"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairie..."
I'm sitting here listening to the soundtrack for Wicked again, and I'm thinking to myself - you know, I've been doing the Oz thing for about, ooh, fifteen years, on and off. No, longer; probably since I was about four. And like most fandoms, it's fractured into little cliques and cults, and it has its troubles, and I like to stay wandering around the periphary more than I enjoy taking active part anymore. But it has incredible longevity (as an organized fandom, something like sixty or seventy years), and one of the most curious aspects of that is the distinct lack of continuity. Yeah, sure, there's a canon - the original Famous Forty books, from 1900 to 1963 - but nobody really worries that much about sticking to it, mainly because its internal consistency is really laughable. Most fans stick to the L. Frank Baum's original fourteen books, and build on that. In fact, I'd say Baum's related non-Oz fantasy books are more revered than some of the official 'canon.'
Anyway, the long and the short of this is, everyone not only feels wildly free to form their own continuity, they often go the length to make up their own alternate continuity. (It helps that nearly twenty of the books are well out of copyright.) Alternate Ozzes, and especially Dark Ozzes, are one of the oldest games in the book, and Wicked is just the latest manifestation of that. It's incredibly schizophrenic, maybe even more so than the novel it's based on; both novel and musical seem to have lifted their main characters from the 1939 film Wizard, but with the history and secondary characters of Baum's book. The musical takes it a step farther by directly refuting Baum's (and the film's!) origins for the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, and - here's the real wild part - providing a, erm, positive spin on the novel's depressing and inevitable end. Does all that stop it from working? Not really - by the sound of the music, it's a zany if slightly overwrought good time, and the visuals on the musical's website look pretty sweet, too. I'd actually be tempted to see it if it came to Nashville (nice low prices for disabled patrons...). It's a shame Idina Enzel's gone - she has the best voice, by far, on the CD - but Ben Vereen is probably a far better Wizard than Joel Grey. And I doubt anyone gets that stirred up about an African-American Wizard from, apparently, 1890s Nebraska.
And this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. Oz is sort of the fan's dream playground - anything goes. Sure, some of the alternate variations fall within recognizable patterns: sometimes these alternate Ozzes are quite sexual and/or violent - most of the comics fit that bill (including Oz Squad), as does March Laumer's (in)famous series of books. Most Dark Ozzes, including the '90s comic series Oz, the WB pilot for Lost in Oz, and even the online roleplaying game, have something to do with an abandoned Oz, often overrun by the Nome King. Quite a few of them take it back even further, expanding on the original book or providing some sort of pre-history (as Wicked does). Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz, arguably the most well-known published Dark Oz, decides the later books are all fiction and has Glinda wage war on the 1930s United States. And then there's a whole slew of books about adult Dorothy returning to her own private fairyland...
I just ordered a very cheap, used copy of Martin Gardner's controversial 2000 novel Visitors from Oz, because while these alternate universes didn't interest me much as a kid, these days I'm rather more intrigued. Apparently Gardner has Dorothy and her friends returning to the modern-day USA as a publicity stunt - young Dot goes on talk shows, the Tin Woodman becomes a walking advertisement, Glinda uses the internet, etc. It should prove interesting, at very least. It's also one of the first texts, oddly, to propose that Princess Ozma is a lesbian - an amusing and terribly obvious suggestion that I really would think would be more popular! (There's certainly enough stories about her being a transsexual, which is - innocuously - canon, as of 1904.)
So - back to Wicked, and back to modern day. It's sort of nice to know that even the mainstream public buys a wildly outrageous new take on the idea, because that only means such experimentation will keep going, and going, and going, and keep the whole fandom fresh. Good for that! It's odd to consider, then, that my own alternate Oz - The Rainbow's Daughter - is neither particularly dark, particularly ribald, or even particularly Ozzy. I never say the word. We never visit the place. A character from 1909 just shows up in modern-day America, and I take it from there. There are a few hints, sure...and if you take them literally, Oz might be well and truly destroyed. But somehow, I don't feel a need to elaborate. If I can ever get this thing published, well...
