Wicked times

THAT EMERALD spectacle, "Wicked" the musical, carts its son-et-lumière magic back into town this week. The occasion allows me to consider whether the themes have acquired new meaning since they showed up first in my 1995 novel, and have been theatrically enhanced, besequinned, and popularized in the dozen years since.

"Wicked" is a story about an awkward girl, one with nascent magical powers and a steely sense of righteousness, who comes up against a ditzy opportunist named Glinda and a megalomaniacal dictator calling himself the Wizard of Oz. I modeled the green-skinned witch, Elphaba, after my heroines. The idealistic nerdess bears some chromosomal resemblance to the young Virginia Woolf, for her acerbity and intellect, and to the young Laura Nyro, for her invention and energy, and to the older Emily Dickinson, for her willingness to retire when the going gets unseemly.

The play crystallizes into a pink-and-green music box what in my novel was more obscurely put: The cost of the choices one has to make may bankrupt even the morally soundest among us. And weirdly, in the dozen years since "Wicked" was first published, my somewhat heavy-handed tropes about power and corruption, about hubris and need, about individuals and institutions, have come to seem less exaggerated.

In 1995, we had successfully concluded Operation Desert Storm. We were giddy with prospects of a peace dividend and were reducing the national debt. The trouble spots were still trouble, but they were mostly Over There. Therefore, as I drew it, the political situation in Oz was not only obvious but, I admitted, even a bit quaint.

The novel hearkened back to Pinochet's Chile and Hitler's Deutschland, seasoned with a bit of Orwell's "1984." The Wizard was more Idi Amin than Lord Voldemort (Harry Potter was still two years out). I felt, and hoped, that I was writing about a kind of sordid American exceptionalism that we might just be outgrowing.

How naive we writers are, forgetting the endless inventiveness of evil.

While the play was in development, the horror of the attacks in 2001 detonated our fragile national sense of equanimity. Still, the work continued, with Winnie Holzman the brave dramatist and Stephen Schwartz the tunesmith, and the first out-of-town tryouts were held only 10 weeks after US forces and allies marched into Baghdad.

In the nearly five years since, the musical has gone from strength to strength. Is it self-delusion on my part to believe that the appeal of feminine strength and moxie, though a real draw to the play, distracts from another reason that "Wicked" found its unexpectedly stratospheric flight path?

Since the book was first published, think what we've been through: the 2000 contested presidential election, the attacks on American soil, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, Darfur, you name it. And the character of our national discourse has grown so shrill that it now borders on the hysterical. I used to fault the court of Incurious George and his cronies. Now I find the lack of civility and the evaporation of respect for different points of view to be rampant all over the political spectrum, including the soapbox I comfortably occupy.

The public, observable face of evil keeps changing; that's how it survives. It employs an endless series of disguises, curtains, puppets to distract the unvigilant, trumpet voluntaries to swell the patriotic heart. But recently in The New York Times, Michael Ignatieff wrote, "Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself." He is reconsidering his early support of the war in Iraq (Let me put that more clearly: He is examining his conscience about how and why he took what he now considers the wrong position on that war). He is reminding us that we should demand that our leaders prove themselves trustworthy, not just declare themselves so.

"People with good judgment listen to warning bells within," Ignatieff continued. But we are all screaming so loudly we can't hear one another, let alone our own interior alarms.

Five years since the Broadway opening, a dozen years since the book was first published, "Wicked" still examines the heady narcotic of believing one's own press releases too earnestly. No one in "Wicked" demonstrates perfect judgment - certainly not the heroines, Elphaba and Glinda. The danger isn't just that one's noble aims might justify questionable means, but that the very quality of one's moral zeal, the rightness of one's cause (and, by extension how very flattering the rightness of one's self) might justify the means.

That self-confidence is the root of fundamentalism of any stripe. In its jovial, tuneful way, "Wicked" still says: Beware dispatching the flying monkeys too fast. The powerhouse chanteuses in the musical still belt that cautionary message. We can stand to hear it again.

Gregory Maguire is author of "Wicked" and the just released "What-The-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy."