Planned for some time, movement appears to finally be underway on a big screen version of the hit Broadway musical Wicked. Vulture spoke with the show’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, who says that the adaptation is currently experiencing some forward momentum.
“We’re starting to do some work on it,” he tells the outlet. “We’ve actually started gearing up on it a little bit… I don’t know exactly how many years away it is.”
The musical, originally based on the novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, retells L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.
“What are we going to change?” Schwartz continues. “What are we going to keep? How do you use a whole new language and medium to tell the story? [We can] really look at it again and say, ‘Oh, we can do this, and we’ve always wanted to do that and we couldn’t onstage, but we can in a movie.’ We’re actually having a blast.”
Premiering in 2003, the stage version, which originally starred Frozen‘s Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth (“Pushing Daisies”) and Joel Grey (Cabaret), continues to perform internationally.
