Wicked: why the musical defied the odds and is still a phenomenon 10 years on

It opened to vicious reviews, but it’s now celebrating its 10th anniversary in the West End. Dominic Cavendish finds out why

This week Wicked celebrates its 10th anniversary in the West End. In reaching this milestone, it joins an elite club. Only four other musicals currently running in London have made it to that landmark: Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Mamma Mia! and The Lion King.

While it is unlikely to outstrip Les Mis, which marks its 31st birthday in October, Wicked shares with it the rare distinction of having opened to mixed reviews, and yet still captured the public imagination.

More than 7.5 million people have seen it in London, forming a major part of the show’s global success story since its inaugural outing in New York in 2003 (50 million have seen it worldwide). Replica productions have cropped up as far afield as Japan and S?o Paulo, but it’s the incarnation at the Apollo Victoria that has shown the most stamina. Such is the appetite to find out, as the subtitle puts it, “The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz” that bookings are being taken until next November.

“I’d rather see The Wizard of Oz 20 times than this ersatz show once,” sniffed one critic 10 years ago. Yet the irony is that when the West End mounted a lavish stage version of the 1939 MGM film five years ago, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice adding to the much-loved celluloid songbook, the audience dried up after 18 months.

What has Wicked got that has made things go so right? Seeing the show the other day for the second time, I was struck by two things.

First, it has an unusual narrative in charting how Elphaba came to be the “Wicked Witch of the West”, as well as the corresponding journey of Glinda, the “Good Witch of the South”. Ambitiously counter-intuitive, it posits that the supposed “villainess” is a heroine, an outsider in Oz “smeared” by the wizard’s dictatorship. And goody-goody Glinda? The more duplicitous of the two.

The Wikipedia synopsis runs to more than 2,000 words, a testament to the fact that there are more than 50 scenes, taking us from the Hogwart’s-like Shiz University, where Elphaba is ostracised for having green skin, via sundry parts of Oz and Emerald City, arriving at a replay of that famous scene in which the witch gets doused with a bucket of water.

Second, running alongside that complexity, though is the unflagging sensation that the central proposition of the night is very simple – we are being let in on a secret: an alternative history of Oz and the story we thought we knew, as originated by L Frank Baum in 1900.

Take these two things together, and it’s hard to resist the urge to see what the fuss is about. Even if you don’t follow every twist and turn, or countenance as plausible some of the backstory that Stephen Schwartz (score, lyrics) and Winnie Holzman (book) have introduced, drawing on the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West), the revisionist gist compels.

A critic might point out that there is simultaneously a glut of rock songs and a dearth of truly memorable numbers besides the Act One closer Defying Gravity. Yet the show isn’t so much critic-proof as refund-resistant. It gives you so much – a cast of 36; exotic, colourful scenery; flying monkeys – that you get ample bangs for your bucks, and by setting itself up as a “prequel” it doesn’t stake a claim to being a masterwork in its own right.

Michael McCabe, the UK show’s executive producer, was there from the start. When those reviews started to land, did he fear it would be all over by the end of the first booking period? “I don’t think I dared go to that place,” he reflects. “I couldn’t countenance that it wasn’t going to work.”

He reminds us that 2006 was dubbed “the year of the musical” by the media. “There were so many shows opening around us: Spamalot, Dirty Dancing, The Sound of Music. We weren’t perceived to be the one that would endure, but very quickly audiences made this emotional engagement with it.” The deciding factor was the onset of social media. “An extraordinary community has grown up around Wicked, championing it.”

What’s plain is that this organic momentum has been sustained by all means possible, even to the extent of a marketing company – Joe Public – being set up in 2009. “Every day there is a need to come up with new ideas,” McCabe explains. “We have to try things no one else has and stay one step ahead.” That means shareable content, corporate tie-ins and special events – there’s an annual fancy-dress Wicked night around Hallowe’en.

An early conception took hold that the show was being sustained by the passion of young women, who, one report suggested, “have never flocked to a musical in such numbers before. They throng the stage door every night, write long letters to the actors about their personal troubles, cheer ex-cast members on … and stampede down to the Apollo if they hear that a previously unglimpsed understudy is performing.”

McCabe agrees that the fantastically tortuous friendship between Elphaba and Glinda (eclipsing the conflicted male hero, Fiyero, in the middle) remains a strong pull for that demographic but argues: “These are themes that affect everyone throughout their lives. You can feel as much of an outsider being a 75-year-old pensioner. It is not just about one age group.”

The exposing of the dark, corrupt heart of Oz and the trumpeting of the need for tolerance strikes a chord, he argues, “with everyone who has got jaded with politics. Beneath the glitter there’s an important story.”

All of which makes McCabe optimistic about Wicked’s survival. “While we must never take it for granted, we’re in a privileged place. We’re part of the landscape now.”

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