Adapted from Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel reimagining The Wizard of Oz's witches, Wicked won 3 Tony Awards in 2004, including Best Actress in a Musical for Idina Menzel.
Many long-running Broadway musicals release a limited number of same-day rush or digital lottery tickets — check the show's official site for its current terms.
Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel is a dense political allegory: a study of how a society decides who counts as evil, set in an Oz run by a propagandist. Winnie Holzman's book keeps the premise and discards most of the rest. What survives the adaptation is the relationship at the center — a green girl and a blonde one thrown together as college roommates, who end up on opposite sides of the same lie. Stephen Schwartz wrote both music and lyrics.
The score works by recurrence rather than by a stack of standalone numbers. The clearest example is the rising figure attached to the word 'Unlimited', which is the opening phrase of Harold Arlen's 'Over the Rainbow' — a deliberate nod to the 1939 film that Schwartz has confirmed in interviews. It arrives first as ambition, returns as self-deception, and finally powers the Act One curtain, 'Defying Gravity', where the orchestration drops the pop framing and goes to brass.
The 2004 Tony Awards gave the show ten nominations, more than anything else that season, and three wins: Idina Menzel for Best Actress in a Musical, Eugene Lee for scenic design, Susan Hilferty for costumes. Best Musical went to Avenue Q. Lee's clockwork Oz, with its dragon over the proscenium, has the room it needs at the Gershwin, which is the largest Broadway house at roughly 1,900 seats — built in 1972 as the Uris and renamed for George and Ira Gershwin in 1983.
The common misreading is that this is a children's show with a green witch in it. The first act largely is. The second is about a government that manufactures a monster because it requires one, and about the friend who stays inside the machine and works it from within. That turn is what the source novel was always about, and it is the part the marketing has never known how to sell.
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Wicked is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman. It is loosely based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire, a reimagining of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and its 1939 film adaptation. Set in the Land of Oz before and after Dorothy Gale's arrival from Kansas, the musical explores the complex relationship between Elphaba Thropp and Glinda Upland – the future Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good — as they are tested by their contrasting perspectives, shared love interest, and reactions to the Wizard's corrupt rule, culminating in Elphaba's tragic fall.
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