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[0:00] Quincy Brown: I wasn't hard-pressed. I knew Stephen Schwartz's work. And after all, you know, I'm a gay man.

[0:12] Quincy Brown: I'm Quincy. And I'm Kevin. And this is Sentimental Men. We're here to talk and maybe scream about our favorite women in musical theater.

[0:21] Quincy Brown: Today, we are joined by the man, the myth, the legend, Gregory Maguire. Thank you so much for joining us on Sentimental Men today.

[0:33] Gregory Maguire: Well, you're very welcome. I was afraid you were going to say the man, the myth, the legend, the mistake. But here I am anyway, mistaken, booking or not. And I'm happy to meet you both and happy to be on Sentimental Men.

[0:47] Kevin Bianchi: Yes, Gregory, I feel like if this Sentimental Men podcast, you are, I feel like, the original Sentimental Men. This is all thanks to you, sir.

[0:55] Gregory Maguire: Well, you know, I am a sentimental man. And in various profiles of me over the last 25 years, there have been a number of people who have used headlines for stories called things like Mr. Wicked and The Man Behind the Curtain. And indeed, I do hold the characters in Wicked in any iteration in which they find themselves very close to my heart, indeed, because they are all flitches and specks of my own character, both good and bad, as much bad as good, I'm happy to say. But a sentimental man really can characterize me in any endeavor in which I do, I think. So here you are.

[1:39] Quincy Brown: Tell me how long you've been going on.

[1:45] Gregory Maguire: We started in 2020. And I don't think either of us could have foreseen this podcast going on for as long as it has. But cool things keep happening. And then the movie happened, and it's all perfect.

[1:57] Gregory Maguire: History keeps happening, and it gets greener and greener, doesn't it?

[2:02] Quincy Brown: I just had a random thought. I'm jumping ahead. You should do a stint as the wizard in Wicked on Broadway.

[2:07] Gregory Maguire: You know what, Quincy? You're absolutely right. And I used to sing, you know, professionally. Why has this not happened? This has not happened because I'm not a member of ASCAP or whatever it is.

[2:14] Kevin Bianchi: Equity.

[2:15] Gregory Maguire: Equity. And also because I don't have any real performing experiences, even though I used to sing in coffee houses. And, you know, I styled myself as somewhere between Paul Simon and Carly Simon.

[2:27] Quincy Brown: That sounds like the perfect wizard to me.

[2:42] Gregory Maguire: But I did sing a lot. And I have been in the public eye for a long time, especially in college classrooms and grade school classrooms and conferences. So I do know how to command a stage when I walk onto it. I have a good voice. I have a strong voice. I can sing. But I'm not the wizard. I'm the man really behind the curtain, behind the second curtain.

[3:06] Quincy Brown: I'll hold out hope. I think that can happen. I have to tell you, I'm jumping ahead now. I know you have your itinerary to follow, but I'm going to jump ahead.

[3:11] Gregory Maguire: You go for it.

[3:16] Gregory Maguire: I am hard. I'm hard pressed to follow rules because we just have this image of the man behind the curtain. And when I was in London 18 months ago during the filming of the Universal Studios Wicked Part One, the week that I was there was the week that they were filming the Ozdust Ballroom scene, arguably the most important scene in the movie and possibly the most moving scene in the movie too. And I was behind the curtain. I was sitting in a corner of the soundstage of the studio looking at a monitor, the way I'm looking at a monitor looking at you today, same monitor that John M. Chu was seeing on his machinery when he was, you know, in the actual room opposite the actresses and the dancers. And I saw, I got a three and a half day tour of what it means to be a film actor, because I saw those two women go through their paces over and over and over again, trying different things, doing it so that a different camera could get a reaction shot.

