‘Wicked’ recap: All things Oz
“Wicked: For Good” is finally here. Here’s where Part 1 of “Wicked” left off.
Spoiler alert! The following story contains major plot details about movie musical “Wicked: For Good.”
Never mind a horse of a different color. What’s going on with Dorothy’s slippers?
In “Wicked: For Good” (now in theaters), you’ll notice that Oz’s naive out-of-towner is no longer wearing ruby shoes, but silver jeweled pumps. The reason behind the change is fairly straightforward.
It’s been common knowledge for decades that in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy Gale famously dons silver footwear. But for the 1939 movie musical “The Wizard of Oz,” MGM was eager to take advantage of the film’s use of Technicolor, and therefore wished to contrast the bright red slippers against the Yellow Brick Road.
MGM owns the rights to Dorothy’s ruby shoes, and therefore Universal Pictures was not allowed to use that color for the “Wicked” films.
Both “Wicked: For Good” and the Broadway musical have a clever workaround: In this version of the “Wizard of Oz” story, the wheelchair-bound Nessarose (Marissa Bode) is given her late mother’s silver shoes by her father. Later, her green-skinned sister Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) casts a spell that allows Nessa to fly.
“My shoes! They feel like they’re on fire!” Nessa exclaims, as the slippers light up in a burning red while she floats into the air.
Midway through “Wicked: For Good,” Nessa declares herself the Wicked Witch of the East, and as “Wizard of Oz” fans know, she doesn’t have the greatest luck with flying houses. After Nessa’s crushing death, Glinda (Ariana Grande) hands off her jeweled footwear to Dorothy (Bethany Weaver), who trots down the Yellow Brick Road to meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in the Emerald City. Elphaba, meanwhile, orders the flying monkeys to fetch Dorothy and bring her the shoes, hoping to have at least one memento of her dearly departed sister.
Speaking to Esquire about the jeweled shoes, Oscar-winning “Wicked” costume designer Paul Tazewell revealed that his favorite fashion Easter egg is Nessa’s heels, which are designed to resemble cyclones.
“They’re the shoes she’s gifted in the first ‘Wicked’ film, and she’s still wearing them by the end, when she meets her fate with the tornado,” Tazewell told Esquire. “She’s matched them with striped socks, and the shoes are crystal and and silver as opposed to the classic ruby – literally due to a copywriting rule. But I’m still using similar imagery so that it will trigger a memory of what it was to experience the original film.
“I had fun with the shoes,” Tazewell adds. “It’s using imagery that’s already within our culture, but shifting it.”
