Update: ticket information for Wicked in Calgary and Edmonton is now available. The show stops in Calgary from June 29 to July 17, and in Edmonton from July 20 to August 7.
The Blogger never fell in love with The Wizard of Oz. I’m not certain if it was the product of my immigrant upbringing, a complete lack of interest in the film as a child, or a total unawareness of what it means to so many others that allowed it to pass me by. I didn’t even see the actual film until after I turned 30, although by the time I saw it, so many people had told me what happens in it years before that I knew the entire story before viewing it and felt that I had already seen it.
The Blogger never fell in love with The Wizard of Oz. I’m not certain if it was the product of my immigrant upbringing, a complete lack of interest in the film as a child, or a total unawareness of what it means to so many others that allowed it to pass me by. I didn’t even see the actual film until after I turned 30, although by the time I saw it, so many people had told me what happens in it years before that I knew the entire story before viewing it and felt that I had already seen it.
Strangely enough, my trip to Oz was presaged by a reading of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist novel from the same source material. Turning the story on its head, the novel charts the Wicked Witch of the West’s history, including her tortured birth and her time at Shiz University, where she meets Glinda the Good Witch (then named Galinda) and they become unlikely friends. Also, Maguire gives her the name Elphaba. It turns out that the Wizard was not so wonderful. Enchanted, anthropomorphized animals integrated into society and, like humans, held down jobs and were highly educated.
The Wizard, in a form of ethnic cleansing, instigates a systemic eradication of these magical creatures and gives them lobotomies, thus robbing them of their faculties and higher functions. Elphaba, as a fierce defender of these creatures, watched helplessly as her favourite professor, an enchanted creature, was reduced to a shadow of his former self under the Wizard’s rule of law. Elphaba declared war on the Wizard and was thus named the Wicked Witch of the West, since she was only wicked to the Wizard and the citizens of Oz who fall under his rule. (Her sister was the Wicked Witch of the East, hardly a fair assessment given that she was herself confined to a wheelchair and seemed to be “wicked” purely by political affiliation and genealogy. Named Nessarose, she is a powerful politician in the novel and the musical.)
If The Wizard of Oz were a historical chronicle of the wars in that place and time, then it was a history written by the winners: the Wizard, the Munchkins, and the unwitting Dorothy, an opportunist who only used the Wizard to return to a barren hinterland. Wicked is a witty, sinister novel that tweaks with our notions of good and evil by asking critically, what is “good”? Does “evil” exist? Is either of these simply a moral or a philosophical concept signifying social values, or is there anything intrinsic in either? Do they only have value in relation to one another and, when you remove that contrast, is there nothing left but a series of categorical imperatives? How do you assign value to a life? Maguire’s text gives dignity to Elphaba’s story.