[4:36] Gregory Maguire: And as I live and breathe, I will testify at the Supreme Court that there was no glycerin drop involved in Cynthia Erivo's eye or in Ariana's. Nobody rushed up to prep or prime, pump. Those women were so deeply engaged in what was happening in that scene that I felt horrible. I felt terrible. I wanted to crash through the kind of molded plastic paper, whatever it is, walls that constructed the Ozdust Ballroom set and grab the two women by their elbows and hustle them up the stairs and out of that dangerous, dangerous place. I was so ashamed of having brought them to a week in which they would have to suffer so in this story. I could hardly bear it. So there I am, both the man behind the curtain and the sentimental man, because my heart was breaking watching them do that over and over again.

[5:41] Kevin Bianchi: Well, no, it's really interesting to hear that because we talked to both Ariana and Cynthia, and they both mentioned filming that scene and how difficult and emotional it was for them. And it felt like there was such mystique. Prior to seeing the movie, I was like, God, everyone is talking about this scene as if it was like the most intense thing ever. And then you see it and you understand why. And to see it over and over again. And I also had a great chat with Jonathan Bailey afterwards. I did not meet Cynthia until after the scene was done because once I saw what she was doing, I thought it isn't fair to interrupt her. I had met Ari, but I thought it isn't fair to interrupt her in her work mode. She is really focusing and I will wait till this is done before I am presented. But I did get to sit down on a couch in the Ozdust Ballroom with Jonathan Bailey. Who wouldn't want to do that?

[6:38] Gregory Maguire: Wow. I've had that dream. And he is so affable and so sweet. And all those three people are just exactly what they seem to be in the movies. At least they were to me. But we talked for about half an hour and I asked him some questions because they took a lot more reaction shots of Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero than they were able to use in the already very long film. But some of them were absolutely astoundingly complex. And I thought, how can you funnel curiosity, openness, guardedness, attention, keenness of perception, all in your face at the same time? How can you do that? That alone, no words, no movement, just his expression was so brilliant. And I asked him, how did you do it? He said, well, it's called acting. And I said, well, it's more than that. You must have had a strategy because I was watching you and you were thinking about something. You were leaning into something that you had conceived ahead. What was it? And he told me.

[7:51] Quincy Brown: Now, do you have any questions for me?

[7:56] Gregory Maguire: What was it?

[7:57] Quincy Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Tell us.

[8:00] Gregory Maguire: I can't. I can't. He didn't say, he didn't say, this is Republic. And he said, he kind of leaned in. He said, this is how I did it. This is what I did. And I said, wow. But he didn't say, you can go.

[8:11] Kevin Bianchi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

[8:12] Gregory Maguire: But the fact is that my real point is the amount of intelligence and skill and talent that are put into that scene, which I think is only about four minutes out of the movie, but it took three and a half days to film the part that I saw. And, oh my God, I almost needed a walker to get out of the soundstage. I was so hobbled by grief and by being moved, by being sentimental.

[8:47] Quincy Brown: We've said a couple of times how, as fans of the show, this movie felt like it was in such safe hands as people who hold the show very, very close to our hearts. And I would imagine, at least I hope, that as the man who built all of this, it felt like it was in safe hands to you as well.

[9:10] Gregory Maguire: Well, I'll tell you, yes, once it was done, while it was happening, I mean, I had, I didn't know much about Cynthia. I knew how impressed with her everybody was, but I had never seen her live. And I had only seen clips of her singing a couple of times. I wasn't sure how her voice has some Ella Fitzgerald in it. It has some smoothness, some velouté in it. And I wasn't sure how that would read as Elphaba's singing voice. But I knew she was constantly professional and highly regarded by everybody who ever met her or heard of her. So I was certainly willing to take a chance the way I was with Idina Menzel because I hadn't known her, or Kristen for that matter, 25 years ago. And Ari, I knew a little bit more of, but I wasn't sure how her acting chops would be. I wasn't sure if she would be coming in as a glam, you know, teen star, diva.

[10:14] Kevin Bianchi: Yeah.

