Why Wicked’s politics feel so bizarrely timely

Wicked, the movie musical based on the beloved Broadway show of the same name, is one of the biggest hits of the year, opening at No. 1 in North America over the weekend and already generating some early Oscars buzz. Audiences came in prepared to love Wicked’s famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have caught people by surprise: its somewhat clunky yet remarkably durable political allegory.

“I noticed that Elphaba is like Kamala Harris and the Wizard is like Donald Trump,” one fan posted on Reddit. “A charismatic leader who gaslights a community that this woman is wicked just because she’s standing up for a marginalized group of people in the society, how could that be [political]?” director John M. Chu joked.

For a silly, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, Wicked actually does invite political interpretations. Its allegory can both elicit eye rolls and still feel eerily prescient more than 20 years after its stage debut.

Wicked the musical is based on a 1995 novel of the same title by Gregory Maguire, an anti-fascist treatise in which the Wizard becomes a Hitler-like despot. The musical wouldn’t go quite so far when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it did get in a number of hits at the George W. Bush administration, which had ordered the invasion of Iraq only months earlier.

In Wicked, the Wizard is revealed to be disenfranchising the talking animals of Oz, on the grounds that to unify the rest of the country, he has to give them a common enemy. Yet the Wizard’s persecution of animals — and, later, of Elphaba — is rooted in a lie, in the same way that Bush falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before invading.

Some of the references are glaringly obvious: When Dorothy’s house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda echoes the Bush administration’s favorite Iraq War euphemism in describing it as a “regime change.” “Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?” sings the Wizard, referencing Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “It’s all in which label is able to persist!”

Critics’ responses were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, Wicked so overplays its hand that it seriously dilutes its power to disturb,” Ben Brantley declared in 2003 at the New York Times, adding that the show “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button.”

Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler, though taken aback by such a dark interpretation of sunny and magical Oz, found himself drawn to the idea. “It is hard not to wonder if the witch, a difficult figure transformed by difficult times, isn’t precisely what our stage needs,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times that same year. “And perhaps, the show suggests, ‘wicked’ is what the W stands for” in George W. Bush.”

Singing the same lyrics today, the Wizard suggests not Bush but Trump: a leader consolidating his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between rabble-rousing progressive Elphaba and conciliatory liberal Glinda might hit home particularly hard for Democrats in the midst of their post-election recrimination.

Both Elphaba and Glinda idolize the Wizard and dream of working at his right hand. When Elphaba learns of the plight of Oz’s animals, she heads straight to the Emerald City to seek his help, certain that if he learns that the animals are being targeted, he’ll rush to their aid. The Wizard suggests he might do so if Elphaba uses her magic as part of his administration, but when she learns that it’s the Wizard behind the attacks, she disowns him, much to the dismay of practical-minded Glinda.

“I hope you’re happy how you’ve hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. Elphaba, after all, is alienating a potential powerful ally. “I hope you’re proud, how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition,” replies Elphaba, who has decided she will not work with anyone who is using his power to hurt Oz’s talking animal citizens. Could you read this moment as an allegory over how Democrats should handle trans issues going forward? Sure, it sounds like a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

In a way it’s odd to think that Wicked’s political messaging feels so prescient, since most Wicked fans would agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. Wicked lives and breathes by the fraught friendship between its two leads, not by its duelling visions of activism.

Still, in another sense, Wicked was born to be an allegory of American politics. It can’t quite be anything else. That’s what Oz stories are for.

Most of the most children’s fantasy classics of the Anglophone world are English: think of Peter Pan, Narnia, The Sword in the Stone, and Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation.

The Wizard of Oz, though, is an American fantasy. A map of Oz, which is shaped like a rectangle with its long side horizontal, is a simplified map of America, as though drawn by a child: unimaginably vast, spanning the inhabitable entirety of a continent from east to west. (Oz is bordered by poisonous deserts rather than oceans.) It is a country where farmers cultivate fields of corn and wheat and orchards of apples; where industrialists build vast, glittering cities; where the west is full of rough and unsettled land. And it is a country governed by a con man who is lying to the people he rules.

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he imagined the Wizard of Oz as someone who was well-meaning if ineffectual and a touch dishonest. “I’m a very good man — just a bad wizard,” the Wizard explains to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Still, the Wizard can work as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American dream. The Wizard is a man who will promise you everything but give you nothing, and then he will tell you the answer was inside of yourself all along.

It’s this metaphor that gives The Wiz, the all-Black reimagining of The Wizard of Oz from the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. In The Wiz, Dorothy and her friends are Black people who are promised certain fundamental rights by a government that never plans to pay up. (Wicked gestures at a similar critique by casting the Black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially othered green-skinned Elphaba.)

“Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” the Scarecrow scoffs in The Wiz, after learning that the Wizard is a washed-up politician from Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” the Wiz crows. “That’s me!”

Wicked, meanwhile, is not a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz so much as it is a revisionist history. As such, it is fundamentally skeptical of figures in authority — much more so than Baum, who eventually replaced the Wizard with the virtuous and nearly infallible fairy queen Ozma.

The premise of any story that tells you that the villains of your childhood are misunderstood is that the storytellers were lying to you. In Wicked, the Wizard isn’t just a very bad wizard, but a very bad man, too. He lies maliciously and with strategic purpose.

Elphaba and Glinda, here, become just two more dreamers who travel to the Emerald City like Dorothy and her friends, because they want the Wizard to give them their hearts’ desire: protection for the talking animals of Oz as they become steadily more persecuted.

Yet the Wizard they encounter is not only incapable of granting them such a request, but in fact plans to pervert it, using their innocent wishes to enact more violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her do magic on his behalf so he can more thoroughly persecute the sentient animals he plans to round up and more efficiently spy on the rest of his citizens.

In the end, the Wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his administration, while Elphaba refuses. He is America governed not by a con man but by a strong man — an authoritarian dictator.

This is the kind of metaphor a revisionist history can offer you, and part of why Wicked feels so bizarrely urgent at this moment. In a subversion of a childhood classic, no authority figure can be trusted — which is what makes these stories so attractive when people you don’t trust have found their way into positions of power.