The Road to Wicked by Kent Drummond & Susan Aronstein & Terri L. Rittenburg

Author:Kent Drummond & Susan Aronstein & Terri L. Rittenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319931067
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Two Witches Instead of One

Schwartz may have been drawn to his “green Oz girl” as an “autobiographical story” about prejudice and exclusion, but he knew from the very beginning that successfully adapting the novel to a Broadway musical would need an author who could create dynamic, strong, believable female characters. 17 He chose Holzman, the writer behind the popular Clare Dane vehicle, My So Called Life—and serendipitously already interested in adapting Wicked—to write the musical’s book. And they began work on the difficult task of translating Maguire’s novel to the stage. Schwartz had already identified and published the story’s meaning, now the trick was to figure out what to keep and what to throw out; to discover, as Holzman joked on the eve of the San Francisco premiere, the musical’s narrative through-line. Holzman recalls, “I was gravitating right away to more of a love story,” a plot that she certainly would have needed to wrest from Maguire’s description of Fiyero’s and Elphaba’s tentative, secretive, and ultimately doomed affair. 18 However, Holzman continues, “the surprise came when it turned out that the love story was between two friends.” This twist on a story that had been originally conceived as centered around Elphaba came, according to reports, relatively late in the game, when the chemistry between Kristin Chenowith and Stephanie Bloch during a reading transformed Wicked into a tale of two witches. “As we were refining the book,” Holzman told Santa Rosa’s The Press Democrat, “We found that this is really a story about the friendship of these two women. We start with them meeting in college and being forced to room together, the green girl and the blond girl, and we go from there.” 19

In going “from there,” the musical riffs on the traditional Broadway romance plot while adhering to its central message. Wicked is, at its heart, a Golden Age Broadway musical, a celebration of an imagined community that brings its audience together within a constructed space to witness a tale that brings “seemingly incompatible peoples—or families, classes, races, ideas, ideologies, or whatever—into a stabilized partnership” and then sends that audience out into their communities with songs to be shared. 20 Wicked may tell a friend-meets-friend tale, but the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda still celebrates a union, still marks a moment of inclusion and diversity. By the end of the show, prior offenses are forgiven (if not forgotten); differences are resolved; and both parties are changed for good through having known each other. In their final scene together, Elphaba passes The Grimmerie, the central repository of Oz’s power, to Glinda. As the two main characters sing “For Good,” audiences bear witness to the power of female inclusiveness, as well as to the nascence of a morally grounded community capable of resisting the Wizard’s repressive regime. The musical also controverts the traditional Broadway notion that a woman’s path to fulfillment lies only through marriage (see, e.g., Hello Dolly!). Instead, Wicked places two powerful women on stage in a plot that emphatically passes the Bechdel Test.

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