Musicals have a long history of reworking familiar stories to find new angles, often producing work that is more challenging than its source material.
West Side Story relocated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to New York, using the tragedy to explore race and immigration. Hadestown reimagines the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a post-apocalyptic city, using folk and jazz to examine power and labour.
Wicked: The Musical, which has its premiere at Dubai Opera on Wednesday, belongs to that lineage, functioning as a complete, stand-alone story while also acting as a prelude to The Wizard of Oz, filling in the moral gaps the original leaves untouched.
Premiering on Broadway in 2003, Wicked: The Musical returns to a time before Dorothy’s arrival, when Oz’s future Wicked Witch, Elphaba, was a green-skinned student whose intelligence, curiosity and natural magical ability marked her as an
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