[10:15] Gregory Maguire: Yeah. And so I was cautiously optimistic. And I'll tell you, did you, either of you happen to be at the, there was a New York preview of the film at the end of October for the Wicked Theatre community. It was the first time I saw the film. I hadn't read the script, hadn't asked to read the script. It had not been offered me either. And I did go to the, I did go to London and I did, it was walked through an upstairs chamber where a lot of the art design was posted to show people, you know, what, so I knew kind of what Shiz might look like. I knew a little bit like of what the Munchkin land, at least the drawings of what it was going to look like. It was all fabulous. Didn't necessarily conform with what I had imagined, but that didn't matter.

That's not the point. So I went to the opening and the preview in late October. My husband did not join me. We live in, we live in Massachusetts. I said, do you want to come and see, you know, they're going to have an invitation for two. He passed up seeing the Wicked movie? And he did, he said, well, aren't you dragging me to LA in three weeks? I said, well, yes, I am. He said, well, I'll see you then. And I said, okay, all right. But you know, he's, that's him. I've been married to him for over 20 years. And so I said, well, I'm going to go and I'll ask somebody in New York. I'll ask a friend to join me because I don't want to go alone. So I asked a good friend who's actually also one of my lawyers.

I said, if you're going to, if you can make it to New York, why don't you come? So we went and this is, this is true. We sat down and I was so terrified that it would be cheesy or, or slavish or, or the tonal register wouldn't, wouldn't seem appropriate to me that I, the credits started to run. I mean, the logo, the universal logo in sepia and gray. And I thought the audience, the Broadway audience clapped for everything the way they would if we weren't live. It was really funny after every musical number, there's lots of kids. That was terrific. But I, I think I grabbed my lawyer's hand as the credit started to roll. And I think I held onto it for two hours and 40 minutes. And when we came out, he said, well, my hand is pretty sweaty.

[13:11] Gregory Maguire: Well, that was, that was amazing. It's a masterpiece. Don't you think? And I said, I don't know. The only thing I'm sure of is I'm still alive. You know, I did not die in the last two hours and 40 minutes. I really didn't know what I thought about it. It was just too overwhelming. It was almost like being in, well, if I, if I call it a train crash, it sounds like a disaster. I don't mean a train crash. I mean, like in fireworks or something. It would work inside helium balloons. I mean, it just was, it was so overwhelming that I could hardly take it all in. It wasn't until I saw it the second time in Los Angeles with my husband and one of our kids in tow that I was able to relax. And yes, I knew I could live through it. I'd lived through it. I was still there. And the second time, I wouldn't say I bawled my eyes out, but I, I had a lot of emotional reaction to it the second time.

[14:10] Quincy Brown: Let's rewind because I imagine you had a similar experience seeing the stage production for the first time.

[14:17] Gregory Maguire: I had a little bit more awareness of what was going to happen in the stage play. I had gone to something I always called an oratorio performance of the, of one of the first drafts where there were 18 people standing on bleachers, Kristen, you know, somebody other than Joel Gray playing the wizard. I don't think it was Robert Morse, but I don't remember who it was. And there was a kind of, there was a rehearsal pianist and there was a narrator, you know, who said scene, us, you know, and begin. And I don't know if you've ever been to one of those. I think I've heard the audios of these workshops. When people are on stage, they're standing. And if they leave the stage, if they go off stage, they sit down and you can, you can think, so if there's only one or two people left standing, you know, they're on stage alone, even though they're surrounded by a mob of people in chairs.

You get that convention about how that works within about 10 seconds. I had never come across that before. It was very moving. They sang all the songs. They went through all the plot. I had not read the plot. I had, I had advised Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holtz about the pronunciation of everybody's name, because at first we're saying Elphaba, like from Duluth. You know, she's not, it's Elphaba.

[15:49] Quincy Brown: So you didn't know going in that the plot was going to differ so drastically from the novel?

[15:49] Gregory Maguire: No, I knew it would differ somewhat. And I'd given them permission to do what they needed to do to make it a viable play. Gotcha.

[15:56] Quincy Brown: So you didn't have any feelings about it being different?

[16:01] Gregory Maguire: Well, no, that's, that's not true, Quincy. I had lots of feelings about it, but I had given them permission. And I'm a man of my word. So,

[16:09] Kevin Bianchi: Interesting.

