Wicked at the Eccles: Who Tells the Story?

Editor’s note, updated October 30, 2026: This review of the April 16 – May 25, 2025 Salt Lake City engagement has been updated to include comments author Gregory Maguire made at Fordham University in October 2025.

Salt Lake City, UT — “Oh, it’s good to see me, isn’t it? No need to respond—that was rhetorical.”

So begins Glinda’s sparkling entrance in Wicked, floating down in her bubble with practiced charm. It’s a quick laugh line, and also a quiet thesis. From its opening moments, Wicked treats rhetoric as more than speech: it is how belief is shaped and power is held. The national tour, presented by Marc Platt, Universal Stage Productions, The Araca Group, Jon B. Platt, and David Stone, defies gravity as expected. In 2025, it also defies political complacency. Under the emerald spectacle is a pointed allegory about narrative control, misinformation, and how easily public truth can be manufactured. This production has teeth, and the one smiling behind them is the Wizard, a character created long before Donald Trump took office, who now reads as an uncanny portrait of him.

From Novel to Phenomenon

Directed by Joe Mantello, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, Wicked adapts Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which retells The Wizard of Oz from the witches’ side. In the novel, questions of charisma, authority, and moral legitimacy stay mostly in the subtext. Onstage they come out in the open, and the musical form gives them emotional immediacy.

Since opening on Broadway in 2003 with Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, Wicked has become the second-highest-grossing production in Broadway history, with more than $1.5 billion in Broadway ticket sales and over $6 billion worldwide (Clement, 2023; Playbill, 2024). It is the fourth-longest-running show on record. Its Grammy-winning cast recording went Platinum (RIAA, 2009), and a two-part film adaptation (2024 and 2025) has carried it to a new generation. Few musicals stay this popular and this politically pointed for two decades.

The Story

Long before Dorothy drops in, Elphaba, brilliant and fiery and born with emerald-green skin, arrives at Shiz University and is paired with Glinda, its most popular student. Their rivalry turns into an unlikely friendship, until a trip to Emerald City shows them what the Wizard really is. One chooses to resist him. The other chooses to stand beside him. Oz decides which is “good” and which is “wicked.”

Performances

Lauren Samuels gives Elphaba a richly textured performance, caught between idealism and alienation. Her “Defying Gravity” plays less as a triumphant anthem than as a refusal to accept a system that brands curiosity and conscience as threats. Maguire’s novel names exactly what Oz is trying to stamp out: the belief that “there were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.” Samuels is fierce without hardening, and her vulnerability stays visible even in exile.

Austen Danielle Bohmer’s Glinda balances precision, warmth, and unsettling charm. Her “Popular” lands with impeccable comic timing, and by “For Good” she has charted, with real restraint, how accommodation and silence can pass for kindness. She never lets Glinda off the hook, and she never lets her lose her humanity either.

Xavier McKinnon’s Fiyero makes a slower, riskier journey. His “Dancing Through Life” reads as a learned survival strategy, a deliberate refusal to look too closely at injustice. When he finally chooses resistance over comfort, the change feels earned rather than romanticized. It also carries one of the show’s sharpest claims: neutrality is itself a political position.

Erica Ito’s Nessarose is a quietly devastating study of how closeness to power corrodes good intentions. Wounded dependency hardens into entitlement and cruelty, showing that harm usually comes from small, self-protective choices rather than grand villainy.

The ensemble gives the production a kinetic pulse. It includes Alex Vinh (Boq), Kingsley Leggs (Doctor Dillamond), Jennifer Mariela Bermeo, and Matt Densky. Wayne Cilento’s choreography in “One Short Day” captures Oz’s central contradiction: a society that moves beautifully while thinking very little. Hardest to watch is the silencing of the Animals. Losing their voices shuts them out of public life, and Doctor Dillamond’s fate shows what happens when knowledge is treated as subversion and empathy as a threat.

Design: Spectacle as Strategy

Eugene Lee’s scenic design, crowned by the ticking Clock of the Time Dragon, is part steampunk fantasy and part metaphor for a culture fixated on surveillance and control. Susan Hilferty’s Emerald City couture, stitched with animal textures, wears Oz’s exploitation on its sleeve. Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections and Kenneth Posner’s lighting move the story seamlessly while underlining mood and manipulation. Tony Meola’s sound design and William David Brohn’s orchestrations let Schwartz’s score do more than carry emotion: it argues, persuades, and resists.

The Wizard as Trumpian Rhetorician

The Wicked Educator’s Guide frames the show around propaganda, scapegoating, and the nature of truth. The Wizard uses all three expertly, and in 2025 his playbook sounds familiar.

