It’s very likely that, even if you are not a musical theatre aficionado, you will have heard of Wicked. Based on the book Wicked (1995) by Gregory Maguire and directed by Joe Mantello, the show opened on Broadway on 30 October 2003, after a successful run in San Francisco in the summer of that year. The musical stars Samantha Barks and Willemijn Verkaik as Elphaba; Camilla Kerslake as Glinda; and Mark Dinning as Fiyero. The original Broadway cast – Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda, Norbert Leo Butz as Fiyero, and Idina Menzel (of Frozen fame), who originated the role of Elphaba – is a veritable who’s who of musical theatre legends.
Wicked is a Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, based on the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, which itself is a retelling of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum and the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film The Wizard of Oz.
The scale of the production is one of the reasons that Wicked is so popular. It’s been at New York’s Gershwin Theatre on West 51st Street in the Paramount Plaza building in midtown Manhattan since its Broadway premiere in 2003. The theatre seats almost two thousand people, the largest seating capacity on Broadway. And it’s regularly sold out, thanks to its international status as one of the shows to see in NYC. Named the Uris Theatre when it opened in 1972 in an art nouveau style by Ralph Alswang, it was renamed in 1983 to honor the Gershwins. The set is loud, bright – and very, very green. Visit the Broadway shows in NYC. Get special offers and access to tickets for major theatre shows.
