Theatre: Something wicked this way comes

At the heart of the piece is an intimate portrait of an unlikely friendship between two girls. Neither of them is called Dorothy. Maguire named his green-skinned heroine Elphaba, after the initials of L Frank Baum, whose book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz set the franchise on the yellow brick road in 1900. When Elphaba turns up for her first day at university, she immediately feels different, most of all from the college’s prom queen, blonde Galinda, who will in due course mutate into Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. In an increasingly politicised Oz, they make an unlikely and combustible alliance. Where Elphaba is outspoken, impassioned and mistrusted, Galinda ickily espouses the world-view that success always comes first to the popular, as enshrined in her song of the same name. If they ever make the movie, and they may well, Reese Witherspoon would be a shoo-in for Galinda, especially as Marc Platt, the creative producer behind Wicked, also produced Legally Blonde.

This is by no means the first spin-off from Baum’s fable. A play opened on Broadway in 1903, while Baum wrote 12 more Oz novels and six short stories. The first Oz film, in 1914, was an adaptation of one of these, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and more followed. After Baum’s death in 1919, his publishers carried on bringing out Oz stories, and didn’t stop until 1963. While the original film musical has never made it back to the stage, in 1975 came the pioneering all-black musical The Wiz, filmed three years later with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.

Wicked was, in fact, meant to be a film. In the late 1990s, Platt set up a production company, took on the rights to Maguire’s novel and had a couple of drafts scripted. “It always seemed to me there was nothing particularly magical about the screenplay,” he says down the line from LA. “I got a call one day from Stephen Schwartz, who said, ‘Did you ever consider it as a musical?’ Before he finished the sentence, a light bulb went off in my head. Music would bring the magic. I wanted to get at the inner dialogue in these two women, and that’s a hard thing to accomplish cinematically. In a musical, you can literally turn and face the audience, and sing what you’re feeling.”

Schwartz, then best known for the soundtrack to the animated film The Prince of Egypt, is a relative rarity in the world of musicals, being both composer and lyricist (see also Sondheim and Jerry Herman). Platt paired him with Holzman, creator of the cult teen television drama My So-Called Life, who had herself inquired into the availability of the rights to Wicked. “It seemed like a great marriage of writer to material,” says Platt. “My So-Called Life was a story about teenage girls. It had a voice to it that was particular to some of the underlying angst of these characters.”

It took another two years for them to come up with the material for a first reading in 2000, after which Platt hired the director Joe Mantello. Mantello is right now the highest-earning theatre director in the world, having also directed the recent Broadway productions of Three Days of Rain, with Julia Roberts, and The Odd Couple, which reunited Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, the stars of The Producers. Back then, he was a less obvious choice, as his only experience of musical theatre was an opera version of Dead Man Walking. But it was his ability to knock new shows into shape that Platt was after.

“The thing about working on a new musical,” Mantello says, “is that it really resists coming into the world. It does not want to be born. Musicals, at least in the early stages, live and die on one simple thing: is it a good idea? When I heard the idea, it made me smile. And I thought, ‘Well, if we do even a half-assed job, it’s going to be really good.’”

The producers first suspected they might have a hit on their hands during the traditional out-of-town run in San Francisco in spring 2003. When Idina Menzel, as Elphaba, first ran down to the lip of the stage and looked out into the audience, a spontaneous burst of applause welcomed her. If Menzel had been a star, they (and she) might have assumed the applause was for her. “At the time, Idina was not terribly well known,” says Mantello. “I think it was this great affection these people felt for the character. Seeing Elphaba in a new way was surprising, titillating, confusing. But they were invested in her from the moment she ran on.”

At the time, Menzel had been nominated for a Tony award for originating the character of Maureen in Rent, a transposition of La Bohème to the Lower East Side. She went one better with Wicked, seeing off stiff competition for a Tony from her co-star Kristin Chenoweth, the Kylie-sized actress who played Galinda. Menzel will play Elphaba for the London opening. “I identify with her in a huge way,” she says, in a break from rehearsals at Three Mills Island in east London. “I struggled a little bit with things I wanted to maintain. I wanted her to come in the way she does in the novel, with this big black hood, fangs and weird nails. The book is really dark, and the musical had to be uplifting.”

Opinions vary about precisely why Wicked and its lead character have hit a nerve, in particular with female audiences. It would be nothing without the eclectic stylings of Schwartz’s songbook, and plainly it’s far more than a musical about the eternal antithesis of blonde and brunette. At an early workshop, Platt recalls having “one African-American woman with tears down her face, saying, ‘You’ve just told the story of a black woman in America.’” But then another pair of women tearfully approached him: “And they said, ‘There has never been a story that has dramatised the friendship women have that is so special.’”

“It could be about race, about religion,” concludes Mantello. “It’s about any person who’s been ostracised because of something about them they can’t change. Someone said to me that the reason it’s so popular with young women is that every young woman knows what it feels like to be green.”

Even the blondes. Menzel has been paired in London with another West End newcomer, Helen Dallimore. All of her work has been in Australia, including the lead in David Williamson’s Up for Grabs, subsequently played by Madonna in London. From a glimpse of her at rehearsal, she has just the right amount of cutesy-curvy guile for blonde Galinda. “I went to a private girls’ school in Sydney,” she says, “and there were quite a few Galindas there. I desperately wanted to be friends with them. I was not the popular girl at school, and I didn’t have many friends. You do get further in life if you’re pretty and popular. One of the team said to me, ‘It’s like the words of Henry Kissinger coming out of the mouth of a Barbie doll.’”

Around the two leads are some familiar faces. Nigel Planer, nowadays reinvented as a musical performer after appearing in Chicago and We Will Rock You, will appear as the Wizard, and Miriam Margolyes as the students’ starchy instructress in sorcery, Madame Morrible. Adam Garcia, best known for Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, finally gets to play Fiyero, the cheerfully airheaded love interest he helped develop at a workshop in 2002. “They’ve hired real actors this time,” says Menzel approvingly.

Meanwhile, back on Broadway, Wicked has turned into a cottage industry. Fans who can’t get enough of the show or the cast CD or any of the usual merchandising on offer can shell out $25 for a backstage tour on Saturday mornings, for a closer look at the sets and costumes. It’s Wicked’s way of showing who’s working the ropes and pulleys behind the curtain. Clearly, it isn’t the critic of The New York Times.q

Wicked previews from Sept 7 at the Apollo Victoria, SW1