May 22, 2025 • 48 mins
Get ready for a Wicked good interview with Gregory Maguire! The author of Wicked joined Lisa to talk about his brand-new book Elphie, the prequel about Elphaba's life. Gregory gave insight to the making of the Broadway phenomenon Wicked, how he felt about the movie casting, and he gave us two pieces of breaking news!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, Welcome to Lisa's Book Club, a podcast where I
interview best selling authors from the New England area, pulling
back the curtain on what it's really like being a
best selling author. They're guilty pleasures, latest projects, and so
much more. Incredible night with author Gregory Maguire of Wicked.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
You have to listen to our talk.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
He gave us some really good insider information and some
breaking news.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So gregree, we're here.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Thank you. Kristin, it's so nice.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I talked Gregory before we came out that when we
do like celebrity doppelgangers, that I always get Kristin Jenna
with right.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I was like, this is so perfect.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He was like, I can see you.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I'll take it right.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So I want to talk a little bit about I mean,
obviously everyone knows the fact that Wicked is a phenomenon,
grossing over one point seven billion dollars, the numbers staggering,
too many awards to even talk about. But I want
to go back because to where it all started. I
(01:11):
want to go back to your fascination with the Wizard
of Oz a little bit, your and your backstory and
your childhood, because I think it all it's important to
talk about.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
You know, it's funny lit because I have just finished
writing draft nine of a memoir. I never thought that
I would do a memoir. But then when Hollywood gets
a hold of you and puffs up your ego, you know,
just like a piece of popcorn, you float around up
there with the raft and you think, well, maybe everybody
needs to nowhere I can.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is this breaking news that you're writing a memoir? Yes,
I guess right.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
My editor doesn't know about it yet, so don't tell it, okay.
But in fact, Wicked is now thirty years old, and
there is an advantage of increased you might say binocularity
when you look back at your life and you realize,
(02:10):
I see my life from the point of view in
which I lived it as a child, but as you're
at the other end, you actually can see it like
an acetate transfer. I can see who I became and
how in a way I became the author of Wicked
(02:31):
and other things better because I'm older. So I thought, well,
if this, you know, I mean, I could be you know,
I could never make it out of your live who knows.
They got to get this down. So the facts, the
raw facts of my childhood, and they do influence the
plot of Wicked and the character of Alphaba. The very
raw facts are that I was born in Upstate New
(02:54):
York seventy years ago, the fourth of four children of
my parents. And when I was born, my mother died
in childbirth. I know, it's like, does that still happen?
What are years old? As Charles dickens, you know, So
I actually think I was one of the last people
born in the Albany area whose mother died from complications
(03:18):
resulting from childbirth. So I began life under a kind
of soft flannel weight that I have not been able
to shuck off my whole life. It's a weight of
I don't want to call it guilt. For many years
I did call it guilt, and I thought, no, this
(03:39):
is actually that I can't be guilty of that because
I didn't choose to do it. Nonetheless, I've had to
live with the reality of having caused distress to my
father and to my older brothers and sisters without meaning to,
just by the fact of having chromosomes in tissue. You know.
And when you see the story of Alphaba, and including
(04:00):
the story of Elphie, you see that the character of
Alphaba grows up also with a sense of I did
not choose this skin. I did not choose this life.
Well of us, none of us did, and yet I
have to live and carry the weight of it around
(04:21):
with me, as we all do. I'm not claiming special
special privileges or anything, or special troubles either. We all
carry with us the weight of what a British writer
of mine said is called moral luck. The moral luck
of having been born in the twentieth century, as most
(04:44):
of us, except a couple of babies, qualify for doing,
the moral luck of most of us having been born white,
many of us having been born in the West, or
in the West Europe or the United States. We have luck,
and we also have cost. We have to carry both
of those things. The story of Alphaba in Wicked, and
(05:06):
I get this more and more as I get older,
is the story of learning how to shoulder the obligations
and also learning how to throw them down on the
floor when it is time for her to be liberated
from them.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
How did you when did the idea pop in your head?
Where were you living at the time.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Well, unlike a newborn child, the germination of a novel
happens over and over and again through your life. It's
not just one nice night with a lesson nice wine.
It's like it takes a lifetime.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
But did you have sort of a moment.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Of I was in great affection for the film, not
the nineteen thirty nine film when I was a kid.
In fact, my brother Joe, whom you know, played the
entire Munchkin population from his stroll when I used to
play the Wizard of Oz in Catholic grade school in
(06:05):
the schoolyard, and so I carried that story, and I
carried my alarm, first about the Witch, but increasingly about
the Wizard as I grew up. And I was living
in London thirty four years ago when two terrible things happened.
When was the start of the First Gulf War, and
(06:27):
I saw the British press come out with headlines in
eighty point type that said Sodom Hussein the next Hitler,
and Hitler is what we would now call a trigger word.
And it triggered me because while I'm a pacifist by
(06:50):
moral conviction, even a pacifist has to say, if my
behavior and actions could save people from being sent to
camps or dying or being shot in the street, what
is my moral obligation. So I started thinking about the
First Gulf War and the use of the word Hitler,
(07:10):
and then at the same time, and I'm looking around,
I'm going to talk obliquely here because there are some
young ears in the audience. There was an occasion in
London in nineteen ninety two or three in which a
small child had a regrettable afternoon, and that was a
(07:32):
final afternoon, and two school children were convicted of the crime.
And so that led everybody in my circle, as it
should really do all of us, to ask the question,
how could two ten year olds wake up in the morning,
(07:54):
decide whether to have weed of vix or toast for
breakfast and be arrested by evening for the most heinous
crime there is and depriving the child of the future
that that child ought to have had. These two things together,
the macro situation of going to war against a named
(08:14):
villain and the micro situation of two ten year olds
and a two year old, they clashed in my head
as if I needed a lot more therapy than I
was currently getting. And as a writer, the thing that
I do with the complications in my head is to say,
(08:35):
I can't work this out. Sure, I'm glib, I'm irish,
but I'm actually not very smart. The only thing I
know how to do is hitch my problems to fiction
and let my creative imagination work on it. Because my
creative imagination is real, it's strong, it's a lot more
powerful than I am. It's never actually introduced itself to
me because it doesn't want to be friends. But I
(08:58):
take it, and I take what it has to give me,
and I work with it. So that's really where it
came from.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
So you tackled the question what makes you wicked?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The problem of evil? Stephen Schwartz and when He Holtzmann
in the movie were able to put at the top
of the film in the first ninety seconds of the movie,
the thing that it took me four hundred and two
pages to say in a novel, which is what makes
somebody evil? Are we born crippled? Are we born morally crippled?
(09:29):
Or does something happen to us? Are we tabyle rasa?
Does something happen to us chromosonally, pietistically, behaviorally? I mean's
the same? Do you remember this? Remember the song from
West Side Story? Officer Krupkey gee, kindly, Officer Krupkey, you
(09:49):
don't understand. And in that story, five different theories are
jokingly presented as to why juvenile delinquents are juvenile. The well,
in a sense, that's what Wicked tried to do. It
tried not to settle on a theory, but to put
every theory I could think of into the life of
Alphaba and say, you can survive anything. You can survive
(10:15):
any imprecation that is lowered upon your shoulders if you
are strong enough. That's what I believe, That's what I
believe happened to me. I was strong enough to survive
what happened to me in childhood thanks to reading. We
have reading in the house, reading books, reading children's books.
(10:39):
Seeing myself in characters like Wendy Darling and Dorothy and
Alice in Wonderland. Let me see people could go through
horrible things and return home stronger. And I made that
really the mantra for my life too.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
How as a because you started out as a children's
book author, how do you bag adult themes into children's
books that will resonate with parents and also be entertaining
to children.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
It's such a hard thing to do.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
It's a hard thing to do, and how does one
do it? One does it with great trepidation and a
sense that you are going to be pilloried by the
world at large. When Wicked Verse was published thirty years
ago this year, I can't believe it. I thought people
are going to come after me with pole axes and torches,
because the Wizard of Oz is part of our national fiber.
(11:29):
It's part of our assessment of American character. It's as
strong in our thinking as the row on the shores
of Walden. It is really fundamental to our sense of
American get up and go, solve your own problems, and
you get home in time for dinner. And I thought
(11:50):
people are going to have at me for taking our
familiar American myth and saying I think there's something else
to see here, And really only one person did. The
book was really nicely received. There was one unfortunate review,
and it was in the most important journal. It was
(12:12):
in the New York Times. It was in the New
York Times, and it was by a critic whose name
I won't mention, Michico Kakitani. Puella Surprise went in critic
and four days after the book was published, she resumed
it with eighteen column inches of vitriol. I was reading
(12:35):
it on a plane from Portland to Chicago for my
next stop on my book tour, and I really started
to cry on the plane. I thought, my career is over.
