Good is ‘the strongest gravity’, says ‘Wicked’ author Maguire

On November 21, 2024By Littum

The new big screen musical “Wicked” expands the fantasy world of L. Frank Baum’s original books and the classic 1939 MGM film adaptation starring Judy Garland. It also undermines them.

“Wicked,” based on a 1995 novel, challenges our preconceived notions of Baum’s characters. It explores the nature of evil through the complex friendship between Glinda, the good witch, and Elphaba, the wicked witch.

Why we wrote this

A story with a focus on

Fairy tales often present characters as either good or bad. “Evil” author Gregory Maguire asks readers to let go of binary thinking when considering morality.

Gregory Maguire, the author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” describes the story as “almost like a morality play.” A global phenomenon, “Wicked” ranks as Broadway’s second-highest-grossing production after “The Lion King.” The first part of the film adaptation will be in cinemas on Friday.

“The play manages to make wanting to be good, wanting to do good, into a theatrical gesture that everyone in the audience can recognize and remember,” says Mr. Maguire.

Distinguishing the line between good and evil is not always easy.

“It’s a conundrum that we have to live with,” he says. But, he adds, we can’t help but ask ourselves that question. To avoid doing so risks “taking the easy way out and taking early retirement from our jobs as moral agents in the universe.”

“Wicked,” the retelling of “The Wizard of Oz,” contains familiar elements. There’s a yellow brick road, an Emerald City, and even a cameo by Dorothy and Toto. Plus show tunes.

The upcoming big-screen musical expands on the fantasy world of L. Frank Baum’s original books and the classic 1939 MGM film adaptation starring Judy Garland. It also undermines them. “Wicked,” based on a 1995 novel, challenges our preconceived notions of Baum’s characters. It explores the nature of evil through the complex friendship between Glinda, the good witch, and Elphaba, the wicked witch.

“Are men born evil?” Glinda asks during the opening musical number. “Or have they inflicted evil upon themselves?”

Why we wrote this

A story with a focus on

Fairy tales often present characters as either good or bad. “Evil” author Gregory Maguire asks readers to let go of binary thinking when considering morality.

Confronting these questions can be scarier than meeting the flying monkeys of Oz.

Gregory Maguire, the author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” describes the story as “almost like a morality play.” The author, who invited the Monitor to visit his home, sits near a bookcase containing many of his works. To date, he has published 38 titles. Some are fantasy books for children. Others are adult reinterpretations of fairy tales such as “Cinderella” (“Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sister”) and “Snow White” (“Mirror, Mirror”). His blockbuster “Wicked” was adapted as a Tony-winning musical in 2003. It’s been defying gravity ever since.

In “Wicked,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo, left) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) form an unlikely friendship.

A global phenomenon, “Wicked” ranks as Broadway’s second-highest-grossing production after “The Lion King.” The first part of the film adaptation, which has been split into two parts, hits theaters on November 22. Meanwhile, Mr. Maguire is gearing up for a spring release for her latest book, “Elphie: A Wicked Childhood.”

In common, these different iterations stick, Mr. Maguire says, because they speak to the innate instinct in each of us to be good.

“The play manages to make wanting to be good, wanting to do good, into a theatrical gesture that everyone in the audience can recognize and remember,” says Mr. Maguire, his face glowing from a standing lamp in his wood paneling. room. But, he adds, Western culture has become somewhat embarrassed by this essential truth. “It goes hand in hand with the secularization of (the United States) … and the decline in church attendance. Anyone who talks about being good is ‘naff’ and is ‘simpleminded’.”

From a classic movie, a morality play

When Mr. When Maguire was a child, his four siblings called him “a moral guardian”. In part, he attributes it to his Catholicism. He was taught that good is “the strongest force of gravity in the progress of time”. Mr. Maguire was raised in a strict, lower-middle-class household in Albany, New York. Reading was encouraged. Television was rationed. Every year Mr. Maguire allowed to see “The Wizard of Oz”. Such was its strong hold on his imagination that he made his brothers and sisters play the Tin Man, the Lion, the Scarecrow and Dorothy. But the boy’s reenactments didn’t always stick closely to the film’s story, a precursor to the path he would take as an adult. At the time when Mr. Maguire began writing “Wicked” when he was an established children’s author.

“I started to feel that some of the themes I wanted to explore were more complex,” says Mr. Maguire, who raised three adopted children with her husband. “It was a very easy leap for me to think, ‘If I’m going to write about the nature of evil, I’m going to take an evil character in a children’s book and start unpacking her and see what it was, even as a child, I could determine were deeper constructions of passion and conflict in that character than we are generally aware of.”

Mr. Maguire’s literary reimagining is for mature readers. Its depiction of debauchery in Oz isn’t prurient, but readers expecting something akin to Baum’s children’s books will quickly realize, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

The musical and movie versions of “Wicked” are more family-friendly. Yet they retain the thematic core of the novel. Last year, Mr. Maguire London’s Elstree Studios to observe the filming of a key scene in the film.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“Wicked” books, many translated into foreign languages, are on the author’s shelves.

The two witches meet at the university. Popular girl Galinda (Ariana Grande) is saddled with an unwanted roommate, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). The latter is a social outcast born with green skin and razor blades. She also has an aversion to water. Galinda (later known as Glinda) mists Elphaba. It’s “Mean Girls: Oz Edition.” But when Galinda sees the hurt behind her roommate’s stoic eyes, it awakens empathy in her.

“At least three times I had tears in my eyes,” says Mr. Maguire, who spent three days watching the actors. “The scenes where they were vulnerable had tears in their eyes.”

A fuller picture of a complicated witch

“Wicked” portrays Elphaba as a well-rounded human being. Her later deeds are the consequence of several factors and experiences rather than of a simple, reductive reason. (The forthcoming “Elphie: A Wicked Childhood,” based on chapters dropped from the first draft of “Wicked,” delves deeper into the witch’s troubled upbringing.) The novel’s nuanced complexity avoids didacticism. The world is dominated by binary thinking, says Mr. Maguire. Everything is black or white. There is no room in the middle.

“That’s definitely how a lot of us come through the world as kids. It’s like, ‘OK, this is bad; this is good; this is right; this is wrong,'” says Emily Kay Shrader, co-host of “Down the Yellow Brick Pod”, a podcast about the world of Oz, including Mr. Maguire’s “brilliant” novels. “The most challenging thing about growing up is recognizing that it is such a spectrum. That whether it’s someone you meet on the street or it’s yourself, there really isn’t a box you can put someone into.”

Shrader adds that it’s a good reminder to check herself every time she meets someone who has a different political background than her.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Gregory Maguire’s gardener put witches’ bones in a planter outside his home.

“We’ve gotten more and more used to believing that we can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t match our string of ones or strings of zeros,” agrees Mr. Maguire. “It’s true about how culture speaks (about) itself to us.”

But the novelist is not a moral relativist. After all, Elphaba becomes a terrorist to fight the sinister Wizard who rules Oz. “She’s not the Wicked Witch of MGM or L. Frank Baum,” he says. “But she’s not a saint either. She makes many mistakes and she is morally confused. She is willing to hurt people if she can, and if she can do it to advance what she believes to be a good cause.”

Distinguishing the line between good and evil isn’t always easy, the author says, before ushering his visitors on a tour of his “Wicked” memorabilia, from figurines to umbrellas.

“It’s a conundrum that we have to live with,” says Mr. Maguire. But, he adds, we can’t help but ask ourselves that question. To avoid doing so risks “taking the easy way out and taking early retirement from our jobs as moral agents in the universe.”