I recognize that I am taking real risks in publishing this essay. Wicked — from its first appearance in Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, through its Broadway success, to Jon M. Chu’s lavish 2024 film adaptation — has become a beloved cultural touchstone. It stands as a worthy successor to the first cinematic reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, the iconic 1939 MGM film starring Judy Garland, which premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

I want to begin by affirming my profound respect for the author, the director, the screenwriters, and the extraordinarily talented actors and performers who have given this story life for millions of readers, theatergoers, and viewers around the world. My purpose here is not to diminish their achievement, but to apply a lens of cultural critique to the ways that social inequities and blind spots inevitably seep into narrative constructions, even when — and sometimes especially when — the creators are striving to tell stories that heal and unite.

In this sense, I believe Wicked has succeeded admirably. The passion of audiences and the acclaim of critics testify to its capacity to enchant, inspire, and affirm. Nevertheless, if we are serious about art’s power to strengthen us, we must also be willing to confront the weaknesses that surface in our most cherished cultural texts. To grow stronger, we must understand where even our dreams remain haunted.

When Gregory Maguire’s Wicked appeared in 1995, and later when the Broadway musical adaptation premiered in 2003, Elphaba’s green skin was meant to stand as a metaphor for all forms of difference — racial, sexual, ideological, even political. She was the outcast who refused to conform, demonized for her refusal to compromise, and destroyed for standing apart from the smooth, sanitized world of Oz. In 2024, however, the metaphor was transformed by a casting decision. Cynthia Erivo, a Black and openly queer actress, stepped into the role of Elphaba opposite Ariana Grande’s Galinda in Jon M. Chu’s lavish two-part film adaptation. The decision was immediately hailed as a triumph of inclusion, a symbolic breaking of boundaries in one of Broadway’s most iconic roles.

Yet the casting also exposed a deeper contradiction. With Erivo as Elphaba, the allegory of difference no longer floats free in the realm of fantasy. It becomes racialized in ways the story itself is unprepared to handle. The outsider is not just green but Black, and her narrative arc — vilified, humiliated in love, and ultimately destroyed — resonates uncomfortably with long histories of racial exclusion. What was once allegory is now refracted through the lens of American racial politics, with consequences the film itself never openly acknowledges.

This essay argues that while the casting of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba was celebrated as a progressive victory, the unchanged structure of Wicked undermines the inclusivity it promises. The film’s romance subplot, its staging of female friendship, its use of queer theatrical tropes, and its tokenistic distribution of nonwhite performers all combine to reinscribe, rather than dismantle, the very hierarchies of desirability and exclusion it seeks to critique. By placing one Black woman at the center of an unchanged story, the film risks turning inclusion into another spectacle of marginalization — a case study in the limits of liberal casting.

Elphaba as Outsider: Allegory Meets Race

From its beginning, Wicked has been praised for transforming the Wicked Witch of the West from a flat villain into a misunderstood outsider. In Maguire’s novel and on the Broadway stage, Elphaba’s green skin serves as a flexible allegory. It stands for all who are marked as different — queer, disabled, politically dissenting, or racially “other.” Because the color green carries no direct historical resonance, audiences could project themselves into her alienation without the story committing itself to one specific form of exclusion. The allegory was broad, a mirror in which almost anyone could see their reflection.

In Maguire’s novel, Elphaba is not a Black woman painted green but a green-skinned creature, born to white parents, marked from birth as strange, monstrous, and unassimilable. The allegory is deliberately fantastical, keeping her difference in a register of myth rather than mapping it onto any single real-world identity. Readers were free to interpret her “green-ness” as disability, queerness, political dissent, or any marginalized status — but the text itself carefully avoided collapsing allegory into race.

Yet the novel also introduces a more troubling layer: Elphaba’s birth is linked to her mother’s infidelity. She is the child of a clandestine affair, her strangeness framed as the bodily mark of moral failure. Within the gothic logic of the novel, this detail supplies tragic backstory. But in cultural terms, it echoes a long-standing trope in white societies: the framing of interracial desire, especially between Black men and white women, as “sin itself.” This association — already weaponized in racist mythology, literature, and lynching rhetoric — is doubly perverse because in reality the far more common dynamic was Black women subjected to sexual violence at the hands of white men.

