By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
REGION – When it comes to the Land of Oz, everyone is familiar with the story of Dorothy’s quest to return home to Kansas. However, Massachusetts cannot be counted out for its connections to this magical land. First, several of the actors in the 1939 film classic “The Wizard of Oz” were natives of or had some type of connection to the Commonwealth. Interestingly, things are not much different for the 2024 American musical fantasy film “Wicked.”
Photo/courtesy of Universal Pictures
Concord author penned revisionist novel
The movie “Wicked” is based on the 1995 revisionist novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” written by Gregory Maguire. It is a two-part feature film with the second film expected for release in November 2025. It had been adapted into a Tony Award winning Broadway musical in 2003. In 2005, ten years after its publication, “Wicked” spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The 70-year-old Maguire was raised in an orphanage in Albany, New York until his father remarried. He attended SUNY Albany where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and art. He later earned an M.A. in children’s literature from Simmons College in Boston in 1978 which is the same year his first children’s book, “The Lightning Time” was published. He taught at Simmons from 1979 to 1986, when the children’s literature program was founded. The following year he and other former Simmons faculty members organized Children’s Literature New England, a nonprofit educational organization that fostered the role of literature in children’s lives and served as co-director for twenty-five years.
Photo/Wikimedia Commons/Jeremy Goldstein
Maguire earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University in Medford in 1990 and has lived in Concord since 1999. During his time at Tufts, Maguire took a required class taught by the highly regarded Professor Jesper Rosenmeier on Puritan and Colonial literature in America before 1800. Maguire said to MSN.com, “I had thought the Puritans were the driest, dullest, ugliest, most scowling, least fun, most oppressive peoples on the planet, in the history of peopledom. And in fact, a lot of that is true, but it’s not all true.”
However, Maguire credits the class with teaching him to rethink the challenges of the Puritans and how that might have influenced their thinking. He explained, “No different, as my teacher pointed out, than if people in our century were to be able to gather in a group of 300 and take a flight to Mars. Never to return. That’s how far away they went. And the psychological crises impressed upon their God-fearing souls were Shakespearean in their pressure and in their forces, sometimes in their effect.”
Movie version
In the movie, Elphaba’s father, Frexpar Thropp, is a governor and minister whose character was shaped by the Puritans of Massachusetts. Ministers at that time “went out into what they called the wilderness, and they tried to correct it through liturgy.” Elphaba’s father does the same, which is why he misses Elphaba’s birth in the book. Frexpar, though not genetically Elphaba’s father is the biological father of Elphaba’s younger sister Nessarose whom he gives preferential treatment and emotionally rejects Elphaba because she was born with green skin.
Maguire was also inspired by a street he previously lived on in Cambridge—Upland Street. Therefore, Glinda Upland of the upper Uplands, through her mother is a descendant of from the noble clan of the Arduennas of the Upland.
Before they were sworn enemies, the Wicked Witch (Elphaba) and Glinda were best friends and roommates at the prestigious Shiz University. While the pre-eminent college shows striking similarities to Harry Potter Hogwarts-like fantastical courses in magic and spellcasting, the campus grounds will remind moviegoers of grand old institutions like Harvard University.
“Wicked” stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, Ariana Grande as Glinda, Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard and Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.
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