After four days I have been pillaring. Wonder. I wonder
if the steward has a stiletto in his shoes. I
wonder if federal agents are going to meet my plane
at the gate and arrest me for crimes against literature.
(12:59):
She was so she thought it was such a bad book.
She thought it was so uppity of me to think
that I had anything else to say about something that
belongs to America, and that's what I had been afraid of. Well,
you know what, just rushed to the end of the story.
I suffered for about three days. One one artist wrote
(13:20):
to call me up and said, Gregory, it was eighteen
column inches in three days. Nobody will remember what was said.
They will remember that they saw this big review about it.
And I thought, yeah, yeah, that does mean a lot
of good. And then I went to sleep in a
fetal position on Sunday when I got back from my
(13:42):
book tour, and on Monday morning my agent called and said,
Wicked got this Galaxy of Stars in the Los Angeles
Times first book over the fall back when they had
book section, and we have to get you an agent
by noon because the calls were coming so so huge.
(14:02):
So I thought, if I had to go between a
good review in Hollywood and a bad review in the
New York Times, I think it worked out for me.
But you know what I hold resentment.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So let's fast forward and the stage production and tell
us the behind the scenes how that happened.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
And well I did. I did option the movie within
about six months of the book's publication to Demi Moore,
who had a working relationship with Universal Studios. And that's
why I went with her instead of with Whoopi Goldberg
or Selma Hayek or a number of other people who
were on the phone with me, because she already, you know,
(14:43):
she knew the secret knock at Universal Studios, and so
I thought, well, it's that much closer if she has
a working relationship with them. And then the film languished
in development for about for about four years. I read
some of the treatments of the story and I did
not admire them, Kristen, I didn't admire them, but I
(15:07):
was my husband my boyfriend, then husband afterwards, and I
were beginning to adopt our children from overseas, and the
need to be able to pay off as much of
the mortgage as possible if your two freelance artists was
a serious need and a burning one. And so I thought,
I'll just put my head into paper bag and go
to the movie premiere, and so what if it stinks,
(15:30):
I'll make sure I have a seat on the aisle
so I can get out before they bring out the pitchforks.
And I didn't like it. And then Stephen Schwartz, the composer,
came to knock on the door of Universal Studios and say,
everybody has in Hollywood knows you're not happy with the script,
(15:52):
and you're no closer to making this a movie than
you were three years ago when you signed up Gregory maguire.
And he's right, I want to make it into a
play because ever since nineteen thirty nine, everyone in the
whole world knows that people in OZ sing right, and
that means that's what's wrong with your script. Well, you
(16:14):
know what, Lisa, I gave enough for the Christian jokes.
But I can I can really, I can really see it.
I really do see it. It's almost not a joke, Lisa.
I never saw this as a stage musical. But what
I did do was make sure in my novel that Alphaba,
(16:36):
the Wicked Witch of the West, could sing. And she
sings three times in the novel, and she has a
good voice. And what she sings is her own version
of over the Rainbow, because from her point of view,
any place else will be better than OZ and that
was my whole point. So, yeah, she could sing. And
(16:58):
when Stephen Schwartz said to the producer at Universal, this
should be a play first, the producer said, works for me,
but you have to convince mister Maguire because he holds
all the rights. So Stephen Schwartz came to my boyfriend's
family farm in Connecticut and we went on a long
walk in the woods. It was raining out, it was November.
(17:21):
We had our collars like.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
This, Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It was like what do we need? Yeah, you know,
I was like a character in a Graham Green story
and we were the West and the East. We were
trying to figure out which of our colleagues to sell out.
And he said to me three things. First he said,
(17:47):
is this would not make a good movie because the
character would have to be close up on the face
of a green and so much green on the screen
it would be unappealing. Well, that argument didn't work with me.
I didn't believe that. Then he said, your novel, Gregory,
is a nineteenth century novel filled with big emotions and
(18:08):
big moral concerns. It has not been cut down to
suit twentieth century conventions. And I knew what he meant
there too, meaning you can't read Wicked and say, oh,
she has a narcissism disorder, or she has this, or
she has that. No, she's a full person, and you
have to study a full person and see them for many,
(18:28):
many from many approaches and in many situations in order
to begin to have a sense of who they are,
just as we all do with each other. You can't
boil it down to a syndrome. But the third thing
he said was what sold the project. He said, he's
getting nervous. You know. The rain was coming off his
(18:49):
head and it was driving into his collar. He was shivering,
and he said, I'm so convinced that you're going to
understand the rightness of my thinking that I will admit
to you I've already written the first song, and I said,
oh you have, and he said yes, and he said
(19:12):
it's going to Glinda's going to be up in the
he didn't have the bubble yet, but she's going to
be up in a tower and she's going to be
being sad. It's going to happen. It's going to open
after the witch has been splashed, and the song is
going to be called No One Mourns the Wicked. And
with those five words, he sold the project to me
(19:33):
because he knew he got it. He had not been
I had not been making fun. I wasn't a writer
for Saturday Night Live, you know, or Mad TV. I
was taking this very seriously, and I was talking about
evil and how we use even our understanding of evil
in order to divide ourselves into camps and give ourselves
(19:54):
permission to hurt each other.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Right, And the impact is still felt today. All the
same themes are right with us today. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, as my friend Natasha would say, yeah, think, yeah,
no it is. It is scary, but that's where that's
where it came from, and that's how it became the
state great story.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Do you have a forever memory of when you actually
saw it come to live on stage.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Do you have that's imprinted our brain?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Flutely? Absolutely. I did hear a what I call an
oratorio sing through about two years before it opened on
the stage, but I did not go to any rehearsals.
I went to one audition morning just so I could
pretend like I had power and sit up there with
a clipboard with a big boy.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So did they consult with you at all on their No?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
And I told them they didn't need to. I signed
the contract that did not require veto power, did not
require anybody to give me any information about it. I
trusted the artists as artists, and I said, look, if L.
Frank Baum didn't come out of the grave and haunt
me for playing with his material, I should give these
arts the strength of doing their best work. And if
(21:06):
it's good, I'll take all the credit. And if it's
bad and it flops and it stinks, I'll say, well
I did write it. You know, I've never even to
do with it. So here I am Lisa. I'm at
the current theater in two thousand and three in the summer.
And while I've met Adina and Kristin and I've heard
most of the songs, and I pretty much have a
(21:28):
sense of how the plot is going. I had no
idea about orchestration, about staging. I didn't know about the
giant dragon over the proscenium. I didn't know how Act
one was going to end with alphabet lifting on the
cherry picker or whatever it is that hoists are up there,
and I didn't know how powerful it would be. I
(21:49):
just knew that I was stuck in a middle seat
in Roji, and how did that happen? If it stun?
I was trapped. So it opens dun dun, dund don
dunt don, and Kristen comes down in the bubble. You
(22:11):
look lovely in a bubble by the way, and and
they sing no one warns the Wicked, and it's actually
it's both funny and like heart hugging at the same time.
And I think, well, so far, so good, but this
could go south really fast. I just I just hope Jesus,
(22:34):
Mary and Joseph, you know. And then about eight minutes
in the doors open on the back of the stage
and Adina Menzelle in her green skin Max Factor number
forty seven strives out from upstage and the audience goes wild.
(22:57):
And even though she hasn't yet note and she's for
people who know Broadway, they'd know of her from Rent.
But she's not the big deal that she became. She's
relatively unknown. The fact that the audience was going wild
meant that in San Francisco they were welcoming back the
wicked witch of the West. They were cheering for her
(23:21):
before a Dina even sung a note. Now, by the
time she got to the end of her first number,
the Wizard and I, she had them. She was a
Dina and she was never going to lose that audience
for the rest of her life. But that first round
of applause made the hair on the back of my
head stand up, because I thought, she's welcome here. They
(23:44):
know who she is. Of course, san Francisco, the book
had been out for eight years, so it wasn't it
was a known thing, but even so I thought, oh
my gosh. Now cut to six months later when it
opens in New York. Act one ends with her terrific rise.
It's me and then the curtain comes down. House lads
(24:09):
come up, and my brother, not Joe, but the brother
in between me and Joe turns to me and says,
I have one word for you. And I said what
and he said, retired.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Well that's the thing, Like, how did you deal with
being thrust into that entertainment world?