By linking Elphaba’s “difference” to her mother’s sexual transgression, the novel unwittingly participates in this cultural misnomer: it aligns otherness with the shame of miscegenation while erasing the violence of historical realities. The Broadway musical wisely excised this thread, keeping Elphaba’s birth unexplained and her allegory open. But the film restores it, and when paired with Cynthia Erivo’s body and presence, the effect is no longer gothic or mythic but racialized and sexualized. The outsider becomes not only a Black woman misjudged by society but a living symbol of “sinful” desire — her very existence marked as punishment.

This framing makes the optics of the central romance all the more glaring. Galinda and Fiyero, white-coded and “proper,” embody the sanctioned union, while Elphaba — the Black paramour — is rejected, her desires delegitimized. What was once a love triangle reads now as a cultural script in which Blackness equals transgression and whiteness equals legitimacy. The green paint might as well peel away: Erivo’s Elphaba is implicitly cast not as a mythical creature but as the embodiment of a taboo that white culture itself invented. The irony is sharp, even cruel. She could almost quip, “…and no, I did not eat too many black-eyed peas as a child,” exposing how absurdly racialized her “difference” has become.

Critics recognized the more explicit consequences of the racial reframing immediately, celebrating what it seemed to add rather than questioning what it might cost. Vox noted that casting Erivo “gestures at a critique of racial prejudice” in ways the original allegory only suggested. Black Nerd Problems went further, arguing that what had once been “subtle undertones about race and queerness with a white actress becomes a battle cry with Cynthia’s performance.” For many progressive viewers, this was a triumph: the metaphor finally sharpened into direct social commentary. Yet this sharpening comes at a steep cost when viewed critically. When the allegory becomes visibly racial, the story’s tragic ending risks reinforcing stereotypes rather than subverting them. A Black Elphaba is not just “the girl with green skin” whom Oz cannot co-opt. She is a Black woman who is misrepresented, humiliated, and ultimately annihilated in a narrative where her white counterpart survives and prospers. In this way, what was once an allegory of difference risks collapsing into a spectacle of racialized suffering.

The Love Triangle and Racial Optics of Desire

The cultural weight of Elphaba’s “illegitimate” birth makes her later romantic storyline all the more charged. If the novel and film already tether her body to sin and transgression, then her pursuit of Fiyero reframes those anxieties in the realm of desire. On stage with two white actresses competing for a white prince, the triangle played as familiar melodrama, softened with comic rivalry. Audiences could enjoy Galinda’s vanity and Elphaba’s awkwardness without the romance carrying larger cultural implications.

In the film, however, the dynamics are racialized. With Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Galinda, the triangle reproduces a familiar script: the Black woman’s attraction to the white man is framed as illicit, precarious, and ultimately doomed, while the white woman’s romance is sanctioned as proper and enduring. Fiyero is not simply a love interest; he is the embodiment of social legitimacy. His choice determines not just romantic validation but cultural acceptability. Thus, when Elphaba suffers humiliation in love, it no longer reads as the sting of youthful rejection. It reverberates as a replay of long-standing racial tropes in which Black women are cast as undesirable or their affections delegitimized.

What makes this dynamic more insidious is how it dovetails with the “born of infidelity” backstory. Elphaba, already framed as the product of sexual transgression, becomes doubly marked in her pursuit of romance. The narrative suggests that her desires — like her birth — are transgressive by nature. In contrast, Galinda’s pursuit of Fiyero affirms her place within the social order. The triangle becomes less a comic subplot than a parable of racialized desire, one where whiteness equals legitimacy and Blackness equals sin.

The filmmakers could have mitigated this by reimagining the triangle — casting Fiyero with a nonwhite actor, reducing his symbolic role, or reframing the women’s bond as primary. Instead, the Broadway structure is preserved wholesale, collapsing under the racial optics introduced by Erivo’s casting. The result is that a subplot once played for light drama now exposes the deepest fault lines of representation. The romance, meant to humanize Elphaba, risks degrading her instead — reinscribing the very cultural misnomers the story claims to resist.Yet the novel also introduces a more troubling layer: Elphaba’s birth is linked to her mother’s infidelity. She is the child of a clandestine affair, her strangeness framed as the bodily mark of moral failure. Within the gothic logic of the novel, this detail supplies tragic backstory. But in cultural terms, it echoes a long-standing trope in white societies: the framing of interracial desire, especially between Black men and white women, as “sin itself.” This association — already weaponized in racist mythology, literature, and lynching rhetoric — is doubly perverse because in reality the far more common dynamic was Black women subjected to sexual violence at the hands of white men.

