Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West / Gregory Maguire

The musical Wicked has taken the world by storm. It has a clever story, is endearing, and is filled with roles rich in character. Having seen it performed on stage twice and listened to its signature tunes dozens of times, my curiosity was piqued by certain aspects of the story that I thought certainly must be better explicated in the novel—like, just what was going on with Dr. Dillamond?, what was the spark that brought Elfie and Fiyero together? and what made people call Elphaba wicked? (And yes, don't be confused, this is most definitely an adult novel. You won't want to be reading it to Little Tommy and Suzie at bedtime.)

Let’s just say that the musical is very loosely based on the novel, taking a few ideas and concepts and throwing most of the story out. The reluctant friendship of Glinda and Elphaba is the most compelling element of the novel, and the creators of the musical took that nugget and out of it crafted a heartwarming story for their blockbuster Broadway hit. The novel seems to work until the point they leave Shiz, and then politics, intrigue, and exile take over, bogging the story down in what turns out to be a mushy, and quite frankly rather dull, middle of the book.

Until Dorothy and Toto enter the story in the last hundred or so pages (and Glinda comes back along with them), it’s just not that compelling. The novel only partly succeeds in putting another face on the Wicked Witch of the West—we want to like her, even though the author doesn't give us much to like, but the musical does a much better job at offering Elphaba a soul (something she explicitly lacks in the book). In addition to so cleverly exploiting and developing the love-hate relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, the stage version of Wicked handily explains the origin of the tinman and the scarecrow, something that the novel doesn’t do as neatly.

Would Wicked the novel be the success it has been if it hadn’t been based on L. Frank Baum’s beloved original version of Oz and the nostalgia we have for the Judy Garland movie? Definitely not. But had it never been written we would not have witnessed the Broadway phenomenon that ultimately has overtaken and outshone the novel that birthed it.

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