...Maybe someone else will find a good way to tell that additional story. And it'll just keep going.
It's interesting trying to be part of an ever-changing history. But, in the end, it's more interesting seeing what everybody else's ideas are. I would never have thought up Wicked, and maybe the novel isn't everything it could be, in my opinion, but hey, at least he got it out there. I can really respect it on that level, and from that perspective, the musical is a remarkable success.
I wonder if it plays Nashville in 2006...
Anyway, the long and the short of this is, everyone not only feels wildly free to form their own continuity, they often go the length to make up their own alternate continuity. (It helps that nearly twenty of the books are well out of copyright.) Alternate Ozzes, and especially Dark Ozzes, are one of the oldest games in the book, and Wicked is just the latest manifestation of that. It's incredibly schizophrenic, maybe even more so than the novel it's based on; both novel and musical seem to have lifted their main characters from the 1939 film Wizard, but with the history and secondary characters of Baum's book. The musical takes it a step farther by directly refuting Baum's (and the film's!) origins for the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, and - here's the real wild part - providing a, erm, positive spin on the novel's depressing and inevitable end. Does all that stop it from working? Not really - by the sound of the music, it's a zany if slightly overwrought good time, and the visuals on the musical's website look pretty sweet, too. I'd actually be tempted to see it if it came to Nashville (nice low prices for disabled patrons...). It's a shame Idina Enzel's gone - she has the best voice, by far, on the CD - but Ben Vereen is probably a far better Wizard than Joel Grey. And I doubt anyone gets that stirred up about an African-American Wizard from, apparently, 1890s Nebraska.
And this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. Oz is sort of the fan's dream playground - anything goes. Sure, some of the alternate variations fall within recognizable patterns: sometimes these alternate Ozzes are quite sexual and/or violent - most of the comics fit that bill (including Oz Squad), as does March Laumer's (in)famous series of books. Most Dark Ozzes, including the '90s comic series Oz, the WB pilot for Lost in Oz, and even the online roleplaying game, have something to do with an abandoned Oz, often overrun by the Nome King. Quite a few of them take it back even further, expanding on the original book or providing some sort of pre-history (as Wicked does). Philip Jose Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz, arguably the most well-known published Dark Oz, decides the later books are all fiction and has Glinda wage war on the 1930s United States. And then there's a whole slew of books about adult Dorothy returning to her own private fairyland...
I just ordered a very cheap, used copy of Martin Gardner's controversial 2000 novel Visitors from Oz, because while these alternate universes didn't interest me much as a kid, these days I'm rather more intrigued. Apparently Gardner has Dorothy and her friends returning to the modern-day USA as a publicity stunt - young Dot goes on talk shows, the Tin Woodman becomes a walking advertisement, Glinda uses the internet, etc. It should prove interesting, at very least. It's also one of the first texts, oddly, to propose that Princess Ozma is a lesbian - an amusing and terribly obvious suggestion that I really would think would be more popular! (There's certainly enough stories about her being a transsexual, which is - innocuously - canon, as of 1904.)
So - back to Wicked, and back to modern day. It's sort of nice to know that even the mainstream public buys a wildly outrageous new take on the idea, because that only means such experimentation will keep going, and going, and going, and keep the whole fandom fresh. Good for that! It's odd to consider, then, that my own alternate Oz - The Rainbow's Daughter - is neither particularly dark, particularly ribald, or even particularly Ozzy. I never say the word. We never visit the place. A character from 1909 just shows up in modern-day America, and I take it from there. There are a few hints, sure...and if you take them literally, Oz might be well and truly destroyed. But somehow, I don't feel a need to elaborate. If I can ever get this thing published, well...
...Maybe someone else will find a good way to tell that additional story. And it'll just keep going.
It's interesting trying to be part of an ever-changing history. But, in the end, it's more interesting seeing what everybody else's ideas are. I would never have thought up Wicked, and maybe the novel isn't everything it could be, in my opinion, but hey, at least he got it out there. I can really respect it on that level, and from that perspective, the musical is a remarkable success.
I wonder if it plays Nashville in 2006...