[16:10] Gregory Maguire: You know, I did not quibble. I didn't cavil. I didn't carp. I didn't complain. I didn't, any other word that begins with a C sound, about what they had done. But when they got to the last three minutes of the play, where Elphaba pops up out of a trap door,

[16:35] Quincy Brown: Yeah.

[16:35] Gregory Maguire: I did take a gasp in.

[16:39] Quincy Brown: I can imagine.

[16:41] Gregory Maguire: The man who was sitting next to me gripped my hand, my forearm so hard that, that skin was broken and blood was shed. And that I had, and I felt initially, I'm honest, I'm very honest, even if sentimental. I felt initially that there'd been a kind of betrayal. Because the song before that, For Good, especially the bridge, when Elphaba sings, and just to clear the air, ask forgiveness. I started to cry at that because I had never seen a moment in musical theater in which even the concept of forgiveness was even mentioned as an important transactional moment between people and among people. I'm sure there are places, but for me, it was very rare. And for me, it was one of the central motifs of the second half of my novel, Elphaba's forgiveness.

And I thought that was brilliant. And then to have Elphaba live, I felt it was kind of, at the time, I felt it was kind of a bait and switch. And I thought it was kind of a cheat. And at the last minute, it sort of Disney-fied the story, which wasn't my novel, a tragedy. What is a tragedy? A tragedy is when somebody with great promises cut down on their prime and cannot continue the work for which they have labored their whole lives to be ready to do. So I wasn't really happy. But of course, I smiled and said, thank you. It's wonderful. Thank you. I did write a letter to the producers and to Stephen and Winnie when I got back to Boston. I don't think the letter was ever delivered to Stephen and Winnie.

When I went back a couple of years later in California, I had no idea about... I knew how Kristen could sing and I knew how Idina could sing by then. But I had no idea about costume setting, bells and whistles, especially the cherry pick flight or the dragon. I mean, none of it I knew about. Everything was astounding. And the first week in San Francisco, I saw the play five times because I wasn't sure it was ever going to get to New York. And I just wanted to be able to remember it for the rest of my life. And the first time, there are two great moments of the first time I'd ever played in front of a paying audience. Two great moments for me. One is that after Glinda comes down in her bubble and the first scene happens and it's a mix of being comic and serious.

I thought, well, this is going to be an interesting mood to hold for a whole evening, comic and serious. I think I'm going to be able to do that. Is it going to trespass into parody? I hope it doesn't, etc. But then the doors in the backstage open and Idina Menzel comes out in her green skin paint. And that first night, the reception by the San Francisco audience, I swear, because this was before she was Elphaba and before she was Elsa and, you know, Broadway aficionados knew her as Maureen in Rent, but she wasn't as well known as she became. When she came onto the stage, of course, it's just practice to welcome the lead actress particularly, all the leads, but the lead actress particularly.

When she went to the stage, she was greeted with such a roar of approval that I have to say, I felt it was as much for the Wicked Witch of the West that she was back as it was for Idina Menzel as the star. She started singing, it was for Idina all the rest of the night. But the first, before she'd begun the first notes of The Wizard and I, she was being greeted because people in San Francisco knew my book. San Francisco's a gay town. It had been out for eight years and had sold more than half a million copies. It was, you know, a presence in San Francisco. And they were glad to see her and they welcomed her back and they were on her side before she uttered a note to sing. So that was one response.

Second response the first night on the other end of the evening when she pops out of the trap door. And the first time she does that in front of a public audience, there were boos. There were, you know, I'm not saying the whole room booed, but there were more than one. There was an affable, I mean, not affable, there was a perceptible reaction, not unlike the one I had had two years earlier in the thing. And so I thought, hmm, are people listening to that? I kept coming back though. By the end of the first week, the boos had died down and they weren't happening anymore. And I had changed my mind too. I had decided that even though I still think of the story as a tragedy, in fact, all the pertinent reasons we consider something a tragedy, which is failure, early demise, unfulfillment of potential, they are all present in Wicked the Musical on stage.

