Through the Looking Glass, Part 3/3: Pink goes good with Green!

There is one last question I have not yet asked and answered. That question is, where is the musical? In all honesty, Reader, I do not know how long I will be able to keep this theme going… there are only so many bootlegged videos on YouTube. But today I will not disappoint. No Broadway lover’s blog on multiculturalism would be complete without a tribute to Elphaba Thropp.

Most people know Elphaba as the Wicked Witch of the West, the terrifying villain in Lyman Frank Baum’s classic novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (his book was made into the film, The Wizard of Oz, in 1939). Well, you can’t keep a good story down – it has a life of its own! In 1995, Gregory Maguire invited his readers to relive the magic of Oz once again with his novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. As the title implies, Maguire tells the tale from the Witch’s point of view, and in doing so turns all of his readers’ previous notions of Good and Evil upside down.

(Imagine a house lands on your sister, and then a girl from Kansas, who just happens to have been inside the house at the time, steals your dead sister’s ruby-red shoes - the last surviving memory of her! Wouldn’t you be a little upset? Wouldn't you try to get them back!?)

The video I have embedded below is from Wicked the Musical, the Tony-award winning show based on Maguire’s novel. Here we see a teenaged Elphaba – shy, uncertain, green - and her effusive college roomate, Glinda (whom the Reader might remember by her honorific, the Good Witch of the North). But this is long before Dorothy and Toto ever arrived in Oz, and these two fated sorcery students have forged an unlikely friendship. Adorably, innocently, but not too-innocently, Glinda decides to give 'Elphie' a makeover.

The scene is reminiscent of Tatum’s 'picture day' experience, where she was praised by a well-meaning teacher for conforming to the mainstream aesthetic. But in this case, it isn’t just ‘pretty’ Glinda is aiming for, but the biggest P-word of them all, Popular. Maybe in the school hierarchy, the Popular students - whatever ethnicity they happen to belong to - could be considered the mythical norm. These seem to be the students to which the others will compare themselves, and with the status of Popular tends to come the illusion of power, and maybe a little bit of genuine power, too. (Think of being able to control the social status of your peers simply by making a decision to sit with them at lunch or not!)

What I like about Maguire's verion of Oz is that we do indeed discover that the norm is mythical. Glinda is not all that she appears, and neither is Elphaba. Moral ambiguities abound in the Wicked story, and the enduring friendship between the two women despite their nearly opposite personalities reminds us that, under it all, we are more alike than we are different.