Wicked Draws on Animal-Rights Sympathies

On the sixth of May I went to the Gershwin Theatre to see Wicked, a musical version of Gregory Macguire’s novel that tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from her own point of view.

In the end, I liked Wicked a lot more than I expected to. Most Broadway musicals have a lot of cliched, overly cheerful twirling about that gets on my nerves. But Wicked finds an ingenious way to avoid this flaw, while still getting the twirling in: because Elphaba, the young woman born green who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch, is a geek so awkward she goes through the entire production with her shoulders hunched and her elbows jammed into her hips, she can’t embody those cliched movements I expect to see. Other characters do engage in the obligatory magic fingers and theatrical pirouettes, and this is pretty. But you can’t help but notice that they are mostly nameless munchkins and citizens of the Emerald City, and the story is constantly criticizing them as brainless conformists.

Wicked also fulfills, at least to some extent, the feminist promise of its concept: take a woman who’s demonized in the original movie and rescue her by giving her a chance to tell her story herself. This works. I’m surprised to say it, but after you see this musical, you will never be able to watch the original Wizard of Oz movie and take the cackling feminine evil of the Wicked Witch of the West at face value again. You will be aware that she is a human being with her own story and her own series of misfortunes that brought her to come riding down on a broomstick to kidnap cute little Judie Garland…

The only problem with this is that the play for some reason lacks the conviction to bring this transformation to its logical conclusion and allow her even a single moment of true evil or cruelty. A lifetime of being rejected, maligned, taunted, and isolated by her peers changes Elphaba from a good-hearted and brilliant young woman into a hated villain. Yet even at the very end of Wicked, she is still trying to do the right thing, and grabs Dorothy only because she wants her sister’s ruby slippers back. Just before the little girl melts her, she even instructs Glinda not to clear her name in a final act of generosity and nobility.

What would have sent real shivers down my spine is to let Elphaba own her cackle, to let her strength finally fail her, to let her succumb to the temptation to cruelty—if only a little—after that agonizing life we’ve been shown. This would have deepened her humanity and made the musical’s condemnation of Elphaba’s peers more stinging. But then, that’s just me.

A final thought about Wicked is that the whole edifice rests oddly on a kind of closeted audience sympathy with animal liberation politics. The context of Elphaba’s story is that a reactionary movement is mobilizing to rob Oz’s animals of their ability to speak, implementing a regime of cages and injections that looks more like today’s America than that technicolor world that gave us the Cowardly Lion.

Elphaba seems to be the only one who resists this movement, which Wicked suggests will lead to the end of all magic in Oz—the annexation of Oz into modern civilization. Elphaba’s green skin makes her a creature of magic herself, of course, and so she has something in common with the talking animals on that score. But here’s the rub: Wicked generates huge sympathy for Elphaba, and it does it by portraying her as what boils down to an animal-rights insurgent, who eventually occupies a Zapatista-like role as a black-clad warrior who hides in the forests between her battles with the state.

And people love her for it. Somewhere, deep down in the psyche of Wicked‘s audience, strong sympathies for animal and those who fight for their freedom may lie. I don’t think the story would work without them.