Originally, the makeup was an airbrush spray, but that would have been kind of toxic for eight shows a week so we chose a different product and used brushes. When we first tried out Elphaba’s green makeup, I went to show the rest of the cast and everyone was gawking at me – all of a sudden I felt isolated, which was helpful for her characterisation. I felt a little aghast but came around to it because the messages remain the same: time is short, cherish who you love, and what you do matters.
The biggest change they made was to my ending. He knew I had not written Wicked to be a parody of The Wizard of Oz but that I wanted to honour and unpack that story instead. With those words, he sold the project to me. He said the first number would be called No One Mourns the Wicked. Stephen understood what the book is about: identifying with someone who was ostracised. Bankrolling a Broadway play is also a lot cheaper than a big movie – and all the film studios were watching Disney mint money on the stage with The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.
A straight film is not going to hit the heart like a musical does. Then composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz met Universal executive Marc Platt and said the reason you’re not getting a good script for this is because everyone knows that people in Oz sing. The studio was scared about paying $100m to make a fantasy movie with no big male roles. This was before The Lord of the Rings, before Harry Potter. Universal developed it as a film for a while but weren’t getting satisfactory scripts. Whoopi Goldberg called, Demi Moore called. The calls from Hollywood came within a week of publication. Photograph: Joseph Marzullo/Wenn Rights Ltd/Alamy When writing, I cast the characters in my head so I could picture them: for Elphaba I cast kd lang. Even though I didn’t anticipate that Wicked would become a musical, I thought Elphaba had to be able to sing in the novel. I wanted to pay homage to The Wizard of Oz novelist L Frank Baum: LFB – Elphaba! It’s clean and simple, but not pretty, and with connotations of otherworldliness. Within the first couple of days I got her name. My novel would start with her birth, end with her death and have a 19th-century moral urgency. I decided to tell her life as if Dickens was doing it.
No one says how The Wicked Witch of the West became as she was. Everyone was asking: how could those boys be so villainous? Were they born evil or were there circumstances that pushed them towards behaving like that? It propelled me back to the question of evil that bedevils anybody raised Catholic. Then the terrible murder of James Bulger happened and it was discovered that children had killed him. When I moved to London in the early 1990s, I was rather lonely and isolated.
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