While it wasn’t a bestseller when it was released in 1995, the Book was a word-of-mouth hit, says Maguire. “Every year it would sell more than the year before. It was the genuine definition of a sleeper hit.” Stephen Schwartz’s decision to adapt the book into a musical made it even more popular. The musical version of Elphaba is more misunderstood and kinder than the increasingly dark and bitter version in the book. Wicked has been playing in New York since 30 October 2003, making it the fourth-longest-running Broadway show of all time.
Such success meant a Hollywood adaptation was inevitable. But much like the musical, Wicked the film (part one), deviates from the book in several ways, perhaps to make it more accessible for mainstream audiences. Rather than being entirely Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo)’s story, we see Glinda (Ariana Grande)’s perspective, too, as the story revolves much more around their friendship. The film unfolds at Shiz University in the Land of Oz, where Elphaba and Glinda are forced to share a room. While they start off hating each other, they quickly become friends, and they both fall for the same handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey). But as they continue their studies, they discover the sinister plot unfolding in the Land Of Oz, which is forcing the country’s talking animals to go into hiding.
Wicked’s continued resonance
Dana Fox, who co-wrote the film with Winnie Holzman, says part of Wicked’s success is down to how Maguire twisted the expectations of the audience. Before the book, everyone would insist, “The green witch is evil. We all know she’s bad. But if you ask a person why she is evil, they can’t answer,” Fox tells the . “The brilliance of Maguire’s book is that he interrogated that very question.”
While Maguire was contemplating these themes and his potential story for Wicked, an incident occurred that made him think more deeply about the nature of evil. On 12 February 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was murdered by two 10-year-olds in Merseyside, England. As Maguire watched reports of this tragedy unfold on television, people on programmes and over dinner would discuss the terrible crime these boys had committed. It made Maguire, who was living in London at the time, wonder, “Where did the decision to do what they did come from? Where did that capacity for evil come from?” As the murder continued to be analysed, and intellectual discussions continued about whether “sociological, biochemical, or spiritual reasons were to blame”, says Maguire, he realised that the atrocity fed into “everything he had been considering” about Wicked. “That sad, sad event proved to be a catalyst for me to push forward,” says Maguire.
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Shortly after the book was released, Maguire learned that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had quoted from it in an essay he wrote on the subject of evil, he says. “The one line he quoted from Wicked in the article, which sums all of this up, is, ‘It is the nature of evil to be secret’. In a 406-page novel, he had found the one sentence that was the most coherent and comprehensive conclusion I had drawn up.”
