The first time I encountered Wicked, it was when my sister went to New York for a field trip for the Humanities and Arts program at school and my father went with her. I was still in elementary school, but I remember when she came back, I asked all about the trip and the show she saw. I had never been to Broadway and my sister just watched a Broadway show, it was unspeakably cool to me and that sentiment only grew when she told me about the play she saw: Wicked. My sister was one of the lucky people who got to see the original Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth production. At the time, my mind was blown at the thought of it, a story that takes everything you think you know about another story and flips it on its head.
By the time I finally was old enough to see a staged production of the show myself, Wicked had already asserted itself as one of my favorite musicals right next to Mamma Mia. Every once in a while, a new movie musical would come out and I would Google when Wicked would get its own movie finally, reading about how it’s long been talked about and the “new songs” the movie would have. By this time, I was old enough to understand certain elements of the movie, like how Elphaba’s greenness was an allegory for racism within Oz, but the full breadth of this story didn’t quite hit me until 2024. Maybe it’s the fact that this is the first time I viewed this play as an adult or maybe it’s the fact that 2024 has proven rife with challenges in the socio-political sphere itself, but Wicked is both a long time coming and yet, could not have come out at a better time.
At its heart, Wicked is the story of a fascist government and a character, already othered by her society, vilified for fighting against it. It’s the story of the love between two women and how their circumstances under fascism tore them apart. Themes regarding racism, queerness, and even immigration are all over Wicked, all of which become increasingly able to spot in the landscape of 2024.
Queerness has been all over Oz since Judy Garland was Dorothy. Garland is even considered a gay icon herself for her ties to the queer community, the phrase “friends of Dorothy” long being used to refer to gay people. The rainbow itself is essential to the movie, in which Garland’s Dorothy sings about a land where she can be happy and free; to no surprise, that is a message that gay people related strongly to. Likewise, Broadway has long been seen as a home for the queer community, with countless queer creatives spearheading productions as actors, playwrights, and more. To read Wicked through a queer lens fits better than the red slippers on Dorothy.
Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship is the driver of the play, which Cynthia Erivo notes “is true love, which is probably why people are shipping it.” And like Erivo, Ariana Grande notes the importance of the relationship without decrying the romantic undertones fans have picked up on, saying, “Glinda might be a little in the closet.” Early on when the two begin their relationship in the story, they note a “sudden and new” feeling from the moment they “laid eyes on [each other].” Said feeling is characterized with “rushing” pulse, “reeling” heads, and their faces flushed. The song doesn’t even name the feeling, titled, “What Is This Feeling?” The girls settle on “loathing” as the descriptor, but the lyrics themselves mirror the experience of an overwhelming romantic encounter, causing them to blush and their hearts to beat faster. This idea of the thin line between love and hatred is the heart of the film, in which the girls’ bond is the largest driver.
When Elphaba goes to experience her life’s goal at that point –meeting the wizard– she invites Glinda with her, which even the Wizard takes note of when he offers Glinda a place with them in his pitch to convince Elphaba to work with him. The love between the women is used again when the Wizard and Madame Morrible try to convince Glinda to bring Elphaba in, which Glinda notably doesn’t do. Instead, Elphaba and Glinda share a heartfelt goodbye, holding hands and making one last plea for the other to join them. Elphaba even defends Glinda during this number physically when the army men attempt to grab her.
But themes related to queerness doesn’t just show up in how a fascist government attempts to split up the women and weaponize one against the other. The speech Doctor Dillamond gives to his class about the way animals are being othered in Oz early in the play is strikingly familiar to many queer people in 2024, especially queer people in the education field. In “Something Bad,” Doctor Dillamond tells Elphaba he knows of “a professor from Quox no longer permitted to teach” and “an owl from Munchkin Rock…forbidden to preach.” In 2024, immediately I thought of the teachers who were assaulted after being posted on LibsofTikTok for simply being queer people in the teaching profession. I thought of the amount of queer people who left teaching because of said stochastic terrorists or the straight teachers who had their schools target of bomb threats because they dared to put a pride flag in their room to let queer kids know they were safe. I thought of the book bannings and the modern conservative push to ban books from libraries with queer characters because their goal is to make it so queer people do not feel safe in public at all.
When the Wizard tells Elphaba that his crusade against the animals worked because he needs someone to point the finger at and blame the hardships on. The Ozians talk about putting the animals in cages and in the classroom, we see a cub in a cage –all I could think about was the political relevancy of such an image: a child in a cage. I couldn’t help but think of the images I saw years ago when the government was separating children at the border, the cages, and the sexual assault of immigrants at the hands of ICE officers. Donald Trump ran on a ticket that blamed every hardship on immigrants, perfectly embodying the Wizards own fascist government and speech about othering the animals to give the people “someone to blame.”
It’s clear Elphaba’s greenness is an allegory for racism in Oz within the play so with the 2024 movie, I was glad to finally see a woman of color take on the pivotal role. Even in the film, it hits a particular chord to hear Madame Morrible declare her “green skin a physical manifestation of the wickedness within” and to see the cartoonish posters of Elphaba all over Oz after her death, each eerily reminiscent of propaganda posters from our history that caricatured a group of people’s features. Being othered her entire life for her green skin, Elphaba’s original wish is to ask the Wizard to “de-greenify” her, but as soon as she gets a chance to meet him, her singular wish is to help the animals from how the government is othering them. On some level, Elphaba achieves self-acceptance and has gotten unconditional love from someone for the first time in Glinda, which certainly play into her choice to change her wish, but ultimately she makes a stance: She will not change anything about herself that doesn’t need changing; she will use her wish to help others because she knows the pain of being othered.
At its heart, Wicked tells the story of a woman who was othered her entire life standing up to a fascist government that labels her a villain for noncompliance with their authoritarian rule. Wicked is a queer story, it’s a story that echoes themes of racism and xenophobia. Ultimately, Wicked is a story about fighting against a fascist regime, never sacrificing your own morals to stand up for what’s right. It’s a story about community and the power that comes with finding community –and how finding community can be crucial to achieving self-acceptance. In 2024, it’s incredibly relevant.
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