Friendship, Rivalry, and Racial Coding

If the love triangle exposes how the narrative codes Elphaba’s desire as transgressive, her friendship with Galinda highlights an even starker contrast. On stage, with two white actresses, their rivalry and reconciliation could be read as a clash of personality: the principled outsider against the frivolous insider, the serious student against the popular girl. Their eventual bond was touching precisely because it transcended such differences.

In the film, however, race unsettles this balance. Ariana Grande’s Galinda embodies the white-coded insider whose privilege allows her to move effortlessly through Oz’s social order. Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, by contrast, is marked as doubly different — green and Black, “illegitimate” from birth and illegitimate in romance. This asymmetry reframes their relationship. What was once an odd-couple comedy becomes a study in hierarchy: the white woman validated by society, the Black woman tolerated only at its margins.

The duet “For Good” exemplifies this shift. On Broadway, it functioned as an anthem of mutual recognition: two women acknowledging that they had permanently altered one another’s lives. In the film, the optics complicate that symmetry. Galinda survives, affirmed as the Good Witch of the North, while Elphaba vanishes into martyrdom, remembered only through rumor and vilification. Their farewell still carries emotional sincerity, but the larger story denies the equality the song seems to promise. The white friend thrives in legitimacy; the Black friend disappears into myth.

This imbalance is intensified by how the film frames Galinda from the very beginning. She presides over the effigy-burning of her supposed “friend” without protest, and when pressed about the nature of their relationship, she evades responsibility: “We may have crossed paths…” she shrugs, as if the bond never mattered. Her opening presentation places her character defects on full display — spoiled, entitled, and basking in superficial adoration from an audience she flatters as “my dear audience.” Whatever growth she undergoes through her relationship with Elphaba evaporates the moment her counterpart exits the stage. She inherits power without cost, while Elphaba pays in full.

This is a cruel paradox: the narrative suggests reconciliation but stages complicity. Galinda’s survival and ascension embody not equality but hierarchy — the triumph of whiteness over racialized difference. Ironically, the alt-right agitators who condemned the film as ‘woke’ missed the reality: what appears progressive at the level of casting is, at the level of narrative, a veiled affirmation of white legitimacy.

Queer Tropes vs. Racial Tropes

Alongside its allegory of difference, Wicked has always carried a strong queer subtext. On stage, Galinda’s flamboyance in “Popular” and the stylized world of Oz provided camp humor and theatrical excess, gestures long associated with queer performance traditions. Fiyero too was often played with a light, ironic touch, his charm more playful than conventionally masculine. These flourishes gave the show a theatrical queerness that softened its tragic beats and opened space for coded identification.

The film magnifies this dimension. Ariana Grande’s Galinda leans fully into camp exaggeration — her gestures, expressions, and comic vanity echoing drag performance. Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero adds another layer, his physicality and interactions often coded as flirtatiously queer, undermining his role as straightforward romantic hero. Even the ensemble scenes shimmer with theatrical “gay affect,” doubling down on Broadway’s camp legacy.

Yet Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba stands apart from this aesthetic. Although Erivo herself is openly queer, the film gives her little of the comic or camp energy that surrounds Galinda and Fiyero. Instead, she is grounded in earnestness and tragedy. Her performance is dignified, solemn, and morally serious — the weight of exclusion, humiliation, and persecution falling squarely on her shoulders. The tonal divide is striking: while the white characters inhabit queer-coded theatrical play, the Black Elphaba is denied access to that space.

This distribution of performance styles reinforces the hierarchy already embedded in the story. Galinda and Fiyero enjoy the freedom of camp — they can wink at the audience, play with gender codes, and turn pain into spectacle. Elphaba cannot. She is locked into a register of suffering, her difference racialized and moralized by the film’s choices. In effect, queer tropes flourish in the white-coded characters, while racial tropes isolate the Black character in tragedy. The allegory of outsiderhood splits: for some, it is playful and liberating; for others, it is a death sentence.

