Wicked Oz

1939 was an amazing year in Hollywood. Gone With the Wind was the big Oscar winner, picking up Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and five other Bests. It is hard to believe that another film, The Rains Came, landed the prize for Best Visual Effects, beating out not only GWTW, but another classic and visually delicious movie that year, The Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz picked up a couple of music Oscars, one for Best Song (‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’) and Best Score, but the movie didn’t do as well at the box office as others, though it was plenty popular in its day. It wasn’t until 1959 when CBS began running the film once annually that L. Frank Baum’s story of friends helping friends hit the cultural jackpot. Many of us baby boomers, in fact, look to those special evening television presentations of Dorothy & Toto’s adventures into the puzzling and wonderful land of Oz as the root of our love for the story. Just yesterday I had lunch with an age-mate, and he declared that after all his years of movie watching, The Wizard of Oz is still his favorite film.

In 1995, Gregory Maguire thickened the Oz plot by releasing his dark prequel of ‘The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,’ Wicked. I can remember the first time I learned of Maguire’s book. It was at the Audubon Camp in Maine on a day we headed out on the water to see what we could find. There were probably twenty of us participants on board, along with a few student assistants, one having parked herself in the stern intently reading Maguire. I was immediately intrigued with the concept of celebrating the Wicked Witch in a book all her own, and though I don’t recall exactly where I picked up my own copy, I’ll just bet I stopped in the bookshop in Camden before I headed home. It has been a favorite story of mine ever since.

Margaret Hamilton played the Wicked Witch in the movie. She was absolutely perfect for the role. Her voice was menacing, the mole on her face was creepy, and her ability to muster flying monkeys and throw fire on command from inside that eerie green body of hers made a believer out of me. I know that when the monkeys came at the Wicked one’s command to collect Dorothy and ‘her little dog, too’ from the Enchanted Forest while brutally destroying her friends in the process, it was potty break time for this nine year-old. The next thing I remember was the rumble in the rocks when the Lion, sounding suddenly brave, eventually pleaded with the Scarecrow and the Tinman to talk him out of a castle rescue attempt.

I have, without question, fallen in love with Elphaba. How can you not love a girl born tragically green? Don’t get me wrong, I love green, but it’s not a color I connect to a healthy person’s skin. Her unnatural green made her an outcast from infancy, rejected even by her parents. She grew up a social anomaly and somehow, miraculously, developed a compassionate personality for the disenfranchised. We can assume her own personal pain tempered her character to speak out for those who had lost their own voices. What’s not to love about that?

I have also, without question, fallen in love with Emily Dickinson, she who decided in her early adulthood that the world was better when viewed at arm’s length. A self-imposed recluse, Emily felt deeply about the natural world and in her letters and poetry reflected often on love, death, birds, flowers, Earth, and sisterhood. The more I think about it, drawing further comparisons between Emily and Elphaba might be an enlightening self analysis. But I’ll leave that for another day.

The Broadway story is different from Maguire’s Wicked, first because it’s a musical, and second for focusing as much or more on Glinda the Good, the show’s other protagonist. The musical offers funny and timely references to both the 1939 movie and the world in which we live.

I find Wicked a great opportunity to revisit Oz with a different pair of glasses -- not so much emerald as older and wiser.

Today’s elder idea: So if you care to find me, look to the western sky! As someone told me lately, everyone deserves the chance to fly!

Elphaba, from ‘Defying Gravity’