Oh What a World

I finally took my husband to Wicked, so I’m reposting this essay, which I revised and expanded last week.

On Sunday, I attended Wicked in my local movie theater for the second time in three days. I was thinking about going the previous night, but it was a Saturday, and I wanted to be at least relatively alone, having been warned that some audiences had been singing along (which is a cultural crime unless the viewing is explicitly billed as a sing-along; it’s not The Sound of Music at the Castro, no matter how gay you think you are).

Wicked is really important to a lot of people. I’m one of them. It and its iterations served a significant role in the conceptual framework of my dissertation, way back in 2010. So, in the intervening day between my first theater visit and my second theater visit that weekend, I read the dissertation. I was curious if what I thought about Wicked back then is how I feel about it now. It is.

The epigraph for my dissertation’s Chapter 1, titled “Oh What A World!” The Wizard of Oz, Queer Authority, and the Negotiation of Fantasy,” is spoken by the Wizard in Wicked: “Elphaba, where I come from, people believe all sorts of things that aren’t true. We call it ‘history.’” At this point, Elphaba (later to become the Wicked Witch of the West) has seen through the Wizard’s ruse, so he has no recourse but to try a little indoctrination.

In my dissertation, referencing L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I described the Wizard as “. . . a false authority whose grandeur relies entirely upon deception,” whose “authoritarianism functions through the unwillingness of his subjects to exercise the slightest level of free will—to take even a tentative peek around the glass in front of their eyes.” In Baum’s original book, the “glass in front of their eyes” is literal. The citizens of the Emerald City wear Emerald-colored glasses.

Baum wanted to create a new kind of American fairytale, something distinct from the fairytales imported from Europe:

. . . the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.

And yet, his fairytale turns out to be deeply moralistic, with a lot of blood to be curdled. The flying monkeys, in Baum’s tale, are generally benevolent figures, forced to commit violence against their will, at one point viciously throwing the Tin Woodman against the rocks, leaving him “so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan,” dismembering the Scarecrow, and ruthlessly binding the Cowardly Lion with ropes. The Tin Woodman chops the Witch’s wolves to pieces with his axe.

At the core of the violence lays a power imbalance fostered by the deception of a single, charismatic despot. While Baum’s primary villain is the Witch, she operates within a world rendered false and therefore malleable by the Wizard. Baum didn’t fully get there, but his later interpreters pushed toward the true nature of power in his created world.

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz did away with some of the more gruesome aspects of Baum’s 1900 novel, but the moralizing remained. The moralizing probably felt fairly urgent in 1939. Dorothy’s epic fight with the Witch appears to be the central conflict in Baum’s book, but the Wizard is the liar, the charlatan, the maker of promises. He is self-interested, and while the film’s version of the character seems like a bumbling idiot, his bumbling has rewritten the rules of reality. At least until a female outsider reveals his charade.

In Gregory Maguire’s 1995 retelling, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the Wizard is finally portrayed as the ultimate tyrant he truly is. Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical adaptation in 2003 necessitated removal of some of Maguire’s subtlety, but the composer and librettist kept the core intact. The Wizard makes the source of his power clear: “Where I come from everyone knows the best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.”

Have you noticed how often the Wizard refers to “where I come from?” He’s from America (Omaha, NE, to be more precise). He has tried to activate a worldview, which he has probably misunderstood to begin with, in order to consolidate his political power over people he assumes to be too stupid to detect the manipulation. To make Oz Great. Again?

He’s made a miscalculation, though. Dorothy is from Kansas. Elphaba, whom he scapegoats as a Wicked Witch, (spoiler alert) is of dual lineage: American and Ozian. They both see the man behind the curtain.

Maguire portrays Elphaba and Dorothy as inextricably linked. As I wrote fourteen years ago, “Maguire carefully constructs Elphaba as Dorothy’s parallel. In Wicked, she dreams of the ‘real world’ as if she is Dorothy and upon confronting the girl, cries, ’You’re my soul come scavenging for me.’” Another spoiler alert: By the time Maguire reworked Baum’s story, paternity tests were a thing. Dorothy and Elphaba have more power than the Wizard could imagine because he thinks he owns them, and they know he doesn’t.

The Wizard is a liar. Dorothy and Elphaba don’t believe him, precisely because of their American-ness (and possibly their parentage). They know the tricks. They can identify the sales pitch. They aren’t easy marks, so they are dangerous to the showman.