Tokenism and the Ensemble Problem

If Erivo’s Elphaba carries the weight of racialized suffering, the ensemble around her demonstrates how the film attempts to mask this imbalance with spectacle. The camera is filled with dancers and background performers of color, creating the impression of a richly diverse Oz. Yet very few of these figures are granted speaking roles, narrative arcs, or even recognizable identities. They function as decoration — visual proof of representation — while the central dynamics remain locked in white-coded legitimacy and Black-coded exclusion.

This is tokenism at scale: one Black woman elevated to symbolic prominence, surrounded by many bodies of color who contribute energy but no narrative weight. The imbalance is made sharper by the fact that the film restores Elphaba’s illegitimate birth and doubles down on her tragic arc. Surrounded by anonymous diversity, she alone is singled out as “different,” punished, and destroyed. The crowd of dancers becomes less a celebration of inclusivity than camouflage, a way to avoid redistributing narrative centrality.

To be sure, the film does cast a major nonwhite performer in a speaking role: Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible. Yeoh’s presence lends gravitas, and her international stature breaks from the pattern of all-white authority. Yet the role she inhabits is that of the manipulative architect of Elphaba’s downfall — another figure of exclusionary power rather than solidarity. Yeoh enriches the film but does not resolve its structural imbalance.

The missed opportunity lies in the supporting cast. Characters such as Fiyero, Nessarose, or even the Wizard could have been cast with Black, Asian, or Hispanic actors, spreading difference across the world of Oz rather than concentrating it in one figure. Instead, the central romance and power structures remain racially uniform, even as the chorus swells with diversity. The result is paradoxical: audiences see a rainbow of bodies, yet the story still replays the familiar script in which a Black outsider is rejected by a white society. The background diversity makes the optics safer, but the narrative hierarchy remains unchanged.

Cultural Reception and the Gap

The casting of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba generated immediate cultural reaction. Progressive commentators hailed it as a long-overdue milestone. Vox described it as sharpening Wicked’s allegory of prejudice into a more direct racial critique, while Black Nerd Problems praised Erivo’s performance as transforming subtle undertones into a “battle cry.” For these voices, the choice symbolized progress: the most iconic outsider in modern musical theatre finally embodied by a Black woman.

Conservatives and reactionary voices responded with predictable outrage. The Guardian reported coordinated alt-right campaigns denouncing the film and Erivo personally, charging that casting a Black actress “distorted” what they saw as a white story. Their vitriol underscored how threatening such symbolic shifts remain to defenders of cultural homogeneity.Yet the novel also introduces a more troubling layer: Elphaba’s birth is linked to her mother’s infidelity. She is the child of a clandestine affair, her strangeness framed as the bodily mark of moral failure. Within the gothic logic of the novel, this detail supplies tragic backstory. But in cultural terms, it echoes a long-standing trope in white societies: the framing of interracial desire, especially between Black men and white women, as “sin itself.” This association — already weaponized in racist mythology, literature, and lynching rhetoric — is doubly perverse because in reality the far more common dynamic was Black women subjected to sexual violence at the hands of white men.

Yet caught between these poles lies a silence. Much of the commentary — celebratory or hostile — focused on optics: who was cast, who appeared on screen, what the ensemble looked like. What neither side addressed was structure. The narrative into which Erivo stepped remained unchanged. Elphaba still bore the stigma of “illegitimacy,” still competed for a white-coded prince, still lost her place in friendship, and still vanished in defeat while her white counterpart was glorified. The film’s background diversity — from dancers of color to Michelle Yeoh’s dignified but villainous Morrible — did little to alter this outcome.

In this gap lies the most pressing critique. Casting Erivo may have expanded the optics of inclusion, but it did not rewrite the story’s hierarchies. Indeed, by layering her Blackness onto a role already framed as born of sin, humiliated in desire, and martyred in death, the film risked validating racial myths it never intended to endorse. Where commentary treated the choice as either victory or betrayal, what has gone largely unexamined is the way inclusivity without structural change can reproduce the very exclusions it hopes to undo.