Speaker 4 (24:34):
Like what grounded you through this whole process?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Because it was like instantly, Oh it.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Was, it was you know, I mean I'd already been
a professional writer for seventeen years or so that level,
but a very different level. And as I told Oprah
when we were on Oprah once, I said, we did
not my husband and I did not adopt our three
children from overseas in order to be you know, accouterments
(25:02):
to our fabulous lifestyle. We adopted them to raise them
and to raise them ourselves, without a nanny, without a governess,
you know, while we had somebody to come in vacuum
after like year four, but they were there, and their
needs were always more important than mine. If Oprah was
(25:24):
on the phone, which she did called sometimes, you know,
the fact that the kids needed the cheerios that was
more important than taking Oprah's call.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And I'm sure she was okay with that.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Oh she was, yeah, she was, yes, Yeah, that is
who she is. And so there was this is just accident.
But if you take on a job of raising children.
That's your job. That's your job. It doesn't matter. I
could have brought some you know, kevlar hotpants and gone
to Broadway and just you know, become a really disgusting
(25:55):
and revolting figure on the West forty second Street. But
I didn't because I had to get the cheerios. Really,
I had to super.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Speaking of your children, when did they read Wicked? And
what were their thoughts of it? Did they enjoy?
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
How charming of you two suggest that maybe they know
how to read. There is this is a this is
a this is you know, like, Okay, it's a Catholic
confessional right here we are. I'm still Catholic, so I
know how to confess as soon as I get a microphone.
(26:37):
In fact, though Andy and I are constant readers, and
we raised them in the same way as close to
the same way as we were raised, the fact is
these children are from different gene pools, and they they
are about two generations younger than we are. So the
fact that we modeled reading and still do the fact
(26:58):
that we read to them every night for a decade,
means that what they got of literature was what we
hand fed to them like baby food. They loved it
when we read to them. Have any of them taken
up reading for pleasure of their own, well, maybe maybe
three quarters of one of them has, so they haven't
(27:21):
read it. They haven't read Wicked. They really know it's
a hard book. It is.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It's intense. You have to really dial in.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
You have to basically divorce your husband and say, yeah,
I'll come back to you in six months. I'm gonna
run a long bath and i'll be I'll be out
with wrinkled fingers in six months when I finished this sucker.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
No, it's not surprising that they never read the book.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, they haven't, you know, And I don't mean in
any way to dismiss them. I really adore that they
have enough character to be themselves. And that is actually
what we wanted. That's what they want.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Pick what they want to read.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
But also, Lisa, to go back to what I was
saying at the beginning, I'm still understanding at you know,
I'm seventy, I'm still understanding myself in new ways this year.
Just by the act of writing the memoir, I understand
things I had never put together. So they have their
whole lives ahead of them to continue to reject it
if they want, or maybe one day after I'm dead
(28:23):
to say, well, I wonder what all this fuss was about. Yeah,
I don't really care. I love them and I love
that they have built themselves with our I.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Love that sentiment. And you're one hundred percent right. We
can all learn from that. So let's jump ahead here.
Let's talk about the movie. Right, It's what movie? Oh
my goodness, my question to you is, because Alphabet has
been played by aDNA and so many, what was it
about Cynthia's approach to the role.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
That delighted you?
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Well, I know, I know why it delighted me, but
I want to hear it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Well, there are several things about Cynthia's approach. One is
she has a voice that is calibrated somewhere between the
smoothness of an Ella Fitzgerald when she wants it to
be that kind of velvety bourbon smoothness. But she can
also channel raise in herself the rage that Cynthia or
(29:32):
Revo in her life, has had to live with as
a black woman in England, in America. I mean, her
superior talent gives her a past to be just about anywhere.
But that doesn't mean she wasn't raised in a marginalized position,
and we have talked about that. The fact that she's
black is a big, big deal of it.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Her sense of humanity just it just is so powerful
in her performance makes you feel something that I never
felt before.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I had I had. I was in Greece a couple
of weeks ago with about thirty teachers, and three or
four of them were black teachers. A couple of men,
couple women. We were touring the sites and one day
we were sitting having a glass of wine at the
end of the day and one woman said to me,
(30:26):
you know what I and my girlfriends, you know the
part of Wicked, the movie that really gets to us.
And I said, oh, no, tell me, and she said,
the thing that made all of our hearts wobble. It
isn't defying gravity, it's when Cynthia Arrivo sings I'm not
(30:53):
that girl. Because every one of us black women know
what that feels like, and we have lived lived with
that sentiment our whole lives. So when you ask, what
does what did Cynthia bring to it and what does
she communicate? Adina sang that song beautifully anybody I've ever
(31:13):
heard play that part plays that moment beautifully, but there's
something even more heartbreaking when Cynthia does it on the
screen to me, And it's the quietest moment in that
two hour and forty minute rather noisy film. It's the
quietest moment and it's very, very powerful.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I think I had many ugly cries when I was
watching the movie, and I think we can all really,
just really and so powerful.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Can you take us? Obviously? Did you visit the set
when they were filming the movie in London?
Speaker 3 (31:43):
I did. I flew out to London and was there
for close to a week. I'd like to say I
hung out and you got drunk with Ari and Cynthia
and Johnny. You know, that's all a big lie. But
I did meet them. I did watch them at work.
I watched them filming. That was there the week that
they were filming the Ozdesk ballroom scene. And that's the
(32:05):
scene where Alphabet is publicly humiliated and Golinda finally accepts
her responsibility for her part in the humiliation and in
the marginalization of Alphabet. And something breaks and strengthens in Alphaba.
And something breaks and strengthens in Golinda as well. So
(32:28):
I watched that be filmed over and over again, and
I have to tell you there was no glisser and
drop in the eyes so that those women could shed tears.
Those women were in that scene over and over again.
I think I saw it shot twelve times. Wow, And
(32:50):
sometimes there were tears and sometimes there weren't. But they
were so invested in the act of being those women
in that situation that the tears were part of who
they were.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Well, Arianna talks about this is her dream role. She
always wanted to play this role, so I can believe
that this was truly like a moment for her.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
It's the central moment in the film, I think. And
I also saw some scenes that did not make it.
Johnny Bailey was on the side and the camera was
focusing on him, and he had the most amazing expression.
I couldn't think, and they didn't use it in the film.
(33:35):
If it's ever a director's cut that's twenty two hours long,
maybe we'll see it. It was so astounding. I did
get to spend time with him. We sat down on
one of the sofas in the Astas ballroom after there
finish shooting. One day and we chatted for about forty
five minutes, and I said, how did you do that?
And he said what I said that expression when Alphaba
(33:59):
and Glinda Glinda are coming together, how did you do it? It's
just like Glinda's saying, how do you do it? How
do you do it? And he said, well, I don't
really talk about my technique. And I said, how did you?
And so he told me. But since you didn't see it,
(34:27):
there's no point of going any farther. I want to know.
I'm not going to tell you, because that's what makes
me so nice.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I did they pepper you with questions?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Did they well, you know, not so much about the characters.
They felt they knew the characters. They felt they were
the characters. They didn't need to know motivation for me,
They'd got it from the book. They'd got it from
the play, they got it from the script, they'd got
it from the director, they'd got it from their own lives.
Johnny Bailey and I talked about raising children, you know,
(34:59):
so you know, I know, you never know with these things.
Everybody was Everybody was so nice, though I didn't see
I didn't meet Michelle Yo on set because she was
off in Hollywood collecting some stupid Academy Award for Best Actress.
Very annoying timing. You know, come on, Michelle, I'm only
(35:20):
here for a week. You could have planned this better.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Did you like the film?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Are you kidding me? I saw it?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Delighted.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
I saw it. I was about saying I saw it
five and a half times.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
But I don't Did they send you?
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Did they send you like a before it came out?
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Or did you go to the premiere?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
No? But I did go to the premiere in Hollywood.
I brought my husband and our youngest child. The boys
were both in work obligations. They couldn't get away. But
about two weeks or three weeks before the Hollywood premiere,
which was about three weeks before the national premiere, I
was invited to New York where they were showing it
(36:00):
at the Director's Guild of America Theater Showcase on West
fifty seventh Street for people who had performed in or
It helped support the play of Wicked for the last
twenty two years, and so it was a special showing
for theater people because without their huge support of the
(36:22):
musical for all those years, it wouldn't have the built
in audience that it had. So I was invited to
that because I'm part of the creative team, and I
went with a friend. Andy said, I said, you want
to go, my husband, you want to go to New
York and see it? And he said, well, aren't you
making me go to Hollywood in two weeks? And I
(36:43):
said yeah, and he said I can wait. That's Andy.
