Behind the 'Wicked' curtain

First came the book.

The one hardly anyone reads anymore. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900.

Then came the movie. The one everyone has seen and committed to deep, sacred, childhood memory. Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939.

Victor who? Don't rack your brain. He was just the director. It's Judy Garland's film.

Skipping over a few yellow bricks, the next truly significant milestone came in 1995 with Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked, the story of how the green witch came to be thought of as evil.

The book is densely wrought with sly twists, passionate love, adultery, a touch of bestiality, major childhood trauma, political intrigue, and ostensible murder. The flying monkeys in the movie may have been scary, but honey, they're bunny rabbits compared to what Maguire has imagined.

Maguire's agent told him not to plan on an early retirement. "He said he thought it would sell fairly well, but probably wouldn't catch on into the zone where anyone noticed," Maguire, now 53, recalls. "And he was right for about five years."

Then the real magic happened.

The seditious novel by a former children's-book author crept onto the best-seller list and caught the eye of Stephen Schwartz, the successful Broadway composer and lyricist. A few years later, his vision would burst into the theater equivalent of a global meteor shower.

The story of that creative trajectory was character-driven. And like the protagonists in the musical, they didn't realize where they were going until they arrived.

Wicked, which returns this week to the Academy of Music for its second Philadelphia run in two years, has broken the Broadway box-office record previously set by The Producers. Last November, in one week, it grossed more than $1.7 million. The CD has gone double platinum. The tender duet, "For Good," has become so beloved that people play it at their weddings, and graduating classes sing it at commencements. When Katie Couric left the Today show, she was serenaded by the leads performing it. And at least one bereaved family has inscribed the lyrics on a loved one's tombstone.

Now that's popular.

No one would have guessed this ending when Maguire's novel came out. Universal Pictures sensed there was potential and bought the rights to make a new film, but the project languished.

The screenwriters, says Marc Platt, 50, then Universal's president of production, were too loyal to the book and struggled to capture its magic.

Platt was losing hope in 1998, when he got a call from Stephen Schwartz. "I know you have the rights to Wicked," he remembers Schwartz saying. "Did you ever think of turning it into a musical?"

"I didn't even blink," Platt says. Part of the problem in trying to make the film was that much of Maguire's novel involves the private thoughts of Elphaba (the name is a play on L. Frank Baum). "It's hard to get an inner dialogue in a film," he explains. "It's not cinematic. But in a musical, the character can just turn to the audience and sing."

Schwartz pitched the idea to Maguire's lawyers.

The author remembers thinking, "It probably won't happen."

"I've had a lot of nibbles over my career, and nothing had ever come to pass," he explains. "I thought it would be get bogged down or Stephen Schwartz would move on. Or the movie people would object. With multiple copyrights involved, the legal speed bumps to a successful completion were so many. I dined out on the flattery of it for a few days, then retired it. But I thought, 'Isn't this nice? It shows that the story continues to roll out into the world like a weather front.' "

(Maguire, by the way, actually speaks like this, in complete, lovely sentences, even while, in the background, you can hear his three young children clamoring for dinner.)

Several months later, in the fall of 1998, Maguire found himself walking with Schwartz across a friend's farm in Connecticut.

"Now," Maguire says, "I was pinching myself."

"Stephen said, 'I'm so convinced that you're going to like this, and want me to do this, that I've already written the first song.' "

He sang, "No One Mourns the Wicked," and told Maguire, "Here's what will happen. It will open with the death of the witch, and then it will go into flashback with her birth."

Schwartz laid out the rough outlines of the play, which reveals the psychological roots of Elphaba's notorious temper, her painful rejection as a girl for being green and outspoken, the evolution of her friendship with the social-climbing bimbette, Glinda, and a subplot involving ethnic cleansing and Ozian despots out to rid the world of dissidents.

When Schwartz finished laying out the play, Maguire thought, "He's got it! He's got the theme!"

Which was?

"How we demonize our enemies in order to justify taking up arms against them. Not to say that taking up arms is always unjust, but it is unjust to consider someone less than human. If you're going to kill them, at least acknowledge they're human, not a limb of Satan."

In 1995, before she ever met Schwartz, screenwriter Winnie Holzman picked up a copy of Wicked in a bookstore on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"I swear to you," Holzman, 53, says, "I had a feeling about it. I'm not saying I knew what was coming, but I looked at the beautiful cover with the green girl's hat covering most of her face and I was blown away." She thought the premise was pure genius, bought the novel, and called her agent to ask who had the rights.

When she was told she was too late, that Universal already owned them, she was crestfallen. She put the book on a shelf, where it sat for years, unread.

Holzman had once written a non-smash Off-Broadway musical. After she found success with the television series The Wonder Years, thirtysomething, and My So-Called Life, however, she doubted she'd ever go back to song-and-dance scripts.

Then in 1998, an executive at Disney who knew both her and Schwartz, now 59, suggested that they team up to write an animated musical.

"We go to lunch and Stephen says, 'Well it's so hard to think of an idea. There aren't many brilliant ideas like Wicked.' "

"You know about Wicked?" Holzman asks.

"Oh yeah," he says. "I've been trying to get the rights as a musical."

"I nearly fell over," she recalls.

That fall, Schwartz called her at her Los Angeles home to say he'd worked out a deal to obtain the rights. "I think maybe you are the right person to write it with me," he said. "I think you should read the book.'"

So she did. They talked. And started writing.

All along, they were careful not to contradict anything in the Judy Garland movie, because in the collective consciousness every detail is sacrosanct. They took more liberty with Maguire's work, using it as the raw material for a completely different art form.

"Stephen and I both have elements of darkness in our personalities," Holzman says. "We could sense that we were seeing something in a unified way."

Over the next months and years they worked on the project, with only minimal input from Maguire. Holzman focused so intently on her collaboration with Schwartz and the other members of the team that she didn't let herself think about how Maguire would react to the changes they were making to his story.

"Just before the first reading, when I realized he would be there, I panicked," she says. "My heart went out to him, because I knew it would not be easy."

She needn't have worried.

"The person who actually nipped and stitched and tucked the play together into a way that has punch," Maguire says, "is Winnie Holzman.

"It's one thing to write a novel that sprawls over all kinds of literary practices," he says. "But what Winnie had to do was telescope the meaning, reduce the novel to a string of gems that communicate epigrammatically the meaning of the novel for a wider audience. . . . I'm glad I gave her lots of raw material to work with, but I could never have done what she's done. I think she's a real gem. And she doesn't get enough credit."

For an author who can't abide simplistic fairy tales and the "striation of the good into the noble innocent and the bad into some kind of laryngitic harpy or emphysemic Darth Vader," wasn't he put off, even the tiniest bit, by the clearer divisions between the virtuous and corrupt in the musical?

Nope.

The play, he says, is still quite nuanced, and true to the book's essential truth.

"You're left at the end with a lump in your throat and a sense of how hard it is to live your life right, but how important it is to try."

He's seen the musical, at last count, 25 times.