Toward True Inclusivity

If the contradictions of Wicked’s film adaptation expose the limits of liberal casting, they also point toward what genuine inclusivity would require. The problem is not that Cynthia Erivo was cast as Elphaba, but that she was cast into a story whose structures were left untouched. Representation, when confined to a single symbolic figure, inevitably makes that figure bear the full weight of difference.

The casting of Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible hints at the potential for a broader redistribution. Yeoh brings stature and complexity to the manipulative headmistress, and her presence does challenge the expectation of an all-white authority. Yet Morrible is still written as a villain, the very architect of Elphaba’s downfall. Diversity is acknowledged, but once again, narrative power is withheld.

True inclusivity would mean spreading difference across the full web of central roles. Imagine an Oz where Fiyero was Latino, where Nessarose or the Wizard was Asian or Black, where Galinda’s privilege was complicated by not being visually coded as white. Such casting would diffuse the allegory, so that Elphaba’s suffering was not read as racially singular but as part of a larger mosaic of systemic inequality. Her outsider status could then return to being allegorical — a mirror for many forms of exclusion — rather than collapsing into a racialized martyrdom.

Instead, the film kept the Broadway script intact, revived the novel’s morally loaded origin story, and concentrated the allegory of difference in a single figure. The ensemble was diverse, yes, but decorative. The effect is a kind of liberal caution: inclusion performed for the eye, but not written into the bones of the story. Until narrative centrality is redistributed — until difference itself is reframed as structural rather than individual — inclusivity will remain a surface layer. Wicked needed not just new casting but a reimagined Oz.

White Ascendency and the Denial of Harmony

Toward the end of the story, the allegory sharpens in ways that become even more troubling when read through the film’s racial optics. The Wizard and Madame Morrible, both white-coded figures, consolidate power by demonizing others. They enslave Animals, exploit fear, and manipulate society by creating enemies where none need exist. Ordinary “white people” in Oz are framed as having no magic of their own, yet they secure dominance through exclusion and control.

In this framework, Galinda is reduced to a pawn of the Wizard’s regime, a beautiful mouthpiece whose privilege ensures her survival while Elphaba is vilified. On stage, this tension could still be read as a parable of authoritarian manipulation, a warning about how power thrives on scapegoating difference. But when Elphaba is also Black, the allegory twists. What was once a commentary on political fearmongering becomes a drama in which racial harmony itself is impossible. The “green outsider” is permanently rejected by the white order; reconciliation cannot be imagined.

This is more than the triumph of white legitimacy. It is the narrative foreclosure of integration. Elphaba’s annihilation preserves the system, while Galinda’s ascension guarantees its continuity. The allegory thus becomes not only about exclusion but about the impossibility of coexistence. In this way, the story affirms what it claims to critique: the persistence of racial hierarchy disguised as a tale of tragic difference.

"Defying Inclusion..."

The 2024 film adaptation of Wicked was heralded as a milestone for representation, with Cynthia Erivo’s casting as Elphaba celebrated as a victory for inclusivity. Yet as this essay has argued, the film reveals the fragility of liberal casting when it is grafted onto an unchanged story. What was once a broad allegory of difference narrowed into a racial parable, freighted with cultural tropes of illegitimacy, rejection, and martyrdom. The restoration of Elphaba’s “sinful” birth, her humiliation in desire, her asymmetrical friendship with Galinda, and the reliance on a diverse ensemble to mask narrative uniformity all combined to reinscribe the hierarchies the film claimed to challenge.

This is not to deny the brilliance of the performers. Erivo’s Elphaba is powerful and heartbreaking; Michelle Yeoh’s Morrible brings gravitas to a role that might otherwise be played as caricature. Yet their talents cannot undo the contradictions of a story in which the Black outsider is destroyed while the white insider thrives. The allegory of outsiderhood, once open to many readings, is narrowed by casting choices and structural conservatism until it risks validating myths of exclusion rather than subverting them.

The lesson is clear. Representation cannot stop at optics, nor can diversity be reduced to a single symbolic figure surrounded by decorative difference. True inclusivity demands structural change: redistributing narrative centrality, reimagining relationships, and refusing to tether otherness to shame. Until that work is done, adaptations like Wicked will hover in paradox — celebrated as progress yet weighted by the exclusions they inherit. To “defy gravity” in the fullest sense, inclusivity must defy not just casting traditions but the cultural scripts that keep difference marked as sin.

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