I’ve acknowledged from the get-go that the lively and engaging Wicked has been very efficiently produced, shot, performed, and choreographed. It is also a vessel of assertive feminist propaganda (i.e., social image enhancement)
There’s a massive, alternate-universe disconnect, of course, between Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West and Cynthia Erivo’s misunderstood Elphaba, but that’s part and parcel of the new (21st Century) feminist mythology.
Throughout the 20th Century American culture had the WWotW all wrong, Wicked is saying. This has been especially true since the redefining of female perspective and identity by the #MeToo revolution of 2017.
The demonic cliche of wicked witches goes way back, of course. It probably originated with the Brothers Grimm and had certainly been intensified by the Salem witch hysteria of the 17th Century. It was then furthered by Frank L. Baum’s fabled, written-for-children fantasies and then by the MGM dream factory of 1938 and ‘39 and the resultant impression of the mean, shrewish, Victorian-minded Almira Gulch.
Either you’ve been fed this crudely condemning concept (boomers and GenXers grew up with it) or you haven’t been.
21st Century mythology has reversed this, of course. Spirited notions of feminine self-empowerment in response to entrenched and oppressive male sexism is the only allowable narrative these days — obviously a much more positive and socially constructive thing than the old Almira Gulch model.
