Wicked: The musical reimagining of The Wizard of Oz shows a way to reclaim the American dream

The great and powerful Wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldblum, called it right. In Wicked’s trailer, he says: “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

In the recent US election, Trump had a long list of people he could parade as the enemy. The political establishment, the media elite, would-be assassins. There were also endless enemies to blame for any ills the electorate were experiencing; all of the above, but above all migrants. And so voters came together to re-elect him.

It feels like a tornado has torn through the fabric of society. As we try to make sense of where we’re heading, a story a century and a quarter old has suddenly found its moment.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

In 1900, L Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, documenting Dorothy’s trip over the rainbow. It’s considered the original and definitive American fairy tale; its impact on popular culture cemented by the 1939 technicolour spectacular.

Like all good fairy tales, it can be told and retold to give fresh perspectives on contemporary times. Gregory Maguire wrote the novel Wicked in 1995, which fills in the backstory of the Witch of the West and how she was framed as wicked to bring unity to the land of Oz. It was adapted into a stage musical by Stephen Schwartz in 2003 that became and remains a Broadway smash, and has been running in London’s Apollo Victoria Theatre since 2006.

This week, after decades of development, a blockbuster version starring powerhouse Cynthia Erivo and pop icon Ariana Grande, alongside Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh and Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey, lands in cinemas. 

The musical has a soaring emotional power and could be the dose of positivity we need. And it arrives with extraordinary prescience at a time when its themes of decency, deception, power and control are intensely relevant. (Imagine if this tale of female empowerment had been accompanied by the country’s first female president-elect.)

“A story is meant to be told when it’s meant to be told,” says Wicked’s director Jon M Chu about the fateful timing. “The show was actually very prophetic, talking about some of the same things we’re going through now. What is truth? Who gets to tell the story? Who determines who’s a hero, who’s a villain?”

Each iteration of Wicked expands the canvas, telling how Elphaba was ostracised and outcast from birth on account of her being…  different. She meets Glinda at Shiz University and the pair go from roommates with a mutual loathing to friends who don’t always find a straightforward path towards their destinies.

The movie is being released into turbulent times, but it grew directly out of a similarly trying period when the world was locked down.

“I came in with an urgency to make this movie,” Chu says. “It was in the middle of the pandemic and I thought this movie needs to be made right now because we are going through so much change. This show is about change and the uncomfortableness of that. And we have to get used to it because on the other side is something really beautiful – but the only way out is through.”

Chu recalls that in Baum’s original book, the sense of the American dream is intertwined with that of progress and idealism, with happiness the ultimate goal. “The further we’ve gone along in history, is being happy the goal for everybody?” Chu asks. 

“Happiness negates the idea of change, in a way, because you’re comfortable. When you do have to face and confront things, you’re not prepared. Maybe the unbeaten path is where we have to head. Maybe there is no person that’s going to save us and we are in charge of saving ourselves.”

‘The stories we make are really important’

The American dream has never seemed so close or so far out of reach, depending on your political persuasion. Chu, 45, feels like an embodiment of its potential. He says there were many times his family talked about the Yellow Brick Road in relation to them coming to America. 

The son of immigrants from China and Taiwan, Chu grew up folding napkins in his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Los Altos, California, frequented by Silicon Valley hotshots including Mark Zuckerberg.

A student film he made while at the University of Southern California caught the eye of Steven Spielberg. Chu was summoned for a meeting. It was like being granted an audience with the Wizard. There was talk of remaking Bye Bye Birdie but it never came to pass. 

Just like Dorothy and the gang, there was no easy wish fulfilment. He had to find his own way and ended up stronger as a result. Chu directed dance extravaganzas Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D and a couple of Justin Bieber concert films. Then the release of his film Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 changed everything. 

“The stories that we make in Hollywood or elsewhere around the world are actually really important,” Chu says. “I saw it firsthand with Crazy Rich Asians. It’s not a perfect movie but the moment you showed Asian people as beautiful, as charming, with as much class as you would see in any classic Hollywood film, suddenly the world can see it. And once you see it, you can’t ignore it. And now there is a place to make a movie better than ours and build characters more complicated than ours.”

• Cynthia Erivo on identity, migrant crisis and what she’s learned playing Elphaba in Wicked
• Labour must ‘learn the lessons’ of Donald Trump’s election win – or face right-wing surge

Crazy Rich Asians’ global success opened doors for films such as Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once getting wide releases and Oscar recognition. Chu next brought Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights bursting onto the screen with infectious vibrancy. His latest project is another American fairy tale of sorts: the adaptation of Britney Spears’s autobio-graphy, The Woman in Me.

“I think she deserves her story to be told in the fairest way,” Chu says. “Human beings aren’t made to go through what she went through, what Ariana Grande or Justin Bieber go through. Justin was 14, 15 when I was on tour with him, and no person – adult or kid – is meant to go through that.”

Before we get Britney’s story one more time, Chu has to finish his next film, the second part of Wicked. He is calling Big Issue from the editing room. The fact that Wicked has been cleaved into two halves – the first film slightly shorter than the full two-hour-45-minute stage production (including interval) – has caused confusion among fans.

This interview is taking place on the first day Chu is working on part 2 in the editing room. Will the second part be just as long?

“We’ll find out later. It may be an hour!”

Does it have a title other than part two?

“We’ll have to wait to find out. The movie will tell us. We had to extend it to two movies because every time we tried to shorten it, you lost either the fact that it was Wicked, the musical that we know and love, or it rushed through moments that were just not emotionally believable, not emotionally satisfying,” Chu explains.

“Cinema is a different medium so you get a different set of tools. I try to interpret what the show made me feel and expand on those feelings. I want to allow it to have more meat or have silence in certain areas and not have to play to the back of the theatre. We expand the scope to be as big as Oz requires, to see the Emerald City, Munchkinland, to be in the grounds of the Yellow Brick Road. 

“Yet to me, the show was always very intimate. That’s the secret sauce. This relationship between two women who see the world very differently from each other.

“When Cynthia sings, ‘Something has changed within me, something is not the same…’ Sure, we’ve heard those words many times, they’re the words to Defying Gravity. But when she sings it, her wounds are so raw and we’re so connected with how she’s feeling.”

‘It’s OK to be on the outside’

The first Wicked focuses on Elphaba as she goes from desperately trying to fit in to flying solo; the second on Glinda’s transformation from slightly annoying to glowingly good.

The casting feels perfect. Both of the leads are remarkably talented singers and actors, each has faced challenges. Ariana Grande, 31, was propelled to fame on the Nickelodeon network before becoming a pop idol. 

Her star continuing to ascend is true defiance against the horror of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 that killed 22 people at one of her concerts, 10 of them under the age of 20.

Cynthia Erivo, 37, has already won a Tony, Emmy and Grammy and been nominated for two Oscars. Earlier this year she spoke to Big Issue about Drift, in which she played a refugee lost and alone on a Greek island. Her performance was inspired by her mother Edith, who came to the UK from Nigeria as a teenager to escape war.

She explained how she has often felt like an outsider: “People underestimate the bravery it takes to just be yourself. I know I’m very different. Even just to look at me, I’m different. And I’m OK with that. In fact, I’ve become more than OK with that. I enjoy it. I enjoy it because it encourages other people to just be them.”

On Elphaba she said: “She’s been an outsider since she was born and we watch her work towards acceptance of that fact. I think that’s a really beautiful thing to explore.

“When someone says, ‘I’m an outsider,’ we immediately believe that they want to be on the inside. But actually, a lot of the time, it’s OK to be on the outside. Because you see things differently. You just do. You can’t help it. So there is a beauty to being slightly outside of everything.

“If I think about the women I’ve played, I think that applies to all of them. They’re all people who are good with being them. Do they find it difficult sometimes? Yes. Does that mean they’re going to change? No.”

‘Wicked has no political agenda’

Change is coming. Will we change with it? Will we fall into line behind widening societal divisions and see others as the enemy rather than different sides of ourselves?

Chu tells me about the story of the man who saves a snake from drowning in mud. The snake bites him so someone else grabs the snake and throws it in the fire. The man saves the snake again, the snake bites him again. Chu loves the lesson: 

“I know the snake is always gonna bite me, but that’s not gonna make me change my need to save the snake. If we’re in this business, we need to be built for the bite but I will not let that change what I think needs to be done.” 

He makes clear that: “This has no political agenda. This is a great story about human beings, and the way human beings have existed and moved forward is through connection, no matter how different we are.

“Entertainment is my number one job. We’re gonna give you your money’s worth. We’re gonna take you to a place you’ve never been. Your jaw is gonna be on the floor. I hope you laugh, I hope you cry, I hope you feel everything, only to take you back to your home and say, ‘where are you on your journey?’”

The original Oz stories were published as America was forming and have helped shape it. And here we are today, returning to Oz.

“It is the cyclical nature of history, that change comes from, sometimes uncomfortable expressions of anger, of frustration,” Chu says.

You see plenty of these expressions widening the divisions on social media. Besides the runtime confusion, it already seems like every Wicked fan had an opinion about the film and its cast long before its release.

“I hate [social media] on some days and I love it on other days,” Chu says. “But it’s a reflection of our inner beings. And I feel sorry for those inner beings sometimes, because I think we’re searching. We’re always searching for connection and fear and hatred is like the fastest way to get that connection and that validation. Hopes and dreams are actually more powerful than that, it’s just harder to put out there, because you’re gonna have to get through the fear and that and the cynicism first.”

Elphaba and Glinda clash after being forced to be roommates. “All of a sudden, we’re all roommates,” Chu says, about how technology has brought us closer to other ideas and opinions, whether or not we want to be exposed to them. “We have to deal with different ideas, each other’s cultures, how we act, all the things we thought we had agreed on before. In this time of many diverse thoughts, I think that hopefully this movie can bring people together.”

In the end, Chu concludes, we’re all the same, with unlimited potential to be wicked or to choose not to be.

“I think we’re all good. I think we’re all terrible. We are flawed,” Chu says. “Both of those girls will do something wicked in this movie, and you have to forgive in order to move forward.

“Maybe that’s the hardest part of the whole journey, to believe that the person on the other side will see you.”

Wicked is in cinemas now.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.

Big Issue is demanding an end to extreme poverty. Will you ask your MP to join us?