I SOMETIMES wonder whether my brain is wired up correctly. Where most people treat Lent as a season for sober and sensible self-examination, a preparation for the joy of Easter, my first thought is: “Which movie shall I watch?” Indeed, since I enjoyed a Lent course based on the film adaptation of Chocolat well over a decade ago, Lent has become a season when films usually supply my prompts for prayerful reflection.
I especially enjoy the dynamic interplay of image, story, and song found in musicals such as The Greatest Showman. Show tunes, I find, offer lively routes into reflection on faith, hope, and love. The world of musicals — in which normal narrative logic is often disapplied — provides imaginative space for encounters with the divine.
THE musical Wicked, however, might seem a stretch too far for many people. As the recent two-part film adaptation starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo showed, the musical is so shiny that it makes classic Disney films look like gritty film noir. More significantly, Wicked is, ultimately, a musical about witches and wizards. One does not need to be a reactionary redneck Southern Baptist to wonder whether witchcraft is a fit subject for Christian prayer and meditation.
I take a more nuanced view. Wicked is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, primarily from the point of view of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. It explores her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, as well as with the Wizard of Oz. It subverts many of the terrifying pictures of the Wicked Witch which haunt my imagination; the movie helps the viewer to see how Elphaba is the victim of stereotyping, and scapegoated. She is ostracised because of her skin colour and her misunderstood magical powers. The Wizard turns her into a “monster” because he needs one to unify his society.
THE first half of the musical explores how Elphaba and Glinda move from enmity to friendship, and shows how Elphaba becomes increasingly disillusioned with her hero, the Wizard of Oz, realising that he is a paranoid tyrant. The second half of the story focuses on how the Wizard uses Glinda’s popularity increasingly to scapegoat Elphaba for all the bad things that are happening in Oz, for which (spoiler alert) he is responsible. Wicked is an origin story for key characters in The Wizard of Oz, as well as a satire on, and subversion of, the original story. It is both a simple childish fable and a clever literary text.
In the midst of the bright major-key musical numbers and the Technicolor blare of Oz is a story that speaks into deep human desires for authenticity, to find community liberation, and to live in the truth of who we are. Not least among the reasons that Wicked has become the phenomenon that it is is the way in which it tells a story about the human desire to break free of those constraints that stifle our creative and true selves. It explores the cost of being oneself, despite pressure to conform, in a society that refuses to respect and nurture difference and honour justice.
One of the many wonderful things about the Christian faith is its invitation to become our truest selves. In Jesus Christ lies a call to discover one’s deepest and most flourishing life: to become who you are. Wicked offers its own lively echo of that deep and holy vocation.
WHAT lifts Wicked above children’s fare is its handling of profoundly contemporary and timeless themes. The setting may be the magical land of Oz, but, at its core, Wicked is a story for our populist, post-truth times: it exposes and satirises — with considerable aplomb — the ways in which powerful and privileged people, institutions, and governments can use propaganda to control public narratives.
Both Elphaba and Glinda become pawns in the wider political machinations of the fraudulent but charming Wizard and his lieutenant Madame Morrible (who is responsible for the hurricane that brings Dorothy to Oz).
Behind the musical’s glossy major-key shininess is a shadier, minor-key story that suggests that those who have the appearance of good may have dubious and exploitative motives, while those who are represented as ugly and wicked can be the agents of salvation and goodness. It is a classic topsy-turvy or upside-down fable, in which the truth is distorted by perception and propaganda. Wicked suggests not only that humans see through a mirror dimly, but that the mirror is so distorted that we can barely judge what is true or false, good or evil, hopeful or despairing any more.
THESE are big ethical and spiritual themes. Indeed, Wicked has been dismissed by some critics as a simple and simplistic morality tale. I understand why some people feel that this diminishes its impact. The criticism is meant to imply that the musical’s moral surety impairs its seriousness. I must admit that there was a time when — without ever having listened to the music, or seen the stage show — I agreed with this critical view. I can be the worst kind of snob: the sort who does not even make the effort to judge for themselves.
I see things rather differently now. I have watched the stage production 14 times, and both part one and part two of the movie version many times. While I recognise that my watching habits verge on the obsessive, what I love about Wicked is precisely the way in which its silliness and broad humour — brought to life, in the movie adaptations, by the superb comic timing of Ariana Grande’s Glinda — embrace the mythic simplicity of fairy tales and morality plays.
BY MYTHIC, I do not mean fake or false, but deep and foundational: myths help us to make sense of a puzzling, often bewildering, world. It is one of the abiding strengths of the Bible; it is the story of stories which gives us words of life. Yes, the Bible is mythically rich in ways in which Wicked would not and could not wish to be; and yet both share a fascination with our simple longing to make sense of reality for good.
The simplicity of Wicked, like that of many fairy tales and myths, is deceptive; simplicity is not simplistic. Simplicity often defeats our human gift for over-complication. It challenges the cynical and the sophisticated alike.
Indeed, the gospel itself has a beguiling simplicity. That is what makes it so wonderfully challenging and demanding. If Wicked is truth-bearing, and I think it is, what it points towards is something greater: Truth itself, as found in the good news of Jesus Christ.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, in the diocese of Manchester.