Blake Hammond plays him with frightening ease. He isn’t playing a villain. He’s playing a man who doesn’t believe he’s doing anything wrong, and that unshakable self-regard makes him far more dangerous than a caricature. Just before “Wonderful,” the Wizard tells Elphaba:

History, for the Wizard, isn’t a record. It’s a narrative, and narratives can be bought, bent, or rewritten. The number is epideictic rhetoric, ceremonial self-praise that celebrates illusion to distract from injustice. It is the logic of a politician who calls inconvenient reporting “fake news” and whose administration answered verifiable facts with “alternative facts.” A few lines later the Wizard states his philosophy outright:

This is an appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum): public opinion (doxa) put in place of reason (logos). It’s an old method, and demagogues have run on it for centuries, but few modern politicians have worked it as relentlessly as Trump. Repeat a claim often enough, through enough channels and with enough branding, and consensus stands in for truth. The Wizard doesn’t need to be right. He needs to be believed. He doesn’t have to be special, either, or a genius. That’s the show’s most unsettling insight: the man behind the curtain was never extraordinary. His power comes from the machine built to amplify him and the crowd willing to applaud.

Maguire’s Elphaba put it more bluntly in the novel that started it all: “The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.” The Wizard isn’t powerful because he’s brilliant. Power has made him careless, and the system covers for him.

He doesn’t work alone. Glinda, now in his camp, insists in “Thank Goodness” that she couldn’t be happier, then breaks from the song to quietly take it back. The admission doesn’t last. She folds it straight back into the performance:

No one crosses the bridges on purpose. They just get crossed. That agentless phrasing shields Glinda from responsibility, and sung with disarming sincerity, it wraps complicity in sentiment. Her brief moment of honesty makes it worse: she knows something has been lost, and she chooses to keep singing. It’s the same move that sells harmful policy as compassion and recasts cruelty as something that simply happened.

Then there’s Madame Morrible, played with deliciously icy resolve by Aymee Garcia. If the Wizard is the face of power in Oz, Morrible is its voice. She knows how to turn a rumor into a headline and a dissenter into a threat. The study guide defines working “in tandem” as acting together, but there’s a difference between partners who build something in the open and partners who work together to deceive. The Wizard and Morrible are the second kind. This is collusion, not collaboration: he invents the narrative, and she sells it. Maguire’s novel has a phrase for what that kind of storytelling leaves of the person it targets: “the carapace of her reputation for malice.”

Final Reflections: Who Tells the Story?

Wicked’s central question, who gets to tell the story, has rarely felt more urgent. In a time of banned books, vilified protest, and rewritten histories, the show reminds us that silence can be complicity and sentimentality can be the velvet glove of authoritarianism. Emerald City is a brand, a myth, and a machine. The Wizard is no longer just a man behind a curtain. He’s the spin doctor running it, using spectacle to bury truth.

Wicked opened in 2003, in the shadow of the Iraq War, built on a novel Maguire wrote more than two decades before Trump took office. Maguire himself seems unsettled by how well it has aged. Speaking at Fordham University in October 2025, he said he was dismayed to see the political themes he wrote into Wicked playing out in American politics: “I did not want to be prophetic.” He didn’t need to be. The Wizard is a role, not a person, and someone is always auditioning for it.

Glinda told us in her first line that it was all rhetorical. Maguire’s novel saw where that leads. As Boq puts it:

Twenty years on, Wicked still asks the question that matters most, and it’s meant for us, not for Oz: when rhetoric shapes reality, who do we choose to believe, and why? Wicked the Musical endures not just for its spectacular score and iconic performances, but for its bold engagement with timeless and urgent questions about truth, justice, and the stories we’re told. Its enduring magic lies in how it invites each generation to reimagine not just Oz, but their own place within systems of power and perception.

Plan Your Visit

🎭 Venue
George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater
131 South Main Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84101

📅 Performance Dates
April 16 – May 25, 2025 (engagement closed)
Presented by Broadway Across America

🎟️ Tickets

• Online: Broadway-at-the-Eccles.com
• Phone: 801-355-ARTS (2787)
• In person: Eccles Theater Box Office
• Groups (10+): 317-632-5183 or Christopher.Schneider@BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com

⏱️ Good to Know

• Run time: 2 hours 45 minutes, including one intermission
• Age guidance: Recommended for ages 8 and up. Children under 5 are not admitted. Every patron needs a ticket, regardless of age.

♿ Accessible Performances

The Eccles Theater offers wheelchair-accessible seating and assistive listening devices. For other accommodations, call the box office at 801-355-ARTS (2787).

📘 Learn More

• Wicked Educator’s Guide
• WickedTheMusical.com
• Follow Wicked on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok

References

Billboard. (2024). Top cast albums chart. https://www.billboard.com/charts/cast-albums/

Clement, O. (2023). Wicked becomes second-highest grossing Broadway show of all time. Playbill. https://www.playbill.com

Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. ReganBooks.

Platt, M. (n.d.). Quoted in Wicked educator’s guide (p. 6). https://wickedthemusical.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Wicked-Study-Guide-Large-File-Sile.pdf

Playbill. (2024). Wicked grosses and performance statistics. https://www.playbill.com

Recording Industry Association of America. (2009). Gold & Platinum: Wicked cast recording. https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/

Russell, J. (2025, December 3). Gregory Maguire says he never expected Wicked to reflect America’s slide toward authoritarianism. LGBTQ Nation. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/12/gregory-maguire-says-he-never-expected-wicked-to-reflect-americas-slide-toward-authoritarianism/