In honor of our very first sneak peek of the movie Wicked, my nostalgia kicked into high gear and I'm honoring one of my earliest fandom crazes with a silly little comic I'm calling "Fiyero Doesn't Get Enough Recognition For All The Shit He's Been Through."
Enjoy Fiyero having the weirdest 72 hours of his life.
So, I know that Wicked the Musical is a different beast than Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
They’re different in tone and theme, and they aren’t trying to be the same thing. I usually don’t even think of them in the same breath; Maguire’s Oz is a different world than the one we see on stage.
However, there is one change made for the stage show that I think is a weakening of the story: the decision to have Elphaba fake her death, and run away with Fiyero. I get it, it’s a musical; Elphie melting at the end of her own story is a bummer. But Wicked is a tragedy, and I always thought it was a little bit of a cop-out to give Elphaba a happy ending.
Then I realized something: The book is Elphaba’s story, but Wicked the musical is very explicitly told from Glinda’s point of view. There’s the whole “I did know her once… at school,” thing that turns into an extended flashback.
Maybe Elphaba didn’t fake her death. Maybe the ending of the stage show is Glinda imagining, and hoping, that’s what happened. Perhaps Elphaba turned Fiyero into a scarecrow, and then they ran away together. Maybe it was all Elphaba’s master plan. Probably not. But for Glinda, it’s helpful to imagine — and always, in the back of her mind, to believe that’s what happened.
No one mourns the Wicked. Glinda doesn’t want to mourn. She wants to believe that somewhere, somehow, her friend is still out there.