There, she gives birth to a baby girl with green skin and sharp teeth. The midwives help evacuate Melena to a cemetery, where the clock has been stored for safekeeping. Frex’s interference angers the town, and Melena, who is in labor, must flee their home to avoid an angry mob. Frex is called into town to investigate the Clock of the Time Dragon, an enormous traveling mechanism controlled that wreaks havoc by putting on puppet plays that depict the various sins and scandals of the townspeople.

Melena, a pregnant woman from the upper echelons of society, lives in the countryside with her husband Frex, a minister.

Wicked begins in Munchkinland, a region of Oz composed of farmers and peasants. Its success in America lead to numerous productions across the globe, firmly placing Maguire’s story in the popular imagination of audiences worldwide. As of 2017, it was the second-highest-grossing musical in Broadway history. Maguire’s interpretation of Baum’s classic was adapted into a sensationally popular Broadway musical called Wicked in 2003. Part revisionist history, part social critical analysis, Wicked employs various literary devices to develop a narrative that transports readers to a setting that is both fantastical and all-too human. His retelling constructs a magical topsy-turvy world that parallels the socioeconomic and political themes of his contemporary reader’s society. In humanizing this antagonist, Maguire questions the stark binary between good and evil.

In Wicked, Maguire adapts these symbols and stories to give voice to the original’s stock villain, the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West. Decades later, expressions like “we’re not in Kansas anymore” or “somewhere over the rainbow” live on, as do prominent symbols like the Yellow Brick Road and Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Allusions to the original story recur throughout film, television, and novels. Frank Baum and became central to American popular culture through the 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire reimagines the central antagonist of the iconic story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900 by author L.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire