The words “Wicked” and “Hitler” are very much alike. Both have two syllables and six letters, two of them in common.
So if one were to infer a connection between the title of Gregory Maguire’s “Wizard of Oz” prequel and the world’s greatest villain of the past century, “that was no accident,” he said.
However, Maguire does not equate Hitler with the iconic cackling green witch, but rather with the “wonderful” wizard himself.
On the surface, “Wicked” is pure glamour and spectacle in the great tradition of Broadway family musicals. But the book upon which this squeaky-clean musical is based is a complicated political allegory that alludes to everything from Hitler’s Germany to Richard Nixon to the first Bush administration.
It is a happy accident, Maguire added, that the sitting president’s middle name happens to start with W. “You don’t have to ask me what I think that W stands for,” he said.
Maguire wrote “Wicked,” which explores how the witches Glinda and Elphaba may have gone their good and wicked ways, in 1995 after the first Gulf War. Long before Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell”) and Winnie Holzman (“My So-Called Life”) reimagined his novel for the stage, reviewers were hailing the book for its deeper commentaries on unchecked superpowers – of the human kind.
Maguire was living in England when the first Gulf War erupted, and he came across a headline that screamed: “Saddam Hussein: The Next Hitler?”
“I was surprised to find my pulse quickening for military action, even though I had been a card-carrying protester of the Vietnam War,” Maguire said from his home near Boston. “Something about how the story was being framed in the British press made me stop and think that maybe there is such a thing as a just war. After all, Thomas Aquinas said there was. And if there ever was an argument for going to war, even for pacifists and Quakers, it certainly could be made for World War II.
“But I came to understand that just this word ‘Hitler’ is not in itself a moral argument for military action. It’s just a word. It’s an incendiary word, and it’s a word you can’t even talk about, in a sense, because it’s so powerful and so real. But you can’t know that Saddam Hussein is the next Hitler. I thought, ‘How can I be so persuaded to justify military action by this one little word?’ So I became very interested in our human response to jingoism.”
In Maguire’s book, Oz is a place gone very wrong. The yellow-brick road was built by munchkin slave labor, the flying monkeys are the result of animal experimentation, and Oz is populated by a class-based society of oppressed animals. Scholars have equated these animals with Hitler’s Jewish victims, with Maguire’s blessing.
“I remember being shocked at age 19 when I first saw the film ‘Cabaret’ and hearing Joel Gray (who would later play the Wizard in “Wicked” on Broadway) sing ‘If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,”‘ Maguire said. “Gray’s emcee is escorting a lady gorilla about the stage, extolling her beauty, grace and intelligence. But the last line of the song goes, ‘If you could see her through my eyes – she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.’
“I had swallowed the setup entirely – and then here’s this gargantuan insult of (aligning) Jews with animals, the ‘sub-human race.’ That reminded me of C.S. Lewis, who in ‘Narnia’ made distinctions between talking and nontalking animals. So setting up the animals as the ‘victim population’ worked in well with certain givens about the Oz material; that for instance, the Cowardly Lion can talk, but Toto, a visitor, never does. So some animals speak, some don’t.”
Maguire believes his Hitler analogy grows from a seed actually planted by Baum 30 years before the Nazis came to power. The Wizard, after all, similarly preys on his subjects’ fears to induce them to do his bidding and exterminate his enemies.
“Think about what happens in the book when Dorothy goes to the Wizard. He says, ‘In this country, everyone must pay for everything he gets … You must kill the witch because she’s wicked.’ And right then and there, this good and wholesome girl chooses to become a murderer on the basis of hearing that one word – wicked.
“That chilled me … and it got me thinking about what we do with moral ambiguities – we act as though they don’t exist.”
Despite being influenced by the Gulf War, Maguire does not want “Wicked” to be seen today in print or on stage as a direct commentary about how American power and might is expressing itself in Iraq.
“I want it to be a story about a complicated culture and ornery individuals in a time of crisis,” he said. “I want it to remind readers of the 1930s in Berlin, of Cambridge and Oxford in the 1930s, perhaps of the American missionaries in Japan and China in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I want Australians to read it and think about Sydney. And I want Scottish readers to read it and think about the relationship of the Stuarts to the Parliament in London.”
Maguire’s politics are not blatantly evident in the stage musical, but Stephanie J. Block, who plays Elphaba, sees at least one direct correlation.
“There is one line when the Wizard looks at Elphaba and says, ‘The way to bring people together is to find a good enemy,”‘ she said. “People are calmed when there is only one evil to focus on, and if you can catch it and destroy it, then everybody will be at a sense of peace and calm and goodness. I think that’s applicable to Hitler, Osama bin Laden and others.
“There has to be an antagonist and a protagonist for there to be a balance in our world, but it’s not the truth today. The truth is your enemy could be your neighbor. It could be the person who just stepped onto your bus.”
That’s one reason Block believes “Wicked” audiences eventually shed their preconceived antipathy for the wicked witch and root for her. “They want her to stand up and fight back against all the injustices that have been done to her,” she said.
But just in case “Wicked” audiences miss Maguire’s political points in the gloss of the stage spectacle, he’s sure they won’t miss a thing when his follow-up book, “Son of a Witch,” comes out soon.
“I expect readers not to be able to avoid the parallels between Abu Graibh in Iraq and Southstairs in the Emerald City,” he said.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Wicked”
MUSICAL|National touring production presented by Denver Center Attractions|Written by Stephen Schwartz (music) and Winnie Holzman (book)|Directed by Joe Mantello|Starring Stephanie J. Block, Kendra Kassebaum, Carol Kane and David Garrison|Buell Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets|THROUGH OCT. 2|7 tonight; then 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays|SOLD OUT|Note: A daily lottery for 24 orchestra seats will be held before each performance. You must arrive at the box office 2 1/2 hours before curtain to enter; lottery 30 minutes later. Cost to winners is $25. Call 303-893-4100 for details.
