. In this series, Vox experts explain what you need to know to get into the latest hot release.

Like a friendship between a popular blonde princess and a dour lime-skinned outcast, the story of Wicked is a bit more complicated than it looks. 

Wicked is billed as the “true story” of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West, the very famous, very what-you-see-is-what-you-get witches from The Wizard of Oz. It’s based on a well-loved, very catchy Broadway musical that’s been around for 20-plus years. It also stars pop queen Ariana Grande and powerhouse Cynthia Erivo, and the movie’s very expansive, very expensive marketing campaign seemed determined to forever alter the way we think about pink and green.

Wicked is everywhere. Surely it can’t be that impenetrable! 

But did you know that the Broadway musical was based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist novels which were, in turn, inspired by L. Frank Baum’s beloved series of over a dozen books about Oz? And that a major plot in the novels involves sentient, talking animals that love sonnets and science? Or that Wicked is really a political thriller about corrupt government officials scapegoating a minority and creating an enemy of the state?

Beneath the movie’s airy aesthetics and its bubblegum pop moments is a broiling, chaotic tale of power, greed, and discrimination. The more you know about Wicked, the weirder and weirder it gets. 

With that in mind, I asked my colleague Constance Grady to help us navigate the world of Wicked and Oz. Grady has read Gregory Maguire’s original novel multiple times, the Baum novels as a child, seen the Broadway production, and like me, saw the movie this week. We discussed everything from anti-goat fascism, to Grande’s delicious performance, to what from the book didn’t make it into the adaptations. Here’s what you need to know about the movie musical of the moment. 

Do I have this correct? Wicked is a movie musical adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway show Wicked which is an adaptation of the novel Wicked which is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz. 

You’re right, but there’s another adaptation layer in there.

All those layers. 

The whole thing starts with the L. Frank Baum children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which he published in 1900. Baum’s book was so successful that it was almost immediately adapted into a Broadway musical of its own (now largely forgotten) and an entire franchise worth of sequels, 13 of which Baum wrote himself. Then in 1939 we got the most famous and, for most people, canonical version of the story: The Wizard of Oz, the Judy Garland film based on the Baum novel. 

The first Wicked was Gregory Maguire’s novel, first published in 1995 as Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s gimmick was to take Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 film — surely one of childhood’s scariest villains — and make her the beating heart of his novel. He renamed her Elphaba, a name suggested by the initials of L. Frank Baum.

Wicked the musical came in 2003, with music from Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman. It was a smash hit success when it came out, and it’s still running on Broadway now, 21 years later. 

The musical was such a hit that Universal, which owns the rights, has had various versions of the film in development for a very long time now. Finally and at last, in 2021, Universal put director Jon M. Chu of Crazy Rich Asians on the task. Chu split the stage musical into two halves, with Wicked Part 1 to premiere in November 2024 and Wicked Part 2 set to come in 2025. And now here we are! 

Do you have a favorite? 

At different times, all of the Oz stories have been my favorites.

I grew up on the 1939 movie like everyone else. When Dorothy opens the black-and-white door to her Kansas home and walks out into brilliant, Technicolor Oz? That’s what cinema was made for, baby! 

When I was around 8 or 9 I came upon the L. Frank Baum novels, and I was tickled to find that they contained such an expansive and playful mythology. I gobbled up those books like candy. Then at around 11 years old, I read Wicked and was entranced by it: all that moral complexity, all the political intrigue, all those slippery, winding sentences. 

When the musical came along, I immediately resented it for being a glitzier, simpler story than the book was — really boiled down to the complicated friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, set against the backdrop of the Wizard’s manipulations — but when I was 17 I saw it on Broadway and was overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of it and the gleeful drive of the songs. When Elphaba started flying at the end of act one, I burst into tears. 

To be fair to 17-year-old you, there is at least one person, if not 10 to 20 people bursting into tears at every performance when Elphaba defies gravity. It’s a spectacle. It’s monumental. It’s as important to Broadway as the chandelier coming down in Phantom of the Opera.