They just take a different guise. When Elphaba and Glinda say goodbye to each other, that's the central emotional relationship for both of those people. And the fact that Elphaba is exiled rather than dead, doesn't change how separate she is from everybody in her life before that moment, except for Fiyero. And we come out of the theater with a lump in our throat. And we come out of our theater, I think, with the same sorts of emotional reactions that we have as people who closed the 406-page book. Life is short. Cherishing who we will is essential. And what we choose to do with our time fucking matters. All those three messages come through in the play. And they were messages that I planted there in the book.

So I decided it was a transliteration and a translation and not an abomination. And we arrived at the same landing zone in both book and in the show. And I'm sure the same will be true in the movie part two.

[23:39] Quincy Brown: Wow. Talk to us about the Broadway. So San Francisco happens. And then you get word that you're moving to Broadway. What was that experience like? Because Wicked didn't open to rave reviews. I think it's fair to say it opened to mixed reviews. But then seeing it go on through the Tony Awards and become the hit that it is. When do you think you kind of settled in and clicked that this show was going to be around for a while? Because that point was also a second life for your novel as well, right?

[24:01] Gregory Maguire: Oh, absolutely. Well, and you know, and now it's had a third life with the film. The novel is, I'll go back to your question, Quincy. The novel in December hit number one on the New York Times Best Seller list 30 years after it was published. It had been in the Best Seller before, but not at number one. So when I took my family and a great many friends to see the show the night before its formal Broadway opening with The Red Carpet, I filled up half the theater, you know, orchestra seats with about 120 cousins and siblings and stuff. And when it was over, one of my younger brothers who was sitting in front of me turned around and he said, I only have one word for you. And I said, what? And he said, retired.

And, you know, it was quite clear that even that first night on Broadway, that it didn't, it wasn't going to matter. I didn't anticipate it would go on to be the fourth longest running play in Broadway history. But I did think this is going to survive whatever slings and arrows are sent its way. This is going to survive it. And how long it survives it, how hobbled it is by critics' disapproval because it takes an American sacred cow and decides it's fair game to make adjustments to the understanding about it. Well, we're going to survive this because the audience reaction was so patently rapturous. And that wasn't just because it was just about to open. It was because it was good enough to be rapturous about.

[26:00] Quincy Brown: What can you tell us about the non-musical movies that were supposed to happen before this musical adaptation?

[26:06] Gregory Maguire: And can I add to that question is then what about a musical adaptation felt good to you, like felt right to you as it took shape?

[26:21] Gregory Maguire: Yeah. When Stephen, you know, first the book was published in 1995. By late 1995, I had multiple movie offers and my agent had to get a Hollywood contact and we were talking to four or five different people and fielding offers. It was not, as you know, it was not thought of as a musical film at the beginning. And the first drafts that I saw in the first couple of years, 96, 97, were not to my personal liking. They were skewing the story more juvenile. There was some degree of pratfall and a bit of scad, too much scatology for my personal liking. But I had three adopted children, you know, and I was thinking, well, you know, if I can earn anything out of this project and pay off my mortgage, then it will all be worth it, even if they make a film that I don't really admire.

That's the business. I'm lucky in the running. When Stephen Schwartz discovered that nobody at Universal really knew what to do with this script, and this was about a year and a half before the arrival of Harry Potter and before the arrival of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, you know, big films. So nobody really knew that it was big money to be had in fantasy cinema. Or as big money as was proven in the next few years. So Universal was a little skittish about putting a literal $100 million in a movie that mostly featured women and magic. And Stephen Schwartz heard that Universal was on the fence about investing and moving forward. And he went to Mark Platt, this part is sort of fairly well known, and said, the reason you can't get a good script is because ever since 1939, everybody knows people that sing.

