Themes Across the Source Material

Five themes that run through Baum, the 1939 film, and Maguire — and that the Wicked musical inherited. Each is examined as a thread in the source material, not as a song or scene in the show.

❦

1. Fraud and Showmanship

The Wizard of Oz is a humbug. This is the central joke of Baum's 1900 book, and it is the entire engine of Maguire's Wicked. Baum's Wizard is a balloonist from Omaha who arrived in Oz by accident, was received as a great magician, and has been pretending ever since. His power is theater: a giant floating green head, a shape-shifting "Great Oz" of the West, a "Great Oz" of the South, etc. The first half of the 1900 book is a slow, comic reveal that the Wizard is just a small man operating levers.

The 1939 film softens this: Frank Morgan's Wizard is a kindly, gentle humbug who genuinely wants to help Dorothy. The Wizard-as-fraud is preserved, but the political edge is gone. Maguire's 1995 novel returns to Baum's edge: the Wizard is a propagandist who uses animals and who has built a public image of himself that has nothing to do with his actual being. The musical follows Maguire.

The theme of fraud vs. reality is the source of the song "Wonderful" in the musical, and it is the source of the political thrust of the entire piece. It is one of the two ideas the musical most clearly inherits from the 1900 book.

2. Animal Voicelessness

Baum's Oz is a country of talking animals. The Cowardly Lion talks, the Toto talks (in the 1900 book, in passing), the Hungry Tiger, the Woozy, the Sawhorse, the Wogglebug, the Gump, the Glass Cat — all the animals of Oz speak. The Ozians are accustomed to this. The 1900 book does not foreground the strangeness of talking animals; it is the normal state of Oz.

Maguire's Wicked (1995) reverses this. In Maguire's Oz, animals are beginning to lose the power of speech. This is happening because the Wizard is suppressing animal speech: the Wizard, who is not actually a wizard, fears the animals' claims of having been present at the founding of Oz. Doctor Dillamond, a goat who is the only animal professor at Shiz, is the source of Elphaba's discovery of the conspiracy. The musical keeps this and makes it one of the two central political facts of Act I.

The 1939 film barely touches this — Toto is a dog, the Cowardly Lion is a man in a costume, and there is no scene of animal suppression. The theme is Maguire's invention, but it works because Baum left the door open: nothing in the 1900 book says that animals have always talked in Oz. Maguire asks, what if they have, and what if it is being taken away?

3. The Good Witch / Bad Witch Split

In the 1900 book, there are four witches: the Good Witch of the North, the Good Witch of the South, the Wicked Witch of the East, and the Wicked Witch of the West. By the end of the 1900 book, only the Wicked Witch of the West is dead; the Wicked Witch of the East was killed by Dorothy's house, and the two Good Witches are both still alive. The Wicked Witch of the South is not mentioned in the 1900 book.

The 1939 film compresses this. There is a Good Witch of the North (Glinda, played by Billie Burke) and a Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). The Good Witch of the South is dropped; the Wicked Witch of the East is also dropped. The split becomes simpler: one good witch, one bad witch, and a binary question — "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Maguire's Wicked complicates this by giving the Wicked Witch a name (Elphaba) and a biography, and by making Glinda not a single static figure but a sharp, ambitious, popular political operator. The musical extends this: Elphaba and Glinda are friends in college. The split is no longer a simple binary; it is a story about how two friends, given different talents and different political situations, end up on different sides of a war.

4. Heart, Brain, Courage

The 1900 book is structured around three wishes: the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Woodman wants a heart, the Cowardly Lion wants courage. The Wizard gives them what look like tokens (a brain of pins and needles, a heart of silk, a green liquid for courage) and declares the work done. The Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Lion return home thinking they have what they wanted; the book ends with Dorothy on her way back to Kansas.

The book's punchline, which is the line the book is best remembered for, comes later: when Dorothy and her friends are on the road, the Scarecrow is shown repeatedly outwitting the Tin Woodman, the Tin Woodman is shown weeping at the sight of an injured insect, the Lion is shown facing a danger. Each of them already had what they thought they lacked. The Wizard's tokens are placebos. The qualities were always there.

This is the single most influential idea in Wicked. The musical's song "Defying Gravity," its Boq arc, its Elphaba arc, and the Wizard's "Wonderful" all draw on the same fundamental move: the thing you are told you lack, you have. The musical inverts it — Elphaba does not know she has what she has until the end — but the underlying move is Baum's.

5. The Meaning of "Wicked"

Baum's 1900 book uses the word "wicked" plainly. The Wicked Witch of the West is wicked because she enslaves people, keeps a pack of wolves, and tries to kill Dorothy. There is no further moral investigation of the term. Maguire's 1995 novel, by contrast, makes the term the entire subject of the book: the book is called Wicked, the narrator at one point makes a long excursus on the etymology and history of the word, and the plot is structured around Elphaba's discovery that "wicked" is a label applied by those in power to those they fear.

This is the single most important theme in Maguire, and the one the musical inherited. The musical's "Defying Gravity" is the song that crystallizes the theme: Elphaba is told she is wicked because she opposes the Wizard. The musical does not argue that she is not wicked; it argues that the word "wicked" is a tool. Maguire's 1995 book makes this argument directly, and the musical makes it musically.

❦

A Sixth Theme: The Power of Names

One theme that is more prominent in the source material than in the musical, but worth noting:

Baum's Oz is a world in which names matter, and in which the knowing of names is a political act. Glinda knows that Tip is Ozma, and chooses to wait years before saying so. The Wizard's full name is a long, complicated string of names that is rarely used: Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. The Denslow Scarecrow has a Scarecrow face and never gets a real name. The Patchwork Girl's name is "Scraps" because she is made of scraps.

The 1939 film is not interested in names. The musical is: "Galinda" becomes "Glinda" because the goat pronounces it wrong, and the mistake stays. The musical's renaming is a small political act: a name imposed by an outside voice becomes the name that sticks. This is Maguire's contribution, but it sits on top of Baum's pattern of names-as-power.