The clearest candidate for America’s favorite fairy tale might be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Author L. Frank Baum set the novel, published in 1900, in a fantasy land that shares core American values: self-sufficiency, personal reinvention, the exploration of broader frontiers. The book’s young heroine, Dorothy, is taken to Oz, where she befriends magical creatures, outwits a witch, and relies on her newfound strength and new friends to return home. For Dorothy, it is a land of empowerment and possibility; for Baum, who perpetuated the distorted ideals of manifest destiny in his other writings— and for its many readers, it was an otherworldly depiction of the American expanse, a place they perhaps wanted to see for themselves.
Baum’s novel and its sequels were major literary phenomena of their time. But Oz persists primarily through the numerous adaptations of the books, which established the series’ enduring iconography. Baum’s world is best remembered for appearing on screen, most notably in the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy: a place full of songs such as “Over the Rainbow” and visuals such as the Yellow Brick Road, which have become one of the franchise’s most memorable features. And with The Wonderful Wizard of OzSince the 1956 entry into the public domain, allowing the creation of new, non-canonical works, subsequent generations have reiterated these features to tell their own Oz stories.
No transformation has been more vital to the longevity of Oz than Wickedthe revisionist origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of Baum’s most recognizable villains. Based on author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, WickedThe importance of lives up to that of its source text, and yesterday’s release of the first part of the highly anticipated film adaptation of the musical will undoubtedly broaden its reach. Key to WickedThe success of – and its ability to connect Oz’s past and future – lies in its astute understanding of what, exactly, makes this world work so well.
Artists of all genres and mediums have found, for decades, great storytelling potential in Baum’s characters and mythology. But the mode to which Oz has continued to lend itself best is musical theater, a genre predicated on the suspension of disbelief and therefore well suited to conveying Oz’s strange earnestness. The Wizard of OzThe Broadway musical debut in 1903 was a success, sparking requests for more stories, prompting Baum to write a total of 13 sequels to his book.
The film Garland, inspired in part by the success of the musical, cemented Oz’s connection to music, but it was The magician this brought him back to the theater, in 1974. The latter was the first majorly reimagined entry in the franchise, a celebration of black culture that took Dorothy’s story into the 1970s. During its four years on Broadway , The magician won multiple Tony victories; the film adaptation (less well received) notably starred superstars of the era, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, respectively. The magician showed that Baum’s novel could be successfully reinterpreted in a contemporary setting, and that its story and characters were updated accordingly. This transposition did not sacrifice the basic images and themes (Dorothy still fights flying monkeys and dons magic slippers to return home), but rather retained and even increased their cultural power.
Oz hasn’t translated as well to adult-oriented dramatic settings, despite the efforts of many writers and filmmakers. The 1985 Disney film Return to Oz reintroduces the world using lesser-known characters from Baum’s later books; although it presented that of Oz convincing featureslike sentient furniture and disembodied human heads, it was a critical and box office failure, deemed too dark for younger viewers. Science fiction authors including Robert Heinlein, Philip José Farmer, and even Stephen King have written stories incorporating Oz that received mixed reviews. The Syfy miniseries The Tin Man and NBC’s flop of a season Emerald City most of the time, they failed to resonate either. Only Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West– a story fraught with adultery, murder and slavery – has captured the popular imagination. Wicked became THE contemporary text of Oz, perhaps even replacing Baum’s work: it perpetuates the mixture of country magic and violent spectacle of the original novels while introducing modern literary themes. Maguire’s biggest change was transforming Baum’s antagonist into an anti-hero, reframing a simple villain as a woman misunderstood by her peers – an experience probably more relevant to today’s readers than the story simpler Dorothy about good versus evil.
Wicked used the whimsy and strangeness of Oz to deepen Baum’s seemingly unambiguous world, strictly divided between good and evil. The basic premise was a powerful one: What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t so bad after all, what if the Wizard – and the seemingly perfect society he oversaw – was the real threat? In his account, Maguire, an Oz fan since childhood, named Baum’s one-dimensional, green-skinned villain Elphaba Thropp; it also gave her a complicated parentage, a soapy romantic arc, and a dormitory. She attended Shiz University alongside a diverse group of colorful, slang-speaking Ozians. And, developing a darker side of Baum’s fanciful creation, Maguire also gave Elphaba a political motivation to wreak havoc in her homeland: the oppression of its talking animals. But Maguire’s most important addition was the academic friendship between Elphaba and Glinda the Good Witch (one of the Wicked Witch’s sworn enemies in Baum’s novel); the musical transforms this connection into its emotional core.
The 2003 Broadway adaptation gave some of the sparkle of the Garland-directed film to Maguire’s story and made it appropriate for audiences of all ages. By foregrounding the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, the musical highlighted Baum’s thematic interest in friendship and self-discovery. Theatergoers could identify with Glinda’s cheerfulness and lust for popularity and Elphaba’s fish-out-of-water awkwardness in the same way they could, watching The Wizard of Oz or while reading Baum’s novel, imagine yourself in Dorothy’s place, looking for a home. By simplifying Maguire’s plot, the musical better captured the fairytale feeling of Baum’s novel. Since its opening, its appeal has proven universal.Wicked became the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time.
Its success has also translated behind the scenes in particularly generative ways. Wicked is now the starting point for many fan works – a meta-development, because the series itself is a fan work of a fan work. Fan fiction based on the musical has become a genre in its own right; many works imagine a queer relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. Hits such as Glinda’s bubbly “Popular” and Elphaba’s anthem “Defying Gravity” are well-orchestrated articulations of the show’s ethos, inspiring amateur and professional performances alike. Artist lovers and theater enthusiasts often reimagine and revisit Wickedjust like budding Broadway fans who haven’t attended a production in person: an abundance of bootleg recordings has made Wicked one of the most accessible entry points into musical theater. It is also a gateway to the larger world of Oz. Wicked and its own iterations – including its long-awaited film adaptation, which has already become a cultural event – work for the same reasons as Baum’s original story: they evoke a dynamic, accessible and unforgettable world.
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