And so I would like to turn it into a play first, and then you can film it when you're ready. And Mark said, fine, but you have to talk to Gregory because he holds all the rights. And the purchase price of a novel to be made into a movie is higher than the purchase price of a novel to be turned into a play. I think the play advance was 4% of what would have been made if it had been made directly into a movie. You know, and money's important when you're a freelance artist. It's actually important all the time.

[29:05] Quincy Brown: Is it fair to say the long game business-wise of adapting into a Broadway musical that hits outweighs adapting it into a movie?

[29:11] Gregory Maguire: It depends on whether, on if it runs 22 years or not. Yeah, short term, if it closed in six months, it would have been a great experience. I would have been happy for it. But as it began to be part of popular culture, then yes, the long-term benefit certainly outweighed and continues to outweigh what would have been paid for me as a one-time payout. You got that 96% back.

[29:40] Gregory Maguire: Well, I'm not going to answer that question without my lawyer. But for one thing, you see the book on the bestseller list. A book hits the bestseller list, and that can be seven figures in one month if you're lucky. Of course, bestsellers have changed a lot in the last 30 years. You can get on the bestseller list selling a lot fewer books than you used to be able to because people are not buying as many books across the board. So Stephen Schwartz had to talk me into walking away from the 96% of income that I would have used to buy this house from the bank. He did so by telling me things about the story that he thought made it pertinent to be developed as a musical. One of them was, he said, you have written a kind of 19th-century pre-Freudian novel where there are no jargony terms from the therapist's office to explain why somebody is the way that they are.

There's no electro complex. There's no daddy issues. These are 19th-century people struggling with high moral questions the way they do in Dickens and the way they do in George Eliot and the way they do in Dostoevsky, etc. And that means that singing can present to your audience the moral conundrums in a very moving and in the face kind of way that a film without music would have a very hard time doing. It's not that it can't be done, but with all the bells and whistles around your story, it'll be hard to be that convincing.

[31:28] Gregory Maguire: That was pretty pervasive. I wasn't hard pressed. I knew Stephen Schwartz's work. And after all, I'm a gay man. I thought it.

[31:45] Gregory Maguire: I love pivoting.

[31:59] Gregory Maguire: So he got a little nervous. We were walking in some fields around my husband's, my now husband's family farm in Central Connecticut. And he said, I'm so convinced that I'm going to be persuasive to you that I will admit that I've already written the first song. Now he says that wasn't true, but that's how I remember it. So that's how I'm telling it. Maybe he just said, I've already conceived of the first song. But he said, the first song is going to be No One Mourns the Wicked. You know, the witch is just going to have died. Glinda is going to be up in a tower at the edge of the stage, he said, not the bubble, but a tower. And she's going to be in grief while the citizens of Oz sing No One Mourns the Wicked.

And with those five words, he basically clinched the deal for me, because he persuaded me that he understood I was writing a kind of serious intellectual inquiry about what we mean when we use words like evil and wicked, and how we use that concept to better ourselves and belittle others. That's what the book was written for. That was very much why I harnessed our old childhood favorite, The Wizard of Oz, for my own nefarious needs. I hijacked it so that I could tell an intellectual story in a popular guise. And of the 7 million copies of the book sold, maybe, you know, maybe 25,000 have been read, who knows. But whoever managed to read it may not have realized that they were reading an intellectual novel, because I gussied it up in the window trappings of L. Frank Baum and 1939 MGM.

[33:43] Quincy Brown: Did you think the movie would take this long?

[33:45] Gregory Maguire: No, no. Originally, they said, you know, we'll run this five to seven years, and then make a movie, if we can get that much time out of it. And then they said, it's going to run 10 years. And then at one point, David Stone, one of the other producers, with a Broadway connection, called me up about five years in and said, this is going to run 20 years. I don't know when it's going to be a movie. It'll be a movie eventually. Maybe not in your lifetime. To be fair, he didn't say that, but that was the implication.

[34:24] Quincy Brown: Okay, so now moving on to this new book you're releasing. Talk to us about that.

