Before Seeing Wicked, Read Gregory Maguire’s Very Weird, Very Adult Oz Novels

By Kayleigh Donaldson  |  November 20, 2024 | 11:00am
Books Features Gregory Maguire
Before Seeing Wicked, Read Gregory Maguire’s Very Weird, Very Adult Oz Novels

The long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Wicked, the multi-million-selling Broadway musical, finally arrives on our screens this month (or, at least, the first half does.) Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande star as the witches bad and good who get to tell their side of the story that was omitted from L. Frank Baum’s beloved Oz novels. Wicked is perhaps the single most iconic musical still running on Broadway following the closure of The Phantom of the Opera. It enthralls musical die-hards and casual visitors alike with its showy production values, series of earworm-worthy tunes, and a central narrative about female friendship, love, and finding your true self. One could argue that, for the youngest generation, the story of The Wicked Witch of the West is more thoroughly defined in their imaginations by Wicked than The Wizard of Oz.

Creatives have plundered Baum’s work for decades, finding ways to adapt, reinvent, or straight-up rip off the Oz mythos. Wicked, however, isn’t technically a Baum adaptation. It’s based on a very strange and very serious adult novel that used the Oz story as a platform to explore the origins of human evil. That book is also a far pricklier creature than the toe-tapping tale of empowerment that’s still running on Broadway.

Published in 1995, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was never intended to be read by kids. Author Gregory Maguire was a children’s author who had begun to think about issues of good and bad while watching news coverage of both the first Iraq war and the murder of baby James Bulger by two pre-teen boys. He wondered if evil was something one was born with or if it was created through circumstance. Using this age-old conundrum as his foundation, he turned to Baum’s Oz books, which he was a lifelong fan of, to further tease out his ideas. Why was the Wicked Witch so wicked, and did she get a bad rap from young Dorothy Gale and her friends?

Wicked is a very weird book. It’s a dense political thriller about an eco-terrorist who becomes the patsy of a corrupt government trying to avoid a civil war incited by their enforcement of an Apartheid system. And yes, it has witches and munchkins and talking lions. 

The witch Elphaba (named after the author—L. Frank Baum = ElPhaBa) is a green-skinned daughter of an alcoholic who was date-raped. She was raised by a self-loathing bisexual preacher alongside her sister, who becomes the mystical version of Pat Robertson. At university, she meets Glinda, the future good witch of the north, and they become embroiled in a plot to help the Oz government retain its iron grip on the masses. Elphaba, however, revolts, calling out the two-tier system of inequality that the nation’s anthropomorphic animals live under. This leads to her being declared an enemy of the state and their convenient scapegoat. 

The Elphaba of the book is a far pricklier protagonist than the one in the musical, who is mostly an outsider who finds herself through love, a cool BFF, and a banging end-of-act-one song.

Her great love affair with Fiyero, the fickle prince who becomes her paramour in the musical, is one of adultery because he’s already married and has several kids when they begin their affair (the book also spends a solid paragraph detailing Elphaba’s pubic hair after they’ve f*cked.) She even births a child, a son named Liir, while in a grief coma. Not very Broadway-friendly, right?

While Wicked is based on Baum’s novels, its references to the 1930 film The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, are obvious. While the books are in the public domain, the movie is not, so Maguire carefully sidestepped issues of copyright while still maintaining those connections to the movie. The specific shade of green of the witch, for instance, is an MGM copyright issue. So are the magical shoes, which are ruby red in the film but silver on the page. You’re still supposed to read Wicked and think of the movie, of course, which puts Maguire’s work in a fascinating context. The Baum novels have frequently been analyzed for their potential political undertones. Many read the Silver Slippers and Yellow Brick Road as allegories for the era’s gold standard monetary policy, and suggested that Dorothy’s companions were metaphors for contemporary social divides. Where the movie has none of that, Maguire took all of that subtext and made it text. 

The most obvious political detail comes in how Elphaba is set up as a propagandistic enemy by the state of Oz. The Wizard’s grand agenda requires the Animal population (referring to the anthropomorphic individuals who can speak, like the Cowardly Lion) to be treated as dangerous second-class citizens who could be a threat to their war plans. Elphaba immediately sees it as propaganda, a way to put a target on someone’s back to distract from the real issue. Maguire says he was influenced to write this after seeing a newspaper headline in 1991 comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and wondering about the ramifications of such a comparison. Certainly, when Elphaba rises up against Oz, joining an underground terrorist group working out of the Emerald City, the Wizard publicly declares her to be Wicked, perhaps the most loaded term to use for a witch in this setting. 

Many of these details are still present in the musical, but in a softened rewrite. It’s a brilliant adaptation, if only in how it remolds this material into something with near-universal appeal. You do lose that political sharpness around Elphaba’s moral complexities, but at least the songs are catchy. 

After the musical became a hit, Maguire kept writing Oz stories. In 2005, he published Son of a Witch, a sequel that followed Elphaba’s son Liir as he navigated Oz in the aftermath of the Wizard’s fall from grace and a growing civil war. Inspired by the Abu Ghraib torture photos (yes, really), Maguire delved even further into the political details, showing how a nation in disarray responded to a power vacuum. He also made the books more LGBTQ+ inclusive, building on the ways that the Judy Garland film became beloved by queer audiences to the point where “friend of Dorothy” is a slang term for being gay. 

Two more sequels followed: 2008’s A Lion Among Men, about the Cowardly Lion and his tragic backstory; and 2011’s Out of Oz, which focuses on Elphaba’s granddaughter and Oz in the midst of its own Great Depression. Maguire’s Oz Rain then received her own spin-off trilogy.is now almost as expansive as Baum’s original creation. And it’s still growing. A prequel focused on Elphaba’s childhood is set to be released next year.

Public domain stories will always be reinvented and reimagined, if only because it’s free and the entertainment industry will plunder every IP into oblivion. Gregory Maguire’s take on Oz has long evolved into its own thing independent of Baum’s novels and the musical it inspired. The Wicked series is a fascinating example of using a pre-existing text as the foundation for a whole new perspective on the familiar. It’s unlikely the musical movie will add some of those stranger and more challenging details back to the story but Maguire’s imaginative and morally dense take on a children’s tale deserves to be appreciated as more than the source for “Defying Gravity.” 

Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.

 
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