The journey from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Wicked

Wicked has been dubbed as Broadway’s Musical Phenomenon; showing for 10 consecutive years; won 50 major awards including a Grammy, three Tony Awards, six Helpmann Awards; and played for 37 million audience members all over the world. And today, Jan. 22, Wicked is set to open in the Philippines, at the Main Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), to cast its spell on the Filipino audience.

What is it in Wicked that has made it so attractive, so alluring to audiences worldwide? Wicked has attracted viewership from the Americas, to Asia and now the Philippines. 

If the basic plot began with the children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, it was picked up on 1969 by MGM and called The Wizard of Oz, and then transformed into a theatrical work Wicked in 2003. Their back-stories should give us an idea of why these various versions should be similarly honored.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the original children’s novel written by American writer L. Frank Baum in 1900, is often thought of as a showplace of strangeness and oddity. There are many symbols in his writings, attributed to his having been a newspaper editor before he became a novelist. Baum is said to have been influenced by political cartoons, so much so that he drew inspiration from them. The characters in Wicked include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrible, and lessons learned from childhood. It sounds to us very much like our komiks writers whose predictions had their birth as komiks characters and situations. 

In 1969, MGM released The Wizard of Oz the movie, directed by Victor Fleming, with a cast of Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton, etc. Writer Steven Greydanus wrote then that the film was “one of a very few shared experiences that unite(d) Americans as a culture, transcending barriers of age, locale, politics, religion and so on… It ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and of fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.”

In Victor Fleming’s film, the lead Dorothy is whisked away from home after suffering a blow on the head and having already decided to leave home. Some of Dorothy’s experiences are so frightful that they can still make grown-ups shudder, remembering them from childhood. There is the horrible appearance of the Witch in the middle of the Munchkin celebration; the blazing, vision of “Oz the Great and Terrible”; the horrid blue-faced Winged Monkeys, swooping down upon four friends and carrying Dorothy up, up and away.

If these images are already terrible, can one imagine what Fleming had left out of Baum’s book! There is a monstrous spider with foot-long fans; the violent origin of the Tin Woodman; the fight between the Tin Man and killer wolves he bloodily decapitates, etc. And we are saying Baum wrote this book for children?

The question has often been asked as to why we introduce such frightening elements to our children. Some answer that the stories with dark elements may act as some sort of cathartic warning to children that life is not a fairy tale and they should be careful. It is said that there is enough magical moments such as the arrival of Glinda the Good; the meeting with Scarecrow; the wonderful sight of the Emerald City skyline; and