I first saw “Wicked” in 2003, when I was 22 and studying musical theater writing at N.Y.U. As a nascent musical theater writer, I was impressed by its craftsmanship and unusual premise: that the cackling, green-faced Wicked Witch of the West most of us know from the 1939 film has a name: Elphaba Thropp.
We also learn that she is not wicked at all. That’s just propaganda spread by Elphaba’s enemies because she stood up for the rights of the enchanted land’s talking animals, whom the not-so-wonderful Wizard of Oz had oppressed. At the time, the plot and its modern sensibility read very simply to me as a quirky, catchy musical fairy-tale soap opera subversion of a beloved classic.
It was only in the intervening years that I learned that “Wicked” was intended to have real world political resonance. With the election of President Trump to a second term, and the release of the first of its two parts as a film, “Wicked” has blossomed into what the director and producer Adam McKay recently described online as “one of the most radical big studio Hollywood movies ever made.” It is now feminist, queer and antifascist. I’ve even seen it suggested, however unseriously, that releasing the film before the 2024 election might have helped Kamala Harris win the presidency. “Wicked: Part One” is up for 10 Academy Awards on Sunday. If it wins Best Picture, I can only imagine that will be a signal to some on the liberal left that the roundly defeated Trump “resistance” is not so dead after all, and that the time has come to levitate on their brooms and take to the Western skies for battle in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
But are assertions like this reading too much into this film? Does Elphaba have anything at all to do with this or any political moment in America? Or are we engaging in what I call progressive magical thinking — a mode of reasoning that takes existing texts and then tries to reclaim or reimagine them for the purpose of imbuing them with socially correct attitudes or critiques? As a musical and a film, “Wicked” falls squarely in the middle of this trend that has been exacerbated over time and by the internet’s obsession with current events and “timeliness.”
But the inclusion of these references and themes does not paint a convincing portrait of any real-world political parallels in either 2003 (when “Wicked” opened on Broadway) or today.
As one example, progressive magical thinking makes it reasonable to suggest that because of the fact that L. Frank Baum, the writer of the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” upon which all of this is loosely based, had undeniably racist attitudes toward Native Americans, his judgment might have been too compromised to compassionately portray the true character of the Wicked Witch (a character he created), and thus, like child protective services, Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel that the musical is based on, and later Stephen Schwartz, its composer, and Winnie Holzman, who wrote the musical’s book, rightly took custody of Mr. Baum’s abused child with their revisions. But if Mr. Baum’s racism is so objectionable, isn’t any attempt to reimagine his work just striking a complicit and corrupt bargain with a bigot?
Shouldn’t his underlying intellectual property be condemned in its entirety? And why not scrutinize “Wicked” with even harsher eyes? To that end, I could very easily rebuke the Elphaba of the musical for choosing a love affair with Fiyero, a prince whom she met at the prestigious Shiz University, which the children of Oz’s elite attended together, over her duty to the more urgent cause of animal liberation. Is that because Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Holzman were too corrupted by a crypto-conservative agenda to do the braver, more radical storytelling that would empower Shiz University’s oppressed talking animal professors as well as those of us in the audience to revolt against our various fascist leaders?
While I am being facetious, in our world, progressive magical thinkers are spreading their own kind of propaganda. For them, the casting of Cynthia Erivo, a Black woman, as Elphaba (a role not typically played by a Black actor) affirms the fact that “Wicked” is also telling a subtextual story about racism (I wish I were making this up) because being Black is like being green. Talk about defying gravity. But what’s maddening is that in “Wicked,” Ms. Erivo’s casting is neither “colorblind” nor “color conscious,” it’s just color-coded into whatever the magical progressive thinker wants it to mean. For being Black to be like being green to work, “Wicked” would have to capture the systemic oppression of other green and Black people in Oz, which it cannot do because there are none.
Then there is the fact that Elphaba’s skin is only green because of a magical elixir the Wizard gave to her mother the night of her conception. Then there is the fact that Elphaba is the privileged and magically empowered daughter of the governor of Munchkinland so her green skin is a temporary social barrier at worst. But also, the discrimination Elphaba faces is nothing compared with that faced by the animals, which I’ve seen no magical progressive thinkers resonate with as strongly as with Ms. Erivo as Elphaba.
Progressive magical thinkers strongly want Ms. Erivo to win an Oscar. I believe that is not just because of the power of her performance, but because they conflate representation, “inclusion” and awards with political relevance. But in my view, color-coded casting is one of the most superficial incantations in the magical progressive thinker’s book of spells. It also does a disservice to an actress like Ms. Erivo by suggesting that when she plays Elphaba, it is primarily her Black racial identity, and the assumption of her innate Black suffering, that makes the journey of the character worth following. Ironically, this is a pretty timeless and popular belief about Black actors, though mentioning it is never considered relevant, convenient or timely.
In the introduction to “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Baum writes: “Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” The clarity of that is so satisfying.
Mr. Baum may have been a flawed messenger with an authorial intention that is old-fashioned by today’s magically progressive standards. But as an author and audience member, I greatly prefer it to attempts to promote a piece of art’s timeliness over its timelessness.
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