Is the Movie ‘Wicked Really an Anti-Authoritarian Musical?

I first saw “Wicked” in 2003, when I was 22 and studying musical theater writing at N.Y.U. As a nascent musical theater writer, I was impressed by its craftsmanship and unusual premise: that the cackling, green-faced Wicked Witch of the West most of us know from the 1939 film has a name: Elphaba Thropp.

We also learn that she is not wicked at all. That’s just propaganda spread by Elphaba’s enemies because she stood up for the rights of the enchanted land’s talking animals, whom the not-so-wonderful Wizard of Oz had oppressed. At the time, the plot and its modern sensibility read very simply to me as a quirky, catchy musical fairy-tale soap opera subversion of a beloved classic.

It was only in the intervening years that I learned that “Wicked” was intended to have real world political resonance. With the election of President Trump to a second term, and the release of the first of its two parts as a film, “Wicked” has blossomed into what the director and producer Adam McKay recently described online as “one of the most radical big studio Hollywood movies ever made.” It is now feminist, queer and antifascist. I’ve even seen it suggested, however unseriously, that releasing the film before the 2024 election might have helped Kamala Harris win the presidency. “Wicked: Part One” is up for 10 Academy Awards on Sunday. If it wins Best Picture, I can only imagine that will be a signal to some on the liberal left that the roundly defeated Trump “resistance” is not so dead after all, and that the time has come to levitate on their brooms and take to the Western skies for battle in the 2026 midterms and beyond.

But are assertions like this reading too much into this film? Does Elphaba have anything at all to do with this or any political moment in America? Or are we engaging in what I call progressive magical thinking — a mode of reasoning that takes existing texts and then tries to reclaim or reimagine them for the purpose of imbuing them with socially correct attitudes or critiques? As a musical and a film, “Wicked” falls squarely in the middle of this trend that has been exacerbated over time and by the internet’s obsession with current events and “timeliness.”

But the inclusion of these references and themes does not paint a convincing portrait of any real-world political parallels in either 2003 (when “Wicked” opened on Broadway) or today.

As one example, progressive magical thinking makes it reasonable to suggest that because of the fact that L. Frank Baum, the writer of the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” upon which all of this is loosely based, had undeniably racist attitudes toward Native Americans, his judgment might have been too compromised to compassionately portray the true character of the Wicked Witch (a character he created), and thus, like child protective services, Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel that the musical is based on, and later Stephen Schwartz, its composer, and Winnie Holzman, who wrote the musical’s book, rightly took custody of Mr. Baum’s abused child with their revisions. But if Mr. Baum’s racism is so objectionable, isn’t any attempt to reimagine his work just striking a complicit and corrupt bargain with a bigot?