Isn’t it a wonder how only the good guys in movies and novels get remembered and how only the heroes get their own stories? Why don’t the bad guys get the same thing even though their depicted characters are sometimes much better written or well-presented than the hero/heroine. Besides, the baddies have lives too! Well…that’s what novelist Gregory Maguire thought when he penned the award-winning, best-selling novel titled Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It is a parallel story to L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of OZ. The novel is set mostly before Dorothy, the lead character from the Wizard of OZ and shows the Land of OZ from the perspective of the witches.

The musical Wicked is a two stage act which tells the story of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West and her love-hate relationship with her fellow witch Galinda, the Good Witch of the North. The musical shows how their unique friendship blossoms, yet faces a myriad of difficulties because of their differences, their contrasting personalities and ways of thinking, their odd love triangle with the same love-interest, their varied responses to the corrupt government of the Wizard of OZ and finally the noteworthy decline of Elphaba. The play includes many scenes and dialogues from the first Wizard of OZ film and makes many references to the same.

The whole concept came about when Stephen Schwartz came across the novel while on holiday in 1995 and realized that what a well-written book had an even bigger hidden potential to become a stage show or musical and in 1998 Schwartz met Maguire and bought the rights for the stage production. It took over a year for Schwartz who collaborated with the Emmy Award-winning writer Winnie Holzman to develop the plot and initial drafts and the lyrics and original score were also developed while scripting. By April 2003, the cast was complete and the show ready to hit Broadway.

The Broadway musical show Wicked debuted on 30th October 2003. Being a Universal Pictures production, it is a star-studded show directed by Joe Mantello. Even though the show received mixed reviews and The New York Times even dumped the idea altogether saying it would flop horribly, the musical proved the opposite and turned out to be a real success and is a much loved favorite among all who come to the show. Wicked musical show tickets get sold out fast and cheap online tickets to Wicked can be booked online. You can get discounted tickets to the Wicked Broadway musical show with little searching online. The Wicked theatre production has now made it to Chicago, Los Angeles, London’s West End, Tokyo (Japan), Melbourne (Australia) and Stuttgart in Germany. There have been two Wicked musical show tours too - in the United States and Canada - that went to more than 30 cities.