He saw Wicked on Broadway once and that was only
the second musical he's ever seen, and he doesn't want
to see any others. So a friend of was in
New York City and I said, well, do you want
to go? I don't want to go alone, and he
(37:05):
said sure, and so we went in and I felt
kind of like I was in an emotional coma. I
had signed the film rights twenty eight years earlier. You know,
I'm like Rip Van Winkle, I'm almost dead. You know,
if I only had a dream, if I only had
a heart, if I only had a brain, if I
only had a pulse, you know, it's like I need
(37:26):
a pulse. And so we sat there and I watched
it and I didn't know what I thought. And when
the house slights came up and we stood up, I
said what did you think? And he said, I'll tell
you in the taxi we're going to take to the er.
(37:48):
And I said, oh my god, what's wrong? What's wrong?
He said, when the house sights went down, you grabbed
my hand and you squeezed it for two hours. And
I had no memory of that. Wow, I have no
memory of it. I just thought, at the end of
two hours and forty minutes, I'm still alive.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Right, you know what a wild ride it.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Was and it didn't crash and burn. Then when I
saw it two weeks later in Hollywood at the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion, I wept through the whole thing. Yeah, so
I had to kind of realize it was survivable first
before I could, you know, open myself to feel it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
So the next one's coming out November twenty first, that's
a long intermission, right, a full year. Oh my goodness.
What's in store for us in for the second movie?
Do you have any you know, tea on.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
That I don't know. If I don't know, at least,
I'm going to ask you a question. You heard about
the movie coming out, and you probably saw some of
the trailers before it came out, and my question for
you is do you think they overdid the exposure in
the trailers for the movie? Do you think do you
think that much airtime for images from the movie was
(39:05):
too much to see some people in the audience and
say no, no, no no, But.
Speaker 6 (39:10):
I didn't think so, okay, okay, interesting, I felt I
felt that by that maybe that was part of why
I was so catatonic in the theater the first time.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I felt they'd given almost every beat of the film
in the trailers, And so for the second film coming out,
I am it's like lent for me. I'm being abstinate.
I am not watching trailers, I'm not watching interviews, I'm
not reading this time. I want to go into the theater.
(39:44):
I know a couple of little things they've tweaked and
have changed from the play. But I want to go
in not knowing what the two new songs are, who
or who are singing them, or not knowing what else
they've changed, and not even seeing the set design. I
want to go in like a virgin.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
You know, so Elfie, you're here for Elfie. Yes, yes, okay,
we have to talk about Alfie briefly.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Do you think this will be turned into a film?
Speaker 3 (40:12):
I think it's not impossible that Elfie will be turned
into a film, but now I know it can take
twenty eight years, right, so I'm not holding my breath.
I will However, is this being broadcast?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
It is, we're streaming live.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
I see, Well you can say it.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
He told me that.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Well, yeah, I'd just say it if I'm not going
to say this to keep anybody from buying a book
at the end of this episode, because of course, if
you haven't already done it, you should, Yes, because you should.
But I have it on fairly high authority that Cynthia
(40:55):
Arrivo is doing the audio book. You did not hear
that from me.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Huge, Huge.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
This is a fascinating book. It takes us behind the
scenes of her as an adolescent, a young girl. I
know a lot of you purchased this, so it's a.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
Really beautiful book. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
I think we have a couple a few minutes for
some questions from the audience.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
This going back to the movie a little bit. I'm
not sure if you had any say in the casting
at all, but if you knew like any of the
actors prior which casting announcement, did you like hear that
made you really be like, oh my god, I've made it.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It was probably Ariana, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I didn't
really know much about her music or about her person.
I thought two things, I'll be honest with you, Ari,
are you listening? I first thought, this is this is
really like celebrity casting of the biggest possible. And the
second thing I thought is I wonder if she has
(42:03):
the chops. And I don't mean the musical chops. I
meant the chops to inhabit the character of Glinda. And
if there was anything I was worried about going in,
it was that she was stunt casting. She was cast
for her, for her beauty and for her voice, and
that she wouldn't be able to inhabit the character. Boy
(42:25):
was I proven wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Well, because her backstory is that she wanted this role
for fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
So yeah, and she shared that with everyone, which was
really a gift.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
She was a gift.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
She was She was a total gift a guest. I
adore her and she was so nice. She signed some
some notepaper for my daughter.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Do you stay in touch? Like do you stay in
touch with an? I know Cynthia, Yes.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Right right, exactly I'm in touch with Cynthia. She and
I text from time to time, and I gave her
messages for the for the cast. And I was in London.
I was in France like ten days ago, and I
left Marseille a couple of days early and flew to
London and saw Johnny Bailey doing Richard the Second on
his last night there, and I went back much. So
(43:11):
you know, we're I'm friends with Johnny, with Cynthia the others.
I think, you know, how do you do?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Another question?
Speaker 4 (43:21):
Right in the back, David written, Yeah, Hey, Greg grat
So what curious?
Speaker 8 (43:25):
So you're in the unique position of having created a
book which was successful, hugely successful, musical and now an
enormous film. Has your relationship to the story changed in
each iteration or do you still see it as you did.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
When you wrote it originally. Well that's a really good question,
and I have been given my answer by somebody else.
In fact, I did a panel with a writer I'm
not sure I can get her name exactly right, Casey
mcquister or something like that, the person who wrote Red,
White and Royal Blue. We were on the panel and
(44:00):
we were talking about what it was like to have
our work be translated into an enormously popular other medium.
And what Casey mcquist said, I think Casey uses they them,
so the herd might not have been accurate, But at
any rate, what Casey said was I feel in watching
the film as if I had not known initially that
(44:23):
I had given birth to twins. I thought I just
had a single child. And now you know, I see
the family relationship. I love the other twin, even if
I discovered its existence much later than I discovered my
own novel. And so to Casey, I said, well, you
have twins, I have triplets, and that's how I feel.
(44:47):
I do feel a kind of grandfatherly distance from the movie.
You know, nobody ever asked me a bloody question. You know,
if I want to go, I have to like call
up and say, can I be please? You know, I know,
I know I could be irritating if I was more
easily irritable. Yeah, but I'm not that terrible. I always say.
(45:10):
I always say to people, if you want to insult me,
you have to send me a telegram the day before
and let me know to look out for it, because
I'm not easily insulted.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Hi, I have a question.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
You talked about kind of the you were asking us
about if we felt like there was some overexposure from
the press and a little bit about the movie and
the actors. And obviously there was a lot with the
press tour and some pretty big culturally significant moments that
really had nothing to do with the movie, like the
infamous pinky hole between Arion and Cynthia.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
So I am curious to hear your take.
Speaker 5 (45:46):
On kind of that cultural significance about the press tour
and maybe the overexposure that really had nothing to do
with the movie, and just hearing that you're like a
little bit removed from it, but it is still your baby.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Is curious your thoughts on.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Well, you know, I'm like any grandmother who gets photos of,
you know, the four year old at you know, with
his his face and the chocolate cake. It's like, oh,
it's not cute. It's not cute. Who'll grow out of it?
Cynthia and ari will grow out of this little face,
I'm sure they will. But I adore it. I adore it.
(46:22):
I didn't expect. I had no idea someday I would
like my agent to go behind doors and find out
what was the cost of the bleeding publicity tour that
was all last year and is continuing on into this year.
I think it's got to be half the cost of
the movie itself. I mean, they just so much, But
those women are so genuinely dedicated to the story. Now
(46:46):
here's where I feel. I don't know, humbled, is pot
perhaps the word I'm looking for. I'm not sure it is,
but I'm going to use it. When the movie was opening,
some responsible reviewers of cinema decided to go back and
scale the impregnable edifice of my novel that they'd never
(47:09):
been able to get past page forty two of and
really read it so that they could speak genuinely to
what the movie had done on the basis of the
original material, And quite a few reviews said McGuire's novel
in nineteen ninety five was prophetic and the character of
(47:31):
Alphaba is who we need now. And I'll tell you
when I was writing the book, I thought it was
kind of retro. I thought it was I thought it
was a little bit Graham Green. I thought it was
a little bit about Stalin and Hitler and Pinochet and
authoritarian figures in our whole, long, ugly history. As a
(47:55):
species not totally ugly, but often ugly. So to have
to be crowned with aging laurels upon my aging brow
at this point, for having seen who were capable of
being as a culture at our worst and who were
capable of being as individuals at our best, is a
(48:22):
reward that most artists are not privileged to receive in
their lifetimes. And believe me, I'm grateful for it.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
I think we should end on that right.
