Wicked, the highly successful musical play based on Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, looks like it will be the latest in a long line of hit shows to make the transition to the big screen. According to the entertainment website Deadline, the show’s producer, Marc Platt, alongside the book writer Winnie Holzman and the songwriter Stephen Schwartz, have already begun talks with potential directors.
Names cropping up for the director’s job on the sure-fire hit include the mastermind behind Lost, J.J. Abrams, Rob Marshall (Chicago and Nine), James Mangold (Walk the Line) and Ryan Murphy of Glee fame. No one has been confirmed for a role in the movie, but there are rumours that the original stars of the Broadway show – Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth – will reprise their roles as Elphaba and Glinda respectively.
since its first run in 2003 (at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre) the show has gone on to break box-office records the world over. Wicked has won over 35 major international awards (the most recent being the 2010 Laurence Olivier Award for Most Popular Show) and to this day, seven years after hitting the Big Apple, it is still the top-selling musical on Broadway.
When seats for the show first went on sale in London, in 2006, more than £100,000 worth were purchased within the first hour. More than 1,500 performances later, the UK production has played to almost three million people, recently reaching a box-office milestone by hitting ticket sales of over £100 million (Dh349m) – making Wicked’s worldwide gross a whopping £1.2 billion and further cementing its status as one of the most popular musical shows of all time.
And the story is nothing if not right-on. The novel on which the show is loosely based was written by the American author Gregory Maguire in 1995 and was itself based on the Frank L Baum classic The Wizard of Oz. Maguire was introduced to the idea behind his novel after being heavily influenced by two major events that took place while he was living in London in the early 90s – the infamous James Bulger murder (in which two young boys brutally murdered the two-year-old toddler, James) and the first Gulf War – which saw the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, being referred to by the British press as “the next Hitler”. Fascinated by the media’s demonisation of the two young boys and Hussein, Maguire began thinking about the labels that go along with social judgement – bad, evil, wicked.
Check out the current Wicked Tour Dates and Tickets Details.
