How did the Wicked Witch of the West become a Broadway and movie sensation? (2025)

Will the real Wicked Witch of the West please stand up?

Not the lady with the green face, black hat and broomstick, from the 1939 MGM movie "The Wizard of Oz."

Not the glamorous green diva from the hit Broadway musical "Wicked" — which was substantially based on that classic movie. And not her coming big-screen incarnation in the movie version of "Wicked," soon to arrive as an unprecedented (for a musical) two-part blockbuster: Part 1 on Nov. 22; part 2 a year later on Nov. 21, 2025.

Those Wicked Witches of the West have little in common with the one that L. Frank Baum created in his 1900 children's classic, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

Baum's witch wasn't green, for starters.

She carried, not a broomstick, but an umbrella. Her peaked hat — as depicted by artist W.W. Denslow in first "Oz" edition — was not black, but a whimsical thing with candy-stripes and goblin faces.

"In the book, the witch is not as scary," said Eric Shanower, artist, "Oz" expert, and co-founder of The Hungry Tiger Press, an independent publisher specializing in L. Frank Baum and Oz material.

"She's a little old dried-up woman wearing a yellow raincoat and pointed hat that's as tall as she is," Shanower said. "She has funny pigtails. She's a much more comic character."

She is afraid of the dark. She wears spats. She is, understandably, phobic about water — hence the raincoat and umbrella.

At times, she seems more scared of Dorothy than Dorothy is of her. "At first the Witch was tempted to run away from Dorothy," Baum tells us.

No nightmares for kids

None of this was an accident. Baum had a theory about children's stories. They should not be scary, he felt. He wanted to leave the "heartaches and nightmares" out.

No Red Riding Hood eaten by a wolf. No witch trying to shove Hansel and Gretel into the oven. Baum didn't want that kind of witch.

So he and Denslow tamed her. Not least by making her, in the illustrations, just Dorothy's size.

"It puts Dorothy and the Wicked Witch on the same plane," said David Maxine, theater historian and co-founder of The Hungry Tiger Press. "It makes them a little more equal. They are a little bit better matched, despite the Witch having magical powers."

Baum's Wicked Witch differs from her movie and Broadway descendants in other ways, too. She has only one eye, "yet that was as powerful as a telescope."

She is not the sister of the Wicked Witch of the East, as depicted in the 1939 movie. And, notably, she has no interactions with Glinda the Good Witch.

That's the entire basis for "Wicked," the show that reimagines Glinda (Kristin Chenoweth on Broadway, Ariana Grande in the coming films) and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch character (Idina Menzel on stage, Cynthia Erivoon screen) as rival sorority girls of Oz, driven in different directions by their need to be popular on the one hand, and their need to be authentic on the other.

The movie sets the tone

Actually, Baum didn't seem much interested in The Wicked Witch of the West. "She only appears in one chapter," Shanower said. "And she's not an important character after the first book. She never appears again."

She was not featured in any of Baum's 13 "Oz" sequels, or in the hit 1903 Broadway musical of "The Wizard of Oz," or the 1925 silent movie version starring Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man.

It was Margaret Hamilton's unforgettable performance, in the 1939 film, that made The Wicked Witch of the West a central Oz character. As she has remained, ever since.

"The Wiz," the funky 1970s retooling of "The Wizard," would be unthinkable without the witch Evillene, whose song "No Bad News" is a highlight of the show. And Hamilton's witch was the clear departure point for Gregory Maguire's 1995 book "Wicked," basis for the play and the upcoming "Wicked" movies. Maguire named her Elphaba — LFB — after "Oz's" creator, L. Frank Baum.

The now-classic 1939 Judy Garland movie musical re-imagined the Wicked Witch as a much more ferocious, scary and omnipresent character — one who makes her appearance early in the film, erupting into the Munchkin celebrations like the evil fairy in "Sleeping Beauty," and bedeviling Dorothy and her friends all the way down the Yellow Brick Road.

Why? Possibly it was because the witch in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" had been such a memorable villainess two years earlier, in Disney's 1937 animated hit. "I have a feeling it might have been a direct influence," Maxine said.

In fact, MGM's original idea had been to feature a sexy, slinky Wicked Witch, with beautiful Gale Sondergaard done up in a cowl, like the "Snow White" sorceress.

The actress, and the conception, were dropped. But the idea of making the witch the central threat to Dorothy remained. "As in 'Snow White,' the witch is a menace throughout the entire film," Maxine said.

Hissing the witch

Today, Margaret Hamilton's character is everyone's template for what a Wicked Witch is. But when "The Wizard of Oz" first came out in 1939, there were some who thought she was a false note. Too modern. Too colloquial. Too vigorous. Not the cackling old crone people remembered from The Brothers Grimm.

"I will rest my case...on one line of dialogue," said New Yorker critic Russell Maloney at the time. "The Wicked Witch snarls, 'You keep out of this!' Well, there it is. Either you believe witches talk like that, or you don't. I don't."

Another well-respected critic and filmmaker, Pare Lorentz, complained: "Almost a third of 'Oz' is given over to the evil witch chasing the little girl from Kansas all around the castle — a business which is produced as if the girl were a gangster and the witch and her cohorts a band of G-men."

But all this is, arguably, just the right characterization for an American witch, the counterpart to Miss Gulch back in Kansas — and appropriate, as well, to Baum's idea of a "modernized" fairy tale. In 1939, the age of Hitler and Mussolini, a hobbling old hag out of folklore was going to frighten no one. This witch was a Fuehrer.

"When the movie opened in August of 1939, that was almost the exact timing of when the brownshirts were marching into Austria," Maxine said.

What's not to love?

If adults had qualms about this feral Wicked Witch, kids loved her. At least, they loved to hate her. Children, as James Thurber pointed out, "like a lot of nightmare and at least a little heartache" in their stories, whatever Baum thought. And a new generation of Baby Boomers, seeing the "Wizard of Oz" movie year after year on TV, took the Wicked Witch to heart.

Among them was novelist Gregory Maguire, born 1954, who began to wonder what the witch's backstory might be. Why was she wicked? And while we're on the subject — didn't she have a just claim to those Ruby Slippers (Silver Shoes in the Baum book) that had belonged to her sister (not, in the Baum book)?

The result was "Wicked" — the 1995 book that became the 2003 hit Broadway musical. Which may now become, in its two-part screen adaptation, the start of a whole new "Oz" dynasty. If it succeeds, its take on "Oz" could eclipse MGM's in people's minds — just as the MGM film overshadowed the original Baum book.

"I'm certainly intrigued, though I have to admit I'm a little bit put off that they split it into two movies," Maxine said. "I don't think it needed it, any more than 'The Hobbit' needed it. They did it for financial reasons. But it's going to be interesting to see if it's going to be a new version of 'Oz' that supplants the MGM version."