The “war on woke” has a new target and her name is the Wicked Witch of the West. If you’re a fan of the musical Wicked, you’ll also know her as Elphaba, the moniker imagined by Gregory Maguire in his 1995 prequel to L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As played by Margaret Hamilton in the 1939 movie, she was the nemesis of Judy Garland’s Dorothy; as played this year by the musical theatre star Cynthia Erivo, she has conservative men across Britain and America bursting their blood vessels.

Since Maguire came up with his novel – an extravagant piece of fan-fiction that suggests this “witch” might simply have been misunderstood – it has been reinterpreted as a stage musical and now as a movie in two parts. Wicked’s target market consists of teenage girls who see themselves in this backstory for Elphaba and her college-friend-turned-rival, Glinda the Good Witch. In the 21 years since Stephen Schwartz’s adaptation opened on Broadway, the show has been a cult phenomenon among young musical fans, blithely ignored by everyone else. Now the screen version has brought into mainstream conversation and the land of Oz has become a battleground in America’s culture war.

As a musical, Wicked is harmless to the point of vapid. Winnie Holzman’s storyline for the show is a more anodyne affair than Maguire’s hallucinatory fever dream of a book, which included bestiality and orgies. It features Elphaba as a talented girl arriving at a magical college, only to be bullied by Glinda and a clique of rosy-cheeked sycophants because she happens to have been born with green skin. This is Mean Girls meets Hogwarts. It has two songs you’ll remember: Popular, in which Glinda reveals the secrets of social success, and Defying Gravity, in which Elphaba vows to pursue excellence and fight prejudice. Wicked is sweet and fun and ultimately forgettable.

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