God, it’s truly so good. For that moment, I even forgive Schwartz for writing the lyric “Nessa, Nessa, I’ve got something to confess-a.”

Wicked is famously one of only six musicals I enjoy. And I feel like the movie sticks to the musical. How well do the musicals stick to the book? 

The musical is very, very loosely based on Maguire’s book.

What Gregory Maguire wanted to write was a really sophisticated allegorical exploration of the nature of evil itself and what might drive Elphaba to wickedness. As such, his Wicked is bleak, at times self-indulgently so. Maguire’s Elphaba is raised by missionaries in a Southern Gothic childhood right out of Flannery O’Connor. After she abandons both religion and schooling and is politically radicalized by the cause of Ozian Animal rights, she becomes a terrorist, complicit in multiple acts of violence against civilians. By the end, however much you might sympathize with Elphaba’s cause, you understand why people call her the wicked witch.

Wicked: Part I (the official name of this movie) feels less like “wow, this lady is really wicked” and more like, “oh, she’s just misunderstood.” Maybe we haven’t gotten to the full terrorist part yet, but I can’t imagine Elphaba’s morality is ever going to be as ambiguous as the novel.  

Absolutely. The Wicked of the stage show is a much sweeter and sillier version of the story. Schwartz and Holzman ditch as much of the religion and the politics as they possibly can to focus on the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North — or Galinda, as she originally calls herself. 

Maguire imagined Glinda as Elphaba’s college roommate, and she’s key to Elphie’s college years, but he largely abandons her after Elphie drops out of school to go into politics. Schwartz and Holzman, however, make comic, superficial Glinda into the heart of the story. Perhaps in part to make room for the shift in focus, Elphaba’s misdeeds are significantly toned down, and as for Maguire’s dark, heartbreaking ending … let’s just say it gets, um, revised.

The movie convinced me that Glinda is actually the splashier, better-written role. I’ve always envisioned Glinda as an SEC-coded mean girl — blonde, bubbly, a bit passive-aggressive rather than aggressive-aggressive. Grande gets us there, and seems to really understand what makes this character so surprisingly funny. 

So buy or sell: Oscar nominee Ariana Grande?

Oh man. I buy.

This movie struggles a lot with its tone. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be as silly as the stage musical or as serious as the Maguire book, and as a result it ends up veering wildly around. The only element of this movie that never has this problem is Grande’s performance. 

Grande nails it top to bottom. She makes spoiled, selfish Glinda so gleefully mean, so deliciously phony in all her virtue-signaling, that you want to laugh at her the way you would laugh at Regina George — and then she shows you Glinda’s tender, insecure heart, and you fall in love with her. 

Grande has always had an uncanny knack for vocal mimicry, and here she pitches her speaking voice into something halfway between Judy Garland’s earnest Dorothy tones and the distinctive showbiz patter of Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda on Broadway. You wouldn’t think you could combine the two, but Grande does, and she makes it make sense. As for the singing — well, that kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? She’s in phenomenal voice.

Whatever happens with the Oscars race this year, I’ll know that Grande is the Academy Award nominee of my heart.

Tonally, the movie goes from Legally Blonde to The Fugitive. The last 10 minutes are absolutely bonkers. What in the world?

Yikes, right? For me, this tonal mismatch is the big flaw of the film, and I think it’s a byproduct of this very long and winding adaptation process. 

When Schwartz and Holzman adapted Maguire’s Wicked, they stripped away as much of his rather baroque mythologizing as they could while still allowing the plot to make a modicum of sense. The vibe of this musical is generally: Why go on and on about the ontological differences between humans and animals if we could be singing fun bops about being popular? It doesn’t all have to be so serious all the time.

In their version of the story, the Wizard’s plans are vague, but clearly evil, and Elphaba’s resistance to his regime is likewise vague, but clearly righteous. The Wizard’s main sin in the stage musical is that he is lying to his people to stoke up their fears and marshal support to his own side, because this musical hit Broadway in 2003, when George W. Bush was just about to invade Iraq. Other than that, we don’t know that much about why he’s so bad. We don’t really care, either. It all pretty much works if you just sit back in the theater and let the songs wash over you.