[34:27] Gregory Maguire: Oh, yes, yes. Yes, the new book is called Elfie. And the subtitle is A Wicked Childhood, which you theater nerds will know is a quote from The Sound of Music. I wanted to reference The Sound of Music somewhere. Perhaps I had a wicked childhood.

[34:48] Quincy Brown: See, you say you're not a theater person. You're a theater person.

[34:50] Gregory Maguire: Oh, I am. When I submitted the book to Harper in '94, my agent did, it came back to me saying, this is great. We love it. We want to publish it. Here's what we'll pay you. But it is 7% to 10% too long. It's a massive book, and you have to trim it. And mostly the way I trimmed it, like if you bring an oboissan tapestry to the castle in the north of Scotland, you say, here's your carpet. And the queen says, oh, well, it was a little cold. So we had to put some plaster on the walls and build them in a little bit and put in some piping. So actually the carpet's too large for the space now. You're going to have to bring it down. Well, the oboissan tapestry makers did not come up with pinky shears and cut off one edge of the carpet so it fit.

What they would have to do is go over the entire piece and pull out one thread at a time while making sure that everything that had been articulated not only stayed in the carpet but stayed proportionally in the same relationship to what had been originally presented. So that's what I had to do. And I lost most of the 5% to 7% by trimming paragraphs and by trimming adjectives and adverbs. But there were one or two places where I could actually trim a couple of scenes because I was told or I was advised by one of my editors that they didn't add enough to get in the way of the forward movement of the story. And two of them were of Elphaba as a child. One was when she was about seven and one was when she was about 12.

And they said, you know, all the front matter about how Oz is arranged geographically, politically, spiritually, et cetera, all that is essential because it undergirds the entire rest of the novel. However, we have to get Elphaba and Galinda at school faster. So see, you know, the most of the cutting you need to do is in the first 70 pages. So I brought the first 70 pages down to about the first 50 pages. And even at that now, I probably could have done more because I'm more skilled at that kind of thing. But I took out the scenes where Elphaba was seven and where she was 12. Why seven and 12? Why had I written them? Because when you're seven, you go through a kind of biological change. The biological changes in your brain.

And you become capable of moral evaluations at the age of seven. You become capable not just of saying, am I safe? Am I okay? But what's going on here? What's the right thing? What's right and wrong here? All the major religions and educational schemes suggest that a child's brain begins to be able to process right and wrong at about the age of seven. Therefore, it begins to be a little bit culpable. If they can process it, then they can make choices and they know what their choices are. When we're 12 or 13, the second big change happens, which is adolescence and prepubescence. And the fact that hormones then begin to screw up with whatever we knew so confidently for the previous seven years.

So that's why I had scenes of Elphaba at those two ages, because I thought they were important in order to understand how she got to be who she was at the time she got to college. But those scenes hit the cutting room floor, if you want to use that film metaphor for a novel. And I never forgot them. I didn't throw them out. I kind of snipped them and put them in a glass of Alka-Seltzer and said, just wait and attend to yourself. I'll be back. And 28 years later, I thought, I didn't think, as I've been accused of, I didn't think, oh, I can make some real moolah by hopping on the bandwagon of the movie. It wasn't that. What's happened is I am 30 years older than I was when I published Wicked. And Wicked, the story that I wrote, in all its iterations, has not finished evolving.

And it is going to outlast me. It is going to be, maybe it won't have the effect of an MGM film, 1939, getting into all our consciousnesses. But it is definitely a property that has its own established history now. And I'm just part of its origins. It is, you know, you are the origin. But I don't own it anymore. You know, it's evolving. It's like a child evolves. It's evolving too. And that's fine. But I'm going to die at one point. So I think somebody eventually is going to say, you know, there's a lot we don't know about Elphaba. What happened between the time she was two and when she got to Shiz? We can make hay of that. Let's go back and let's do young Elphaba, like young Frankenstein and young Sherlock Holmes.