Speaker 4 (48:31):
Really wonderful, really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Details on the next book Club will be coming up
in the next couple of weeks, but we're looking like
it's going to be at the end of July.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
We have a lot in store. Stay tuned for more details.
Hey, Welcome to Lisa's Book Club, a podcast where I
interview best selling authors from the New England area, pulling
back the curtain on what it's really like being a
best selling author. They're guilty pleasures, latest projects, and so
much more. Incredible night with author Gregory Maguire of Wicked.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
You have to listen to our talk.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
He gave us some really good insider information and some
breaking news.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So gregree, we're here.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Thank you. Kristin, it's so nice.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I talked Gregory before we came out that when we
do like celebrity doppelgangers, that I always get Kristin Jenna
with right.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I was like, this is so perfect.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He was like, I can see you.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I'll take it right.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So I want to talk a little bit about I mean,
obviously everyone knows the fact that Wicked is a phenomenon,
grossing over one point seven billion dollars, the numbers staggering,
too many awards to even talk about. But I want
to go back because to where it all started. I
(01:11):
want to go back to your fascination with the Wizard
of Oz a little bit, your and your backstory and
your childhood, because I think it all it's important to
talk about.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
You know, it's funny lit because I have just finished
writing draft nine of a memoir. I never thought that
I would do a memoir. But then when Hollywood gets
a hold of you and puffs up your ego, you know,
just like a piece of popcorn, you float around up
there with the raft and you think, well, maybe everybody
needs to nowhere I can.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Is this breaking news that you're writing a memoir? Yes,
I guess right.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
My editor doesn't know about it yet, so don't tell it, okay.
But in fact, Wicked is now thirty years old, and
there is an advantage of increased you might say binocularity
when you look back at your life and you realize,
(02:10):
I see my life from the point of view in
which I lived it as a child, but as you're
at the other end, you actually can see it like
an acetate transfer. I can see who I became and
how in a way I became the author of Wicked
(02:31):
and other things better because I'm older. So I thought, well,
if this, you know, I mean, I could be you know,
I could never make it out of your live who knows.
They got to get this down. So the facts, the
raw facts of my childhood, and they do influence the
plot of Wicked and the character of Alphaba. The very
raw facts are that I was born in Upstate New
(02:54):
York seventy years ago, the fourth of four children of
my parents. And when I was born, my mother died
in childbirth. I know, it's like, does that still happen?
What are years old? As Charles dickens, you know, So
I actually think I was one of the last people
born in the Albany area whose mother died from complications
(03:18):
resulting from childbirth. So I began life under a kind
of soft flannel weight that I have not been able
to shuck off my whole life. It's a weight of
I don't want to call it guilt. For many years
I did call it guilt, and I thought, no, this
(03:39):
is actually that I can't be guilty of that because
I didn't choose to do it. Nonetheless, I've had to
live with the reality of having caused distress to my
father and to my older brothers and sisters without meaning to,
just by the fact of having chromosomes in tissue. You know.
And when you see the story of Alphaba, and including
(04:00):
the story of Elphie, you see that the character of
Alphaba grows up also with a sense of I did
not choose this skin. I did not choose this life.
Well of us, none of us did, and yet I
have to live and carry the weight of it around
(04:21):
with me, as we all do. I'm not claiming special
special privileges or anything, or special troubles either. We all
carry with us the weight of what a British writer
of mine said is called moral luck. The moral luck
of having been born in the twentieth century, as most
(04:44):
of us, except a couple of babies, qualify for doing,
the moral luck of most of us having been born white,
many of us having been born in the West, or
in the West Europe or the United States. We have luck,
and we also have cost. We have to carry both
of those things. The story of Alphaba in Wicked, and
(05:06):
I get this more and more as I get older,
is the story of learning how to shoulder the obligations
and also learning how to throw them down on the
floor when it is time for her to be liberated
from them.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
How did you when did the idea pop in your head?
Where were you living at the time.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Well, unlike a newborn child, the germination of a novel
happens over and over and again through your life. It's
not just one nice night with a lesson nice wine.
It's like it takes a lifetime.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
But did you have sort of a moment.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Of I was in great affection for the film, not
the nineteen thirty nine film when I was a kid.
In fact, my brother Joe, whom you know, played the
entire Munchkin population from his stroll when I used to
play the Wizard of Oz in Catholic grade school in
(06:05):
the schoolyard, and so I carried that story, and I
carried my alarm, first about the Witch, but increasingly about
the Wizard as I grew up. And I was living
in London thirty four years ago when two terrible things happened.
When was the start of the First Gulf War, and
(06:27):
I saw the British press come out with headlines in
eighty point type that said Sodom Hussein the next Hitler,
and Hitler is what we would now call a trigger word.
And it triggered me because while I'm a pacifist by
(06:50):
moral conviction, even a pacifist has to say, if my
behavior and actions could save people from being sent to
camps or dying or being shot in the street, what
is my moral obligation. So I started thinking about the
First Gulf War and the use of the word Hitler,
(07:10):
and then at the same time, and I'm looking around,
I'm going to talk obliquely here because there are some
young ears in the audience. There was an occasion in
London in nineteen ninety two or three in which a
small child had a regrettable afternoon, and that was a
(07:32):
final afternoon, and two school children were convicted of the crime.
And so that led everybody in my circle, as it
should really do all of us, to ask the question,
how could two ten year olds wake up in the morning,
(07:54):
decide whether to have weed of vix or toast for
breakfast and be arrested by evening for the most heinous
crime there is and depriving the child of the future
that that child ought to have had. These two things together,
the macro situation of going to war against a named
(08:14):
villain and the micro situation of two ten year olds
and a two year old, they clashed in my head
as if I needed a lot more therapy than I
was currently getting. And as a writer, the thing that
I do with the complications in my head is to say,
(08:35):
I can't work this out. Sure, I'm glib, I'm irish,
but I'm actually not very smart. The only thing I
know how to do is hitch my problems to fiction
and let my creative imagination work on it. Because my
creative imagination is real, it's strong, it's a lot more
powerful than I am. It's never actually introduced itself to
me because it doesn't want to be friends. But I
(08:58):
take it, and I take what it has to give me,
and I work with it. So that's really where it
came from.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
So you tackled the question what makes you wicked?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The problem of evil? Stephen Schwartz and when He Holtzmann
in the movie were able to put at the top
of the film in the first ninety seconds of the movie,
the thing that it took me four hundred and two
pages to say in a novel, which is what makes
somebody evil? Are we born crippled? Are we born morally crippled?
(09:29):
Or does something happen to us? Are we tabyle rasa?
Does something happen to us chromosonally, pietistically, behaviorally? I mean's
the same? Do you remember this? Remember the song from
West Side Story? Officer Krupkey gee, kindly, Officer Krupkey, you
(09:49):
don't understand. And in that story, five different theories are
jokingly presented as to why juvenile delinquents are juvenile. The well,
in a sense, that's what Wicked tried to do. It
tried not to settle on a theory, but to put
every theory I could think of into the life of
Alphaba and say, you can survive anything. You can survive
(10:15):
any imprecation that is lowered upon your shoulders if you
are strong enough. That's what I believe, That's what I
believe happened to me. I was strong enough to survive
what happened to me in childhood thanks to reading. We
have reading in the house, reading books, reading children's books.
(10:39):
Seeing myself in characters like Wendy Darling and Dorothy and
Alice in Wonderland. Let me see people could go through
horrible things and return home stronger. And I made that
really the mantra for my life too.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
How as a because you started out as a children's
book author, how do you bag adult themes into children's
books that will resonate with parents and also be entertaining
to children.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
It's such a hard thing to do.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
It's a hard thing to do, and how does one
do it? One does it with great trepidation and a
sense that you are going to be pilloried by the
world at large. When Wicked Verse was published thirty years
ago this year, I can't believe it. I thought people
are going to come after me with pole axes and torches,
because the Wizard of Oz is part of our national fiber.
(11:29):
It's part of our assessment of American character. It's as
strong in our thinking as the row on the shores
of Walden. It is really fundamental to our sense of
American get up and go, solve your own problems, and
you get home in time for dinner. And I thought
(11:50):
people are going to have at me for taking our
familiar American myth and saying I think there's something else
to see here, And really only one person did. The
book was really nicely received. There was one unfortunate review,
and it was in the most important journal. It was
(12:12):
in the New York Times. It was in the New
York Times, and it was by a critic whose name
I won't mention, Michico Kakitani. Puella Surprise went in critic
and four days after the book was published, she resumed
it with eighteen column inches of vitriol. I was reading
(12:35):
it on a plane from Portland to Chicago for my
next stop on my book tour, and I really started
to cry on the plane. I thought, my career is over.
