I SOMETIMES ponder whether my brain is wired up accurately. Where most individuals treat Lent as a season for sober and sensible self-examination, a preparation for the enjoyment of Easter, my first thought is: “Which movie shall I watch?” Indeed, since I enjoyed a Lent course based on the film adaptation of Chocolat well over a decade ago, Lent has grow to be a season when movies often supply my prompts for prayerful reflection.
I especially benefit from the dynamic interplay of image, story, and song present in musicals equivalent to The Greatest Showman. Show tunes, I find, offer vigorous routes into reflection on faith, hope, and love. The world of musicals — wherein normal narrative logic is usually disapplied — provides imaginative space for encounters with the divine.
THE musical Wicked, nonetheless, may appear a stretch too far for many individuals. As the recent two-part film adaptation starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo showed, the musical is so shiny that it makes classic Disney movies seem like gritty film noir. More significantly, Wicked is, ultimately, a musical about witches and wizards. One doesn’t must be a reactionary redneck Southern Baptist to ponder whether witchcraft is a fit subject for Christian prayer and meditation.
I take a more nuanced view. Wicked is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, primarily from the viewpoint of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. It explores her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in addition to with the Wizard of Oz. It subverts lots of the terrifying pictures of the Wicked Witch which haunt my imagination; the movie helps the viewer to see how Elphaba is the victim of stereotyping, and scapegoated. She is ostracised due to her skin color and her misunderstood magical powers. The Wizard turns her right into a “monster” because he needs one to unify his society.
THE first half of the musical explores how Elphaba and Glinda move from enmity to friendship, and shows how Elphaba becomes increasingly disillusioned together with her hero, the Wizard of Oz, realising that he’s a paranoid tyrant. The second half of the story focuses on how the Wizard uses Glinda’s popularity increasingly to scapegoat Elphaba for all of the bad things which might be happening in Oz, for which (spoiler alert) he’s responsible. Wicked is an origin story for key characters in The Wizard of Oz, in addition to a satire on, and subversion of, the unique story. It is each an easy childish fable and a clever literary text.
In the midst of the brilliant major-key musical numbers and the Technicolor blare of Oz is a story that speaks into deep human desires for authenticity, to search out community liberation, and to live in the reality of who we’re. Not least amongst the explanations that Wicked has grow to be the phenomenon that it’s is the way in which wherein it tells a story concerning the human desire to interrupt freed from those constraints that stifle our creative and true selves. It explores the associated fee of being oneself, despite pressure to evolve, in a society that refuses to respect and nurture difference and honour justice.
One of the numerous wonderful things concerning the Christian faith is its invitation to grow to be our truest selves. In Jesus Christ lies a call to find one’s deepest and most flourishing life: to grow to be who you’re. Wicked offers its own vigorous echo of that deep and holy vocation.
WHAT lifts Wicked above children’s fare is its handling of profoundly contemporary and timeless themes. The setting would be the magical land of Oz, but, at its core, Wicked is a story for our populist, post-truth times: it exposes and satirises — with considerable aplomb — the ways wherein powerful and privileged people, institutions, and governments can use propaganda to manage public narratives.
Both Elphaba and Glinda grow to be pawns in the broader political machinations of the fraudulent but charming Wizard and his lieutenant Madame Morrible (who’s accountable for the hurricane that brings Dorothy to Oz).
Behind the musical’s glossy major-key shininess is a shadier, minor-key story that means that those that have the looks of fine could have dubious and exploitative motives, while those that are represented as ugly and wicked will be the agents of salvation and goodness. It is a classic topsy-turvy or upside-down fable, wherein the reality is distorted by perception and propaganda. Wicked suggests not only that humans see through a mirror dimly, but that the mirror is so distorted that we will barely judge what’s true or false, good or evil, hopeful or despairing any more.
THESE are big ethical and spiritual themes. Indeed, Wicked has been dismissed by some critics as an easy and simplistic morality tale. I understand why some people feel that this diminishes its impact. The criticism is supposed to imply that the musical’s moral surety impairs its seriousness. I have to admit that there was a time when — without ever having listened to the music, or seen the stage show — I agreed with this critical view. I will be the worst type of snob: the kind who doesn’t even take the time to guage for themselves.
I see things slightly otherwise now. I actually have watched the stage production 14 times, and each part one and part two of the movie version over and over. While I recognise that my watching habits verge on the obsessive, what I like about Wicked is precisely the way in which wherein its silliness and broad humour — delivered to life, within the movie adaptations, by the superb comic timing of Ariana Grande’s Glinda — embrace the mythic simplicity of fairy tales and morality plays.
BY MYTHIC, I don’t mean fake or false, but deep and foundational: myths help us to make sense of a puzzling, often bewildering, world. It is one among the abiding strengths of the Bible; it’s the story of stories which supplies us words of life. Yes, the Bible is mythically wealthy in ways wherein Wicked wouldn’t and will not want to be; and yet each share a fascination with our easy longing to make sense of reality for good.
The simplicity of Wicked, like that of many fairy tales and myths, is deceptive; simplicity isn’t simplistic. Simplicity often defeats our human gift for over-complication. It challenges the cynical and the subtle alike.
Indeed, the gospel itself has a beguiling simplicity. That is what makes it so splendidly difficult and demanding. If Wicked is truth-bearing, and I feel it’s, what it points towards is something greater: Truth itself, as present in the excellent news of Jesus Christ.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, within the diocese of Manchester.