And I thought that's probably going to be all fine and good if my heirs and assigns approve it. But why don't I do it first? Because after all, she does this in my head more vividly, I believe, than she does in anybody else's. So that's why Elphie comes now. It isn't piggybacking on, you know, a $100 million advertising budget for the movie. I hope that doesn't hurt.

[40:25] Kevin Bianchi: And also, what a perfect time because the movie features young Elphaba.

[40:28] Gregory Maguire: Yeah, yes.

[40:29] Gregory Maguire: In such a big way. Yeah.

[40:31] Gregory Maguire: That I didn't know, of course, because I hadn't seen the script. I didn't know that little scene and the return toward the end. Now I'm looking at the clock. As I said, I talk too much. We got to wrap up.

[40:45] Quincy Brown: I have a 10 o'clock that I need to get ready for.

[40:50] Kevin Bianchi: Okay.

[40:51] Quincy Brown: So is there any final question? And I'm sorry for having, you know, as I said, spilled over.

[40:55] Kevin Bianchi: I would love to ask you, I guess, this character, the role of Elphaba, our podcast started kind of devoted to breaking Elphaba down scene by scene from the musical. And this character has been with you for more than half your career at this point. So what is it about her that stays exciting to keep exploring and keep expanding her life, her presence in your work?

[41:28] Gregory Maguire: Well, you know that scene, it's a good question, Kevin. You know that scene in the movie at the bridge of The Wizard and I when she walks into that outdoor area and there's mirrors and colored glass and she looks at herself in the mirror and it's the line about if I should de-greenify you. And for a minute, she's actually de-greenified and she's Cynthia Erivo in her natural skin tone. And then it comes back to her. I had to see that scene like three times before I was sure I was seeing what I...

[42:02] Gregory Maguire: I'm colorblind. So I'm still just trusting that that's what happens. It's very cool and it's very subtle. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure I was perceiving it right, or if it's just, I thought that would be cool. But my point is that that scene about Elphaba looking at herself in the mirror, well, that's really me. I look at myself in the mirror and I see Elphaba. I see her complexity. I see her moral hesitations. I see her stubborn and slightly blinkered opinions and her simplifications. I see her power and her passion and the moral challenge she has despite her shortcomings to try to do something for the world. I see that in Elphaba and I see it in myself. So since I never fail even to this day to try to understand who I am today, as opposed to who I was yesterday, every time I look at Elphaba, I feel she's evolving too.

And so that's why I could go back and see her. And she has shown up in glimpses that are unexplained in some of the following books after Wicked. Even in the pages of the Grimmery at some point when her granddaughter is looking through it in one of the, I think it's the Oracle of Marikor, maybe the Witch of Marikor, that she's still there. She's still in the world. She may not be in a trap door. She may not even be alive. She may be in memory, but she's potent and she has agency. And therefore, anybody who has agency, you have to keep tracking. Whether it's yourself or somebody else, keep tracking the people with agency because it matters. It matters to figure out what you should do next and what somebody else is going to do next. And that includes people with agency who are not elected officials.

[44:03] Kevin Bianchi: Mm-hmm. Yep.

[44:04] Quincy Brown: On that note, I have just enough time to go brush my teeth and get a second coffee. Thank you so much for joining us. This was really incredible.

[44:12] Gregory Maguire: It was so much fun. I'm really grateful and I'm sorry for having to go on, but you can probably scale this down. It's like take out 7% to 10% of you.

[44:22] Kevin Bianchi: I'll channel you.

[44:25] Quincy Brown: We'll cut the parts you talked about your childhood.

[44:27] Gregory Maguire: Slap it on the wall of a castle.

[44:33] Quincy Brown: Thank you, Gregory. It was such a pleasure meeting you.

[44:35] Gregory Maguire: Okay. Take care.

[44:36] Gregory Maguire: Good luck to you.

[44:37] Quincy Brown: Thank you.

[44:37] Kevin Bianchi: Thank you. Bye.

[44:57] Quincy Brown: Or you can email us at sentmenpod at gmail.com. Till next time, I'm Quincy.

[45:04] Kevin Bianchi: And I'm Kevin.