After four days I have been pillaring. Wonder. I wonder
if the steward has a stiletto in his shoes. I
wonder if federal agents are going to meet my plane
at the gate and arrest me for crimes against literature.
(12:59):
She was so she thought it was such a bad book.
She thought it was so uppity of me to think
that I had anything else to say about something that
belongs to America, and that's what I had been afraid of. Well,
you know what, just rushed to the end of the story.
I suffered for about three days. One one artist wrote
(13:20):
to call me up and said, Gregory, it was eighteen
column inches in three days. Nobody will remember what was said.
They will remember that they saw this big review about it.
And I thought, yeah, yeah, that does mean a lot
of good. And then I went to sleep in a
fetal position on Sunday when I got back from my
(13:42):
book tour, and on Monday morning my agent called and said,
Wicked got this Galaxy of Stars in the Los Angeles
Times first book over the fall back when they had
book section, and we have to get you an agent
by noon because the calls were coming so so huge.
(14:02):
So I thought, if I had to go between a
good review in Hollywood and a bad review in the
New York Times, I think it worked out for me.
But you know what I hold resentment.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
So let's fast forward and the stage production and tell
us the behind the scenes how that happened.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
And well I did. I did option the movie within
about six months of the book's publication to Demi Moore,
who had a working relationship with Universal Studios. And that's
why I went with her instead of with Whoopi Goldberg
or Selma Hayek or a number of other people who
were on the phone with me, because she already, you know,
(14:43):
she knew the secret knock at Universal Studios, and so
I thought, well, it's that much closer if she has
a working relationship with them. And then the film languished
in development for about for about four years. I read
some of the treatments of the story and I did
not admire them, Kristen, I didn't admire them, but I
(15:07):
was my husband my boyfriend, then husband afterwards, and I
were beginning to adopt our children from overseas, and the
need to be able to pay off as much of
the mortgage as possible if your two freelance artists was
a serious need and a burning one. And so I thought,
I'll just put my head into paper bag and go
to the movie premiere, and so what if it stinks,
(15:30):
I'll make sure I have a seat on the aisle
so I can get out before they bring out the pitchforks.
And I didn't like it. And then Stephen Schwartz, the composer,
came to knock on the door of Universal Studios and say,
everybody has in Hollywood knows you're not happy with the script,
(15:52):
and you're no closer to making this a movie than
you were three years ago when you signed up Gregory maguire.
And he's right, I want to make it into a
play because ever since nineteen thirty nine, everyone in the
whole world knows that people in OZ sing right, and
that means that's what's wrong with your script. Well, you
(16:14):
know what, Lisa, I gave enough for the Christian jokes.
But I can I can really, I can really see it.
I really do see it. It's almost not a joke, Lisa.
I never saw this as a stage musical. But what
I did do was make sure in my novel that Alphaba,
(16:36):
the Wicked Witch of the West, could sing. And she
sings three times in the novel, and she has a
good voice. And what she sings is her own version
of over the Rainbow, because from her point of view,
any place else will be better than OZ and that
was my whole point. So, yeah, she could sing. And
(16:58):
when Stephen Schwartz said to the producer at Universal, this
should be a play first, the producer said, works for me,
but you have to convince mister Maguire because he holds
all the rights. So Stephen Schwartz came to my boyfriend's
family farm in Connecticut and we went on a long
walk in the woods. It was raining out, it was November.
(17:21):
We had our collars like.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
This, Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It was like what do we need? Yeah, you know,
I was like a character in a Graham Green story
and we were the West and the East. We were
trying to figure out which of our colleagues to sell out.
And he said to me three things. First he said,
(17:47):
is this would not make a good movie because the
character would have to be close up on the face
of a green and so much green on the screen
it would be unappealing. Well, that argument didn't work with me.
I didn't believe that. Then he said, your novel, Gregory,
is a nineteenth century novel filled with big emotions and
(18:08):
big moral concerns. It has not been cut down to
suit twentieth century conventions. And I knew what he meant
there too, meaning you can't read Wicked and say, oh,
she has a narcissism disorder, or she has this, or
she has that. No, she's a full person, and you
have to study a full person and see them for many,
(18:28):
many from many approaches and in many situations in order
to begin to have a sense of who they are,
just as we all do with each other. You can't
boil it down to a syndrome. But the third thing
he said was what sold the project. He said, he's
getting nervous. You know. The rain was coming off his
(18:49):
head and it was driving into his collar. He was shivering,
and he said, I'm so convinced that you're going to
understand the rightness of my thinking that I will admit
to you I've already written the first song, and I said,
oh you have, and he said yes, and he said
(19:12):
it's going to Glinda's going to be up in the
he didn't have the bubble yet, but she's going to
be up in a tower and she's going to be
being sad. It's going to happen. It's going to open
after the witch has been splashed, and the song is
going to be called No One Mourns the Wicked. And
with those five words, he sold the project to me
(19:33):
because he knew he got it. He had not been
I had not been making fun. I wasn't a writer
for Saturday Night Live, you know, or Mad TV. I
was taking this very seriously, and I was talking about
evil and how we use even our understanding of evil
in order to divide ourselves into camps and give ourselves
(19:54):
permission to hurt each other.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Right, And the impact is still felt today. All the
same themes are right with us today. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, as my friend Natasha would say, yeah, think, yeah,
no it is. It is scary, but that's where that's
where it came from, and that's how it became the
state great story.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Do you have a forever memory of when you actually
saw it come to live on stage.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Do you have that's imprinted our brain?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Flutely? Absolutely. I did hear a what I call an
oratorio sing through about two years before it opened on
the stage, but I did not go to any rehearsals.
I went to one audition morning just so I could
pretend like I had power and sit up there with
a clipboard with a big boy.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So did they consult with you at all on their No?
Speaker 3 (20:42):
And I told them they didn't need to. I signed
the contract that did not require veto power, did not
require anybody to give me any information about it. I
trusted the artists as artists, and I said, look, if L.
Frank Baum didn't come out of the grave and haunt
me for playing with his material, I should give these
arts the strength of doing their best work. And if
(21:06):
it's good, I'll take all the credit. And if it's
bad and it flops and it stinks, I'll say, well
I did write it. You know, I've never even to
do with it. So here I am Lisa. I'm at
the current theater in two thousand and three in the summer.
And while I've met Adina and Kristin and I've heard
most of the songs, and I pretty much have a
(21:28):
sense of how the plot is going. I had no
idea about orchestration, about staging. I didn't know about the
giant dragon over the proscenium. I didn't know how Act
one was going to end with alphabet lifting on the
cherry picker or whatever it is that hoists are up there,
and I didn't know how powerful it would be. I
(21:49):
just knew that I was stuck in a middle seat
in Roji, and how did that happen? If it stun?
I was trapped. So it opens dun dun, dund don
dunt don, and Kristen comes down in the bubble. You
(22:11):
look lovely in a bubble by the way, and and
they sing no one warns the Wicked, and it's actually
it's both funny and like heart hugging at the same time.
And I think, well, so far, so good, but this
could go south really fast. I just I just hope Jesus,
(22:34):
Mary and Joseph, you know. And then about eight minutes
in the doors open on the back of the stage
and Adina Menzelle in her green skin Max Factor number
forty seven strives out from upstage and the audience goes wild.
(22:57):
And even though she hasn't yet note and she's for
people who know Broadway, they'd know of her from Rent.
But she's not the big deal that she became. She's
relatively unknown. The fact that the audience was going wild
meant that in San Francisco they were welcoming back the
wicked witch of the West. They were cheering for her
(23:21):
before a Dina even sung a note. Now, by the
time she got to the end of her first number,
the Wizard and I, she had them. She was a
Dina and she was never going to lose that audience
for the rest of her life. But that first round
of applause made the hair on the back of my
head stand up, because I thought, she's welcome here. They
(23:44):
know who she is. Of course, san Francisco, the book
had been out for eight years, so it wasn't it
was a known thing, but even so I thought, oh
my gosh. Now cut to six months later when it
opens in New York. Act one ends with her terrific rise.
It's me and then the curtain comes down. House lads
(24:09):
come up, and my brother, not Joe, but the brother
in between me and Joe turns to me and says,
I have one word for you. And I said what
and he said, retired.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Well that's the thing, Like, how did you deal with
being thrust into that entertainment world?
Speaker 4 (24:34):
Like what grounded you through this whole process?
