Spoilers for Wicked, the 20-plus-year-old Broadway musical, as well as Wicked: For Good, ahead.
Do you accept Jonathan Bailey as your Lord and Savior? Go see Wicked: For Good, and you just might. The follow-up to last year’s Wicked is an adaptation of the Broadway musical’s second act, which ostensibly takes place concurrent to the events of The Wizard of Oz. But there is another famous fable happening right under our noses in Wicked: For Good, and that is a steamy, Technicolor Passion of the Christ.
You need to understand that when Wicked first came out in 2003, sympathetic villain origin stories were still a novelty and not an endless assault on studio-blockbuster slates. The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch as school chums? With sexual tension? It was groundbreaking. Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics make hay (Fiyero spoiler alert) out of teasing the characters’ infamous destinies using wordplay and euphemisms. Elphaba gets a big Disney-ish “I want” song, where every hopeful lyric is a sad-in-hindsight double entendre (“a celebration throughout Oz that’s all to do with me,” “so happy I could melt,” “when people see me they will scream,” you get the idea). The effect is delicious irony, capitalizing on the audience’s familiarity with The Wizard of Oz. But of all the Wizard of Oz character origin stories in Wicked, it’s Fiyero’s that strikes me as the most beautifully bonkers — namely because it ends up as sort of a Christ allegory.
If you’ve never seen the stage show or haven’t yet put together the pieces (and spoiler-y marketing materials): By the end of Wicked, hunky romantic lead Fiyero is turned into one of the least sexy magical creatures imaginable, the Scarecrow. The twist is foreshadowed by simply making Fiyero a himbo and introducing the character with a whole song about being “brainless.” It’s foreshadowed further in the first Wicked film when Jonathan Bailey does some extremely gangly, noodly choreography in “Dancing Through Life.” But the mechanics of how this man transforms into a Scarecrow are revealed throughout Wicked like a very unlikely, probably sacrilegious, Ozian passion play.
It begins when Fiyero, now wiser and more principled than he was in Act One, sacrifices himself so that Elphaba can live. He goes about it in a not-so-Christlike manner, holding Glinda (his fiancée) at gunpoint as a temporary hostage so that Oz’s guards will free Elphaba, but the effect is the same. He submits himself to be arrested and taken away by the guards, and then he is then literally strung up on a cross, tortured, and left to die. The degree of physical torture is laid out pretty clearly in Elphaba’s song “No Good Deed,” where she tries to save him via witch magic: “Let his flesh not be torn / Let his blood leave no stain / Though they beat him, let him feel no pain / Let his bones never break / and however you try to destroy him / let him never die.”
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If her spell worked as intended, the passion play would end there; Fiyero’s fleshy vessel has to suffer for his sacrifice to take (sorry for typing that sentence). Luckily for the theological soundness of my argument, we know that Fiyero does get his shit rocked before his resurrection. In the movie, we see black-and-white imagery of him being beaten by the guards to the point of death while Elphaba performs her incantation. When she sings the line, “Since I cannot succeed, Fiyero, saving you,” we see him in black-and-white again looking quite dead and Christlike on the cross.
Later, a scrap of Fiyero’s jacket is passed around among characters and held with delicate reverence, like an emerald-green Shroud of Turin, with Glinda taking it to mean that he has died — if not for all of Oz’s sins, then at least for Elphaba’s no-good deeds. Toward the end of the film, Fiyero emerges from a trapdoor, as though from a tomb, resurrected. He now has immortal life (“let him never die”) as a very uncanny and disturbing scarecrow, crowned by a golden wheat halo. His body has been turned to straw, which is technically just dried wheat stalks, which is basically one step removed from bread, which means Fiyero underwent transubstantiation. Frankly, the only difference I can think of between him and Jesus is that Fiyero’s girlfriend fulfills the God/father role in this version of the Passion. And that Fiyero is canonically kind of stupid. Both of these things are upgrades, I think!
I’m not sure if the Jesus-y resonances here are entirely a coincidence. Gregory Maguire, who wrote the 1995 novel that the musical is based on, is gay and a practicing Catholic. Composer Stephen Schwartz’s very first musical, decades before Wicked, was Godspell, a musical about the life of Jesus (much like me writing this blog, Schwartz is a Jewish guy who was clearly fascinated by, but also real loosey-goosey with, Jesus stuff). Maybe the allegory was intentional, or maybe it was subconscious, but either way, I celebrate Jonathan Bailey’s himbo scarecrow deity.
