A World Worth Approaching: A Guest Post by Gregory Maguire
The novel that sparked the inimitable Broadway show is a fractured fairy tale (with a ton of heart) where the world of Oz is flipped on its head. Read on for an exclusive guest post from Gregory Maguire on what inspired him to write Wicked.
Hardcover $40.00
Wicked Collector's Edition: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wicked Collector's Edition: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
In Stock Online
Hardcover $40.00
The beloved multimillion-copy-bestselling novel and basis of the Tony Award–winning musical and movie, in a deluxe hardback edition with green stained edges, a ribbon marker, and an elegant foil-stamped cover.
The beloved multimillion-copy-bestselling novel and basis of the Tony Award–winning musical and movie, in a deluxe hardback edition with green stained edges, a ribbon marker, and an elegant foil-stamped cover.
Surfing through YouTube clips not long ago, I came across a Bugs Bunny cartoon made by Warner Brothers in 1954—the year I was born. Our hero with the Brooklyn longshoreman’s accent looks up from reading aloud the tale of Hansel and Gretel. Ahead of him, two cheery, gluttonous children are being promised heaps of sweets by a green-skinned witch. The reader has walked into the very story he was reading.
Cartoons can make such transitions seem not only possible, but likely. So can magic.
Witch Hazel, the villain, isn’t very menacing, nor capable as a sorceress. No harm comes to anyone who crosses her path. She’s plain, she’s ungainly, and she walks like a two-legged spider, toggling on tiny feet. “Bewitched Bunny” marks her first appearance, and she becomes a recurring figure in the Looney Tunes pantheon, if a B-tier player. Still, I remembered her, and I recognized her pinched, old-lady giggle. She’s nearly loveable.
What really caught me, though, was how Bugs Bunny looked up from what he was reading and saw her—right there—in front of him. The story isn’t just printed in the pages of the book he’s been reading—it’s being acted out in his own world. And he has a part to play. So he inserts himself into it. In liberating the children, he becomes the replacement menu item for the Witch’s supper. Rabbit stew, a fate he evades.
I’ve been thinking about how children own stories so deeply that they nearly find themselves living within them. Usually this happens in playtime, or in daydreaming; sometimes it is in nightmares. The urgent stress of a tale tugs forward the open hearts of children. As Bugs Bunny was pulled into Hansel and Gretel, I was pulled into The Wizard of Oz.
It happened early, in childhood—the same years I was watching Warner Brothers cartoons. The world of Oz on our black-and-white TV screen seemed so possible—if Dorothy could be flown there by nonstop tornado, maybe I could get there, too? And I did, in my earliest drawings and attempts at storytelling. The Wicked Witch of the West was still unrelievedly villainous, of course. (Being young, I swallowed down all the propaganda that I was fed.) But she had room to grow. And time to change.
Eventually, our backyard games acting out the famous story became more intricate, more—experimental. More improv. And while I’d always been fond of stories and of drawing, I think it was in actual “playing” with found materials—meaning this story we kids all knew—that I discovered my calling. Somehow, in the twenty-odd years that followed, as I solidified my skill sets, I blundered right into the story of Oz, just as Bugs Bunny had stumbled into Hansel and Gretel. I found that the old story could be changed. That children could be saved. That the witch had a name. Nothing was the way it seemed.
WICKED was seeded in my mind, and Elphaba in my heart, by books and films: by the great storyteller L. Frank Baum, whose 1900 children’s novel inspired MGM’s classic 1939 film. Thirty years on, WICKED the novel has reached millions of readers—literally—around the globe. The musical play inspired by WICKED has delighted scores of millions more. Other people walked into the world of Oz as I saw it and shared it in new ways. It’s a world worth approaching. Especially with the new eyes that you will bring to it when you look up from the book you’re reading and find that the story is coming true.