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Because it was like instantly, Oh it.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Was, it was you know, I mean I'd already been
a professional writer for seventeen years or so that level,
but a very different level. And as I told Oprah
when we were on Oprah once, I said, we did
not my husband and I did not adopt our three
children from overseas in order to be you know, accouterments
(25:02):
to our fabulous lifestyle. We adopted them to raise them
and to raise them ourselves, without a nanny, without a governess,
you know, while we had somebody to come in vacuum
after like year four, but they were there, and their
needs were always more important than mine. If Oprah was
(25:24):
on the phone, which she did called sometimes, you know,
the fact that the kids needed the cheerios that was
more important than taking Oprah's call.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And I'm sure she was okay with that.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
Oh she was, yeah, she was, yes, Yeah, that is
who she is. And so there was this is just accident.
But if you take on a job of raising children.
That's your job. That's your job. It doesn't matter. I
could have brought some you know, kevlar hotpants and gone
to Broadway and just you know, become a really disgusting
(25:55):
and revolting figure on the West forty second Street. But
I didn't because I had to get the cheerios. Really,
I had to super.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Speaking of your children, when did they read Wicked? And
what were their thoughts of it? Did they enjoy?
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
How charming of you two suggest that maybe they know
how to read. There is this is a this is
a this is you know, like, Okay, it's a Catholic
confessional right here we are. I'm still Catholic, so I
know how to confess as soon as I get a microphone.
(26:37):
In fact, though Andy and I are constant readers, and
we raised them in the same way as close to
the same way as we were raised, the fact is
these children are from different gene pools, and they they
are about two generations younger than we are. So the
fact that we modeled reading and still do the fact
(26:58):
that we read to them every night for a decade,
means that what they got of literature was what we
hand fed to them like baby food. They loved it
when we read to them. Have any of them taken
up reading for pleasure of their own, well, maybe maybe
three quarters of one of them has, so they haven't
(27:21):
read it. They haven't read Wicked. They really know it's
a hard book. It is.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It's intense. You have to really dial in.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
You have to basically divorce your husband and say, yeah,
I'll come back to you in six months. I'm gonna
run a long bath and i'll be I'll be out
with wrinkled fingers in six months when I finished this sucker.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
No, it's not surprising that they never read the book.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
No, they haven't, you know, And I don't mean in
any way to dismiss them. I really adore that they
have enough character to be themselves. And that is actually
what we wanted. That's what they want.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Pick what they want to read.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
But also, Lisa, to go back to what I was
saying at the beginning, I'm still understanding at you know,
I'm seventy, I'm still understanding myself in new ways this year.
Just by the act of writing the memoir, I understand
things I had never put together. So they have their
whole lives ahead of them to continue to reject it
if they want, or maybe one day after I'm dead
(28:23):
to say, well, I wonder what all this fuss was about. Yeah,
I don't really care. I love them and I love
that they have built themselves with our I.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Love that sentiment. And you're one hundred percent right. We
can all learn from that. So let's jump ahead here.
Let's talk about the movie. Right, It's what movie? Oh
my goodness, my question to you is, because Alphabet has
been played by aDNA and so many, what was it
about Cynthia's approach to the role.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
That delighted you?
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Well, I know, I know why it delighted me, but
I want to hear it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Well, there are several things about Cynthia's approach. One is
she has a voice that is calibrated somewhere between the
smoothness of an Ella Fitzgerald when she wants it to
be that kind of velvety bourbon smoothness. But she can
also channel raise in herself the rage that Cynthia or
(29:32):
Revo in her life, has had to live with as
a black woman in England, in America. I mean, her
superior talent gives her a past to be just about anywhere.
But that doesn't mean she wasn't raised in a marginalized position,
and we have talked about that. The fact that she's
black is a big, big deal of it.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Her sense of humanity just it just is so powerful
in her performance makes you feel something that I never
felt before.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I had I had. I was in Greece a couple
of weeks ago with about thirty teachers, and three or
four of them were black teachers. A couple of men,
couple women. We were touring the sites and one day
we were sitting having a glass of wine at the
end of the day and one woman said to me,
(30:26):
you know what I and my girlfriends, you know the
part of Wicked, the movie that really gets to us.
And I said, oh, no, tell me, and she said,
the thing that made all of our hearts wobble. It
isn't defying gravity, it's when Cynthia Arrivo sings I'm not
(30:53):
that girl. Because every one of us black women know
what that feels like, and we have lived lived with
that sentiment our whole lives. So when you ask, what
does what did Cynthia bring to it and what does
she communicate? Adina sang that song beautifully anybody I've ever
(31:13):
heard play that part plays that moment beautifully, but there's
something even more heartbreaking when Cynthia does it on the
screen to me, And it's the quietest moment in that
two hour and forty minute rather noisy film. It's the
quietest moment and it's very, very powerful.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I think I had many ugly cries when I was
watching the movie, and I think we can all really,
just really and so powerful.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Can you take us? Obviously? Did you visit the set
when they were filming the movie in London?
Speaker 3 (31:43):
I did. I flew out to London and was there
for close to a week. I'd like to say I
hung out and you got drunk with Ari and Cynthia
and Johnny. You know, that's all a big lie. But
I did meet them. I did watch them at work.
I watched them filming. That was there the week that
they were filming the Ozdesk ballroom scene. And that's the
(32:05):
scene where Alphabet is publicly humiliated and Golinda finally accepts
her responsibility for her part in the humiliation and in
the marginalization of Alphabet. And something breaks and strengthens in Alphaba.
And something breaks and strengthens in Golinda as well. So
(32:28):
I watched that be filmed over and over again, and
I have to tell you there was no glisser and
drop in the eyes so that those women could shed tears.
Those women were in that scene over and over again.
I think I saw it shot twelve times. Wow, And
(32:50):
sometimes there were tears and sometimes there weren't. But they
were so invested in the act of being those women
in that situation that the tears were part of who
they were.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Well, Arianna talks about this is her dream role. She
always wanted to play this role, so I can believe
that this was truly like a moment for her.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
It's the central moment in the film, I think. And
I also saw some scenes that did not make it.
Johnny Bailey was on the side and the camera was
focusing on him, and he had the most amazing expression.
I couldn't think, and they didn't use it in the film.
(33:35):
If it's ever a director's cut that's twenty two hours long,
maybe we'll see it. It was so astounding. I did
get to spend time with him. We sat down on
one of the sofas in the Astas ballroom after there
finish shooting. One day and we chatted for about forty
five minutes, and I said, how did you do that?
And he said what I said that expression when Alphaba
(33:59):
and Glinda Glinda are coming together, how did you do it? It's
just like Glinda's saying, how do you do it? How
do you do it? And he said, well, I don't
really talk about my technique. And I said, how did you?
And so he told me. But since you didn't see it,
(34:27):
there's no point of going any farther. I want to know.
I'm not going to tell you, because that's what makes
me so nice.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I did they pepper you with questions?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Did they well, you know, not so much about the characters.
They felt they knew the characters. They felt they were
the characters. They didn't need to know motivation for me,
They'd got it from the book. They'd got it from
the play, they got it from the script, they'd got
it from the director, they'd got it from their own lives.
Johnny Bailey and I talked about raising children, you know,
(34:59):
so you know, I know, you never know with these things.
Everybody was Everybody was so nice, though I didn't see
I didn't meet Michelle Yo on set because she was
off in Hollywood collecting some stupid Academy Award for Best Actress.
Very annoying timing. You know, come on, Michelle, I'm only
(35:20):
here for a week. You could have planned this better.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Did you like the film?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Are you kidding me? I saw it?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Delighted.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
I saw it. I was about saying I saw it
five and a half times.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
But I don't Did they send you?
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Did they send you like a before it came out?
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Or did you go to the premiere?
Speaker 3 (35:39):
No? But I did go to the premiere in Hollywood.
I brought my husband and our youngest child. The boys
were both in work obligations. They couldn't get away. But
about two weeks or three weeks before the Hollywood premiere,
which was about three weeks before the national premiere, I
was invited to New York where they were showing it
(36:00):
at the Director's Guild of America Theater Showcase on West
fifty seventh Street for people who had performed in or
It helped support the play of Wicked for the last
twenty two years, and so it was a special showing
for theater people because without their huge support of the
(36:22):
musical for all those years, it wouldn't have the built
in audience that it had. So I was invited to
that because I'm part of the creative team, and I
went with a friend. Andy said, I said, you want
to go, my husband, you want to go to New
York and see it? And he said, well, aren't you
making me go to Hollywood in two weeks? And I
(36:43):
said yeah, and he said I can wait. That's Andy.
