'Wicked' never loses its magic for its writer

Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

Whenever Gregory Maguire needs a hit of self-esteem elixir he heads for Broadway to see the musical "Wicked."

"For example, if I've put on four or five unwelcome pounds," Maguire says. "I feel bad. But it's a real ego boost to see all those excited people gathered in front of the theater before the show begins. And the best part is seeing them even more excited when the show's over."

Maguire is a prolific author of fantasy literature. Probably his best-known work is "Wicked," a 1995 novel that imagines a detailed back story for the 1900 novel "The Wizard of Oz." Maguire's central character is the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West, whom he calls Elphaba (EL-fah-bah -- a play on Oz author L. Frank Baum's name).

"Wicked" opened on Broadway three years ago and is still running. A touring production of the show opens at the Paramount Theatre Thursday.

"I've seen 'Wicked' 19 or 20 times, it's like an addiction," Maguire says. "I guess that would be 19 1/2 actually. Three or four months ago I saw it, or half of it, with Rosie O'Donnell. From the very beginning she was sitting there beside me, singing along, quite loudly, with all the choruses and even the solos."

People who have paid something like $100 for a "Wicked" ticket are not likely to be pleased to have the show turned into a sing-along, even if the singer along is a celebrity.

"I grabbed her, fearing that she would be mobbed," Maguire recalls. "We ran out in the dark and went and had a drink.

"Actually, it was a sort of business get-together. She and I had met at a dinner party and she wanted to feel me out on the possibility of my participating in one of those cruises for gay families that she organizes.

"That went nowhere. I hate boats. If I had to ride the Staten Island ferry to see Staten Island, then I'd never see Staten Island. As a Catholic, I realize that the world is out to get me, but there's more to it than just that. When I was about 12, I took my younger brother out on Lake George in a metal rowboat. Suddenly a storm came up, lots of lightning. And us in a metal boat!

"I rowed back to shore like one of those cartoon characters that makes the boat zip along so that it hardly touches the water. That was it. No more boats."

An alert reader who is familiar with both Baum and Maguire will be having "aha!" experiences at this point. Yes, like the Wicked Witch of the West, Maguire has a phobia about water. And that lake: Lake George is in upper New York state and Lake Chorge is in upper Oz.

"But I also hate to fly, whereas Elphaba likes flying," Maguire says. "I do fly though. We spent part of the summer in France. If I take two Xanaxes I'm OK on a plane."

Maguire, 52, is married to the painter Andy Newman (really married -- the couple lives in Massachusetts where they were among the pioneers of same sex marriage). Maguire and Newman have three children, ages 8, 6 and 5 -- two boys from Cambodia and a girl from Guatemala. Home is the infinitely picturesque colonial town of Concord, famous for a Revolutionary War battle and a lake, Henry David Thoreau's "Walden Pond."

Maguire has a doctorate from Tufts University in English Literature. His doctoral thesis investigates fantasy fiction for children. Turning "Wicked" into a stage musical was the idea of songwriter Stephen Schwartz, whose past hits include "Pippin" and "Godspell."

"Wicked," the novel, had been optioned for a movie by Universal. "But they weren't convinced that they really wanted to spend $100 million on a fantasy movie," Maguire says. "That was before 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings' showed how profitable fantasy movies could be. "So Schwartz talked Universal into giving us adaptation rights, and the musical went ahead."

As a child, Maguire became obsessed with the Oz phenomenon, he says, because he was raised in a "strict Irish Catholic home in which children were not allowed to watch much television. But when 'The Wizard of Oz' was broadcast every year, that was different. It was a real event for us, a liturgy.

"Like a 9-year-old proto-graduate student, I went to the local libraries to find Oz books. Well, there were only two. I think public libraries at that time thought Baum was too trivial an author to waste taxpayers' money on. Because of that frustration, maybe, I had to make up my own Oz adventures. I never thought of that before. I just realized that. You're the first person I've ever said that to."

To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.