Wicked

Now running at Midtown’s Gershwin Theatre, *Wicked* is Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Broadway musical that reframes the Oz story through the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda. Set before and after Dorothy’s arrival, it follows their competing ideals as power consolidates around the Wizard and dissent is punished. The show opened in New York in 2003 and became a long-term fixture of the city’s commercial theater ecology. Its sharpest move is to treat villainy as a political label, not a personality trait.