Chu, however, takes Wicked very seriously indeed; so much so that he’s stretched out the musical’s 90-minute first act into a lugubrious two hours and 40 minutes, mostly by keeping the pacing slow and solemn. The side effect of moving so slowly, though, is that it puts a lot of pressure on the political subplot of this musical to not only make sense, but to be emotionally impactful. Unfortunately, all of the background that could make it work got left behind in Maguire’s novel. 

Are we supposed to care this much about anti-animal fascism in the movie? Or the musical? Do the people who adapted Wicked care that much?

Yeah, this is one of the big plotlines where the cracks in the adaptation show. It also makes for a kind of interesting timeline of how different authors have thought about Oz.

One of the inconsistencies of L. Frank Baum’s Oz is that it’s a land where animals can talk and go on quests and be guests at dinner parties and so on — you’ll recall the Cowardly Lion — but also all the characters are constantly eating meat. It’s the kind of minor quirk in worldbuilding that a children’s book can skate right over, but it becomes weird and confusing in an adult novel.

So when Maguire wrote Wicked, he imagined an Oz that distinguished between Animals, who are talking and intelligent beings who wear clothes and hold jobs and can be invited to dinner parties, and animals in lowercase, who are non-sentient and can be killed or treated as chattel. In Maguire’s Oz, the Wizard consolidates his power in part by making the Animals into a scapegoat race. 

Emphasis, quite literally, on “goat.” 

Over the course of the novel, we see them go from full citizens to living under restrictions to slaves who are occasionally cooked and eaten. Elphaba is radicalized into terrorism when her favorite college professor, the Goat and Animal rights agitator Doctor Dillamond, is assassinated by the government. 

When Schwartz and Holzman got their hands on the story, they were transforming it once again into a children’s tale, so they didn’t particularly have time for this piece of worldbuilding. They ditched the distinction between Animal and animal, so that Doctor Dillamond becomes a guy in a silly goat costume who exists to nudge Elphaba into realizing that the Wizard might not have her best interests at heart. It would be a stretch to think that the stage musical really wants the audience to care about animals in general or Doctor Dillamond in particular.

Chu, characteristically, seems to want to give the animal plotline more gravitas. He makes Dillamond an eerily photorealistic CGI goat who appears in one of Elphaba’s visions shivering and cringing in a cage, in a dark foretelling of the Wizard’s eventual goals. Under Chu’s solemn and slightly heavy-handed touch, you can feel how important the animal rights plotline is to Elphaba’s character arc. But the part of Maguire’s novel that made you care about the animals, and about Elphaba’s commitment to their freedom, was jettisoned long ago. It’s an uneasy balance.

This contradiction is part of why, I think, Grande’s Glinda feels so much like a breath of fresh air whenever she appears on screen. The part of this story that Schwartz and Holzman cared about was Glinda and Elphaba, so that’s the part of the story architecture that remains rock solid. No matter what happens, you can’t not root for their friendship.

Are we going to get more of that in Wicked: Part II? Are people going to want to see the second half of this musical if it’s all about authoritarianism? 

I am very curious to see how Chu handles Wicked: Part II, because the second act of Wicked is famously much worse than the first half. All the iconic songs are over by then (although personally, I quite like “No Good Deed”), the storytelling gets bogged down in mythology that never becomes either clear or interesting, and Glinda and Elphaba spend most of the act in separate places, effectively depriving the show of its strongest dynamic for long stretches of stage time. In the stage show, you’re generally invested enough in the characters on the strength of the first half to sit through the second half with minimal complaints, but for that act two to hold its own for a full movie? Tricky! As for the anti-animal fascism, though, we can all breathe easy. As originally staged, Wicked’s act two focuses on the animal rights plotline for exactly as long as it takes to hook Elphaba up with her iconic flying monkeys and not a single second longer. We’ll see if Chu keeps it that way.