The Politics of Villains: The Musical’s George W Bush-era Vibes Taken a Hard Hit During the Trump Years

“(The Iraq War) was sold entirely on misinformation and misinformation, which was propagated not only by our government, but frankly by your government as well,” said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist behind the musical, in a recent interview in the United Kingdom. publication The Independent. “And also the demonization of Saddam Hussein as a justification for the war. Not that he wasn’t a bad guy, but the total demonization, in black and white, obviously struck us as part of the story. We hope we’ve incorporated this in a subtle and entertaining way.

In Wicked: The Grimmerie, a behind-the-scenes look at the hit Broadway musical by David Cote Winnie Holzman, the musical’s writer, says that when she and Schwartz began working in 1998, they were first inspired by Clinton — a sympathetic leader with a glaring personal weakness — to create the Sorcerer. But as Bush took power and America changed, so did the man behind the curtain. The popular, self-deprecating “corn-fed redneck” of the Emerald City who was proudly unfit to lead, lied to his people, and turned them against the Wicked Witch, has become more dangerous.

In a 2003 coin The New York Timeswhile the series was playing an out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, author Daniel Handler made a brief comparison between WickedTH White’s page for staging a trip to the Bush era The once and future king musical adaptation, Camelotduring the Kennedy era. Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, concluded that “maybe, the show suggests, ‘bad guy’ is what the W stands for.” »

In “Wonderful,” a second-act ditty that will likely hit like a ton of yellow bricks in 2025, the wizard describes a postmodern view of morality and truth itself. “A man is called a traitor or a liberator / A rich man is a thief or a philanthropist / Is one a crusader or a ruthless invader? / It’s all in which the label can persist / Few are comfortable / With moral ambiguities / So we act as if they don’t exist. Again, although the lyrics apply to several historical figures, they were written with Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in mind.

It’s worth noting that this is all a walk in the park compared to the source material. In Maguire’s dense and dark novel, Elphaba joins an eco-terrorist organization and the animals experience more complex, apartheid-like oppression. “(Maguire’s) Oz is basically a fascist society,” Schwartz said in The Grimmerie. “We didn’t go that far: we talked more about American politics. Depending on what color state you live in, you have an idea of ​​how close we are to fascism today. This book was published in 2005.

The policy of Wicked are perhaps ultimately smarter than smart. After all, these references were jokes that amounted to political cartoons, and stories of courageous underdogs speaking truth to power and fighting against oppression are not uncommon. However, the fact that all of this was hiding in plain sight in a Broadway show about female friendship in the Land of Oz was incredibly appealing to a bookish, disillusioned teenager like me at the time. And if it was obvious to me at that age, there’s no excuse for anyone else, especially now. Here we are in 2024, where the cult of personality around Donald Trump is all the more dangerous, anti-intellectualism is all the more prevalent, and moral ambiguities are being swept under the rug at an alarming rate. It’s disturbing to think how far back we have fallen and to be reminded of it by a musical, of all things.

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