He saw Wicked on Broadway once and that was only
the second musical he's ever seen, and he doesn't want
to see any others. So a friend of was in
New York City and I said, well, do you want
to go? I don't want to go alone, and he
(37:05):
said sure, and so we went in and I felt
kind of like I was in an emotional coma. I
had signed the film rights twenty eight years earlier. You know,
I'm like Rip Van Winkle, I'm almost dead. You know,
if I only had a dream, if I only had
a heart, if I only had a brain, if I
only had a pulse, you know, it's like I need
(37:26):
a pulse. And so we sat there and I watched
it and I didn't know what I thought. And when
the house slights came up and we stood up, I
said what did you think? And he said, I'll tell
you in the taxi we're going to take to the er.
(37:48):
And I said, oh my god, what's wrong? What's wrong?
He said, when the house sights went down, you grabbed
my hand and you squeezed it for two hours. And
I had no memory of that. Wow, I have no
memory of it. I just thought, at the end of
two hours and forty minutes, I'm still alive.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Right, you know what a wild ride it.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Was and it didn't crash and burn. Then when I
saw it two weeks later in Hollywood at the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion, I wept through the whole thing. Yeah, so
I had to kind of realize it was survivable first
before I could, you know, open myself to feel it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
So the next one's coming out November twenty first, that's
a long intermission, right, a full year. Oh my goodness.
What's in store for us in for the second movie?
Do you have any you know, tea on.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
That I don't know. If I don't know, at least,
I'm going to ask you a question. You heard about
the movie coming out, and you probably saw some of
the trailers before it came out, and my question for
you is do you think they overdid the exposure in
the trailers for the movie? Do you think do you
think that much airtime for images from the movie was
(39:05):
too much to see some people in the audience and
say no, no, no no, But.
Speaker 6 (39:10):
I didn't think so, okay, okay, interesting, I felt I
felt that by that maybe that was part of why
I was so catatonic in the theater the first time.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I felt they'd given almost every beat of the film
in the trailers, And so for the second film coming out,
I am it's like lent for me. I'm being abstinate.
I am not watching trailers, I'm not watching interviews, I'm
not reading this time. I want to go into the theater.
(39:44):
I know a couple of little things they've tweaked and
have changed from the play. But I want to go
in not knowing what the two new songs are, who
or who are singing them, or not knowing what else
they've changed, and not even seeing the set design. I
want to go in like a virgin.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
You know, so Elfie, you're here for Elfie. Yes, yes, okay,
we have to talk about Alfie briefly.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Do you think this will be turned into a film?
Speaker 3 (40:12):
I think it's not impossible that Elfie will be turned
into a film, but now I know it can take
twenty eight years, right, so I'm not holding my breath.
I will However, is this being broadcast?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
It is, we're streaming live.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
I see, Well you can say it.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
He told me that.
Speaker 3 (40:31):
Well, yeah, I'd just say it if I'm not going
to say this to keep anybody from buying a book
at the end of this episode, because of course, if
you haven't already done it, you should, Yes, because you should.
But I have it on fairly high authority that Cynthia
(40:55):
Arrivo is doing the audio book. You did not hear
that from me.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Huge, Huge.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
This is a fascinating book. It takes us behind the
scenes of her as an adolescent, a young girl. I
know a lot of you purchased this, so it's a.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
Really beautiful book. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
I think we have a couple a few minutes for
some questions from the audience.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
This going back to the movie a little bit. I'm
not sure if you had any say in the casting
at all, but if you knew like any of the
actors prior which casting announcement, did you like hear that
made you really be like, oh my god, I've made it.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It was probably Ariana, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I didn't
really know much about her music or about her person.
I thought two things, I'll be honest with you, Ari,
are you listening? I first thought, this is this is
really like celebrity casting of the biggest possible. And the
second thing I thought is I wonder if she has
(42:03):
the chops. And I don't mean the musical chops. I
meant the chops to inhabit the character of Glinda. And
if there was anything I was worried about going in,
it was that she was stunt casting. She was cast
for her, for her beauty and for her voice, and
that she wouldn't be able to inhabit the character. Boy
(42:25):
was I proven wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Well, because her backstory is that she wanted this role
for fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
So yeah, and she shared that with everyone, which was
really a gift.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
She was a gift.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
She was She was a total gift a guest. I
adore her and she was so nice. She signed some
some notepaper for my daughter.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Do you stay in touch? Like do you stay in
touch with an? I know Cynthia, Yes.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Right right, exactly I'm in touch with Cynthia. She and
I text from time to time, and I gave her
messages for the for the cast. And I was in London.
I was in France like ten days ago, and I
left Marseille a couple of days early and flew to
London and saw Johnny Bailey doing Richard the Second on
his last night there, and I went back much. So
(43:11):
you know, we're I'm friends with Johnny, with Cynthia the others.
I think, you know, how do you do?
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Another question?
Speaker 4 (43:21):
Right in the back, David written, Yeah, Hey, Greg grat
So what curious?
Speaker 8 (43:25):
So you're in the unique position of having created a
book which was successful, hugely successful, musical and now an
enormous film. Has your relationship to the story changed in
each iteration or do you still see it as you did.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
When you wrote it originally. Well that's a really good question,
and I have been given my answer by somebody else.
In fact, I did a panel with a writer I'm
not sure I can get her name exactly right, Casey
mcquister or something like that, the person who wrote Red,
White and Royal Blue. We were on the panel and
(44:00):
we were talking about what it was like to have
our work be translated into an enormously popular other medium.
And what Casey mcquist said, I think Casey uses they them,
so the herd might not have been accurate, But at
any rate, what Casey said was I feel in watching
the film as if I had not known initially that
(44:23):
I had given birth to twins. I thought I just
had a single child. And now you know, I see
the family relationship. I love the other twin, even if
I discovered its existence much later than I discovered my
own novel. And so to Casey, I said, well, you
have twins, I have triplets, and that's how I feel.
(44:47):
I do feel a kind of grandfatherly distance from the movie.
You know, nobody ever asked me a bloody question. You know,
if I want to go, I have to like call
up and say, can I be please? You know, I know,
I know I could be irritating if I was more
easily irritable. Yeah, but I'm not that terrible. I always say.
(45:10):
I always say to people, if you want to insult me,
you have to send me a telegram the day before
and let me know to look out for it, because
I'm not easily insulted.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Hi, I have a question.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
You talked about kind of the you were asking us
about if we felt like there was some overexposure from
the press and a little bit about the movie and
the actors. And obviously there was a lot with the
press tour and some pretty big culturally significant moments that
really had nothing to do with the movie, like the
infamous pinky hole between Arion and Cynthia.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
So I am curious to hear your take.
Speaker 5 (45:46):
On kind of that cultural significance about the press tour
and maybe the overexposure that really had nothing to do
with the movie, and just hearing that you're like a
little bit removed from it, but it is still your baby.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Is curious your thoughts on.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Well, you know, I'm like any grandmother who gets photos of,
you know, the four year old at you know, with
his his face and the chocolate cake. It's like, oh,
it's not cute. It's not cute. Who'll grow out of it?
Cynthia and ari will grow out of this little face,
I'm sure they will. But I adore it. I adore it.
(46:22):
I didn't expect. I had no idea someday I would
like my agent to go behind doors and find out
what was the cost of the bleeding publicity tour that
was all last year and is continuing on into this year.
I think it's got to be half the cost of
the movie itself. I mean, they just so much, But
those women are so genuinely dedicated to the story. Now
(46:46):
here's where I feel. I don't know, humbled, is pot
perhaps the word I'm looking for. I'm not sure it is,
but I'm going to use it. When the movie was opening,
some responsible reviewers of cinema decided to go back and
scale the impregnable edifice of my novel that they'd never
(47:09):
been able to get past page forty two of and
really read it so that they could speak genuinely to
what the movie had done on the basis of the
original material, And quite a few reviews said McGuire's novel
in nineteen ninety five was prophetic and the character of
(47:31):
Alphaba is who we need now. And I'll tell you
when I was writing the book, I thought it was
kind of retro. I thought it was I thought it
was a little bit Graham Green. I thought it was
a little bit about Stalin and Hitler and Pinochet and
authoritarian figures in our whole, long, ugly history. As a
(47:55):
species not totally ugly, but often ugly. So to have
to be crowned with aging laurels upon my aging brow
at this point, for having seen who were capable of
being as a culture at our worst and who were
capable of being as individuals at our best, is a
(48:22):
reward that most artists are not privileged to receive in
their lifetimes. And believe me, I'm grateful for it.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
I think we should end on that right.
Speaker 4 (48:31):
Really wonderful, really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Details on the next book Club will be coming up
in the next couple of weeks, but we're looking like
it's going to be at the end of July.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
We have a lot in store. Stay tuned for more details.
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