Even if you’ve still not seen Wicked, you’re probably aware that it reframes the classic story of The Wizard Of Oz from the perspective of the character most of us know as the “Wicked Witch Of The West”.
Director Jon M Chu made the decision to split the award-winning Broadway musical in two when it came to the movie adaptation, the first half of which ends shortly before the events of The Wizard Of Oz get going.
It stands to reason, then, that people might be wondering whether the iconic character Dorothy Gale will be putting in an appearance in the sequel.
While Dorothy famously doesn’t appear in the original stage show (although she is repeatedly referred to off stage), the next film will presumably flesh out the story, meaning the character could be seen after all.
Part Two has already been filmed, and is slated for release this time next year, with speculation now rife that Matilda star Alisha Weir could put in a small appearance as Dorothy.
So… what’s the real story?
“In the show, Dorothy is around,” Jon recently told Variety. “They have to intersect, and you can only tease it so much.
“I won’t say whether she’s a character, necessarily, in movie two. There’s a part of me that wants everyone’s Dorothy to be the whatever Dorothy they want. And yet, there is interaction and some crossover. So I’ll leave that up to Part Two.”
He added: “The Wizard of Oz is potentially a dream. It’s a world where there are no real stakes.
“Knowing that Elphaba and Glinda live in a world of real stakes, we had to reestablish with the audience that this was real. So we dropped everyone into the crime scene, maybe the most famous crime scene ever in cinema and literature, of the iconic hat in the puddle.
“There are all these little clues before we see the full landscape of Oz. It’s this living, breathing place with real cultures, so we immediately establish this is not a dream world. After we go somewhere over the rainbow, we see that those four iconic characters exist in this real world. And we will revisit those characters in movie two.”
Dorothy was, of course, played by Judy Garland in the much-loved 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz, with Fairuza Balk revisiting the character in the unofficial sequel Return To Oz.
In the 1978 movie musical The Wiz, Diana Ross played Dorothy, while Ashanti also put a new spin on the character in the oft-forgotten TV special The Muppets’ Wizard Of Oz.
