‘Wicked’ Takes the Stage in VF’s November Issue

On a flawless summer day in Los Angeles, I watched two witches work their magic. They defied not only gravity but also a rain machine, as you’ll see in Norman Jean Roy’s glorious photographs, styled by the inimitable Patti Wilson. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have taken the backstory of Oz’s characters to heart, and we cannot wait to see their chemistry on the screen when Wicked (part one!) comes out in November. Chris Murphy speaks to each star solo and captures their dynamic together in his profile of two women putting their stamp on a theatrical property beloved for its interpretation of Gregory Maguire’s excellent 1995 novel, which itself recasts our notion of The Wizard of Oz, one of the most famous American stories of all time. High bar, big shoes, but Erivo and Grande are up to the task.

In the summer of 2023, I spoke with Ta-Nehisi Coates about a piece he wanted to write out of South Carolina. He’d been following accounts of censorship around the US amid the political backlash to the racial-justice protests of 2020 and had encountered a high school teacher who was being forced to remove his book Between the World and Me from her syllabus. Ta-Nehisi wanted to go to the school board meeting, hear what was said, report it out. After his trip he emailed to say, “I’ve gone a little deeper than I thought,” whereupon I made the rookie error of telling him not to rush it, and now, a year later, we are so proud to publish his dispatch from Chapin, South Carolina. This story is a chapter in Ta-Nehisi’s new book, The Message, about the power of narrative to shape not only identity but also reality, to imagine into being things that might not otherwise seem possible. What I’ll never forget, perhaps because the conversation happened when I was spending time with my father in his final days, is that Ta-Nehisi called me after the hearing in a state of unexpected optimism. It wasn’t merely that he had witnessed people defending his book and their right to teach and be taught it. It was the spirit of finding allies in the larger project of literature and the role it plays in human understanding.

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