As a certified "Friend of Dorothy,” I sat in the movie theater twice over the weekend, watching and listening to Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba peel back the Wizard’s clumsily grown onion with tears in my eyes. Most queer people know what Dorothy and Elphaba know. That knowledge is complicated, but one portion of it is knowing where the threat is coming from and how to fight it. We peg the liar before he knows he’s lying.

As Erivo sang, “and nobody in all of Oz, no wizard that there is or was, is ever going to bring me down,” her cape expanding via digital cinematic techniques, the orchestra recalling leitmotifs associated with rage and denial, I felt my body release—just for a moment—the tension it has clung to since November 5, 2024.

All of my graduate school ruminating on the Wicked Witch of the West was in service of articulating what I called “reparative cultural historiography” by thinking about the music of Rufus Wainwright, another gay man with an obsession with the Wizard of Oz. Marginalized people do not often get to see themselves in history, and if they do, the examples they are provided are generally not ideal. Typically, the examples they are given are stories told about them by the people who actively harm them.

When I’m trying to sound less pompous than I sounded in graduate school, I refer to “reparative cultural historiography” as finding value in things that don’t value you. Rufus Wainwright’s career, at least in my musicology brain, demonstrates the ability to claim ownership of a space in a hostile culture and history. In my dissertation, the Witch and her various versions (along with a bunch of other cultural creations) helped guide me into his music. It wasn’t hard to find her:

Maurice Ravel helps the Witch out in Wainwright’s “Oh What a World.” As in Ravel’s “Bolero,” which is quoted explicitly and extensively, Wainwright’s fantasy builds upon itself, expanding, creating, strengthening. For Ravel, the build-up ends in a strange cacophonous chord before collapsing to the ground. Wainwright, however, melts like the Wicked Witch, harps sonically marking the interstitial world between Dorothy’s black-and-white Kansas and the sharp colors of Oz. Ravel just stops. Wainwright transports to a different reality. He’s not dead or destroyed.

The musical Wicked sorts out what happens to the Wicked Witch when she melts differently than either Baum or Maguire do. It remains to be seen what happens to her in the movie reality, as Part I ends with the Act I finale of the stage musical. I assume it will maintain the Holzman and Schwartz conclusion, but I don’t know.

What’s more important to me is that Elphaba, whatever happens to her, is vastly more interesting than the Wizard, just as Wainwright is vastly more interesting than the straight “men reading fashion magazines” in “Oh What a World.” Elphaba is bulding something while the Wizard is hiding something. He’s hiding his inability to build something.

In Wainwright’s song, the straight men with their magazines are aberrant and strange. He doesn’t bully them, though. He just laments the good ol’ days. What grace. What, dare I say, empathy.

But Wicked and Wainwright’s musical fantasies are art. Fiction. They require real-world discernment and critical capacities to negotiate the real and the unreal.

Real: Judy Garland had a hard life, largely due to powerful men who treated her like a commodity.

Unreal: A girl named Dorothy has the power to travel between worlds.

Real: Donald Trump is the president-elect.

Unreal: Donald Trump is a self-made man.

During Donald Trump’s bizarre Dance Party Rally in October, he (or whatever poor, confused staffer was running the playlist) played Rufus Wainwright’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” While doomscrolling shortly after the event, I tragically landed on a video clip of that dystopic farce in which those distinctive piano arpeggios—ones associated in my mind with goodness, beauty, and kindness—appeared, trapped in a nightmare along with a clearly uncomfortable Kristi Noem, wishing she could be on any other stage.

Wainwright called it “blasphemous.” Then he showed kindness:

As I sat in the movie theater listening to Elphaba articulate the difference between reality and facade, against every ounce of my psyche telling me to stop, I wondered about how my few fellow audience members voted. I wondered about Donald Trump co-opting cultural products that belong to marginalized cultures he publicly reviles (will someone please explain to him what “Y.M.C.A.” is about? My god.). I thought about Wainwright’s kindness in trying to give grace to an old man who seems confused.

I mostly thought, though, about how a charlatan like the Wizard succeeds because he steals. He steals power. He steals self-efficacy. He steals reality. And he steals cultural history. He repairs nothing.

We have a lot to repair, and we are about to get many, many more broken things. Reparative cultural historiography isn’t going to repair the things Trump breaks. It may help to repair a few people’s senses of self, though. That’s the work of artists, not shady businessmen with spotty records of compensating contractors.

Rufus and the various creators of the Witch and all the other powerful figures of cultural and artistic meaning will make things. They will build things. And we will all repair the broken things, including the cold and broken Hallelujah.