So I recently saw Wicked.¹ And by “recently saw” I mean watched at the movie theatre, then bought the second it was available, then watched several more times. I was a huge Oz fan as a kid, and I was also and still very much am a massive musical theatre geek. So look, this movie had a very strong shot with me. Musical theatre shows don’t always make the leap well to film, but director Jon M. Chu did a fabulous job with Schwartz and Holzman’s show. (I had high hopes because he also did a fabulous job with Miranda and Hudes’s In the Heights.²) Anyway, the movie got me thinking about why I think musical theatre and fantasy are two great tastes that taste so great together.

One thing I love about theatre in general is that the audience is very much asked to participate in it. You place two chairs side by side, and now you have a car. 3-D CGI doesn’t work on the stage (yet), and I think that’s a key part of what’s often called the magic of the theatre. A couple hundred people in a room together, willing to imagine two chairs are an automobile. That’s a sort of communal, sitting-around-the-campfire magic that we don’t always have day-to-day in our modern world.

You make the same imaginative leap with musicals. Tonight, we will all pretend together, that when someone is deeply in love, or full of woe, or simply wants to make a lot of puns about meat pies, that they should obviously start singing. Or dancing. We have agreed on this worldbuilding, okay, cool, let’s go!

And of course fantasy—and all speculative fiction—works the same way. First let’s agree to believe there are a bunch of telepathic dragons…and now see what happens. The writer suggests a world, and if there’s buy-in, a community forms around this shared belief.

And when you put all these three things together (theatre, musicals, fantasy)—boom!

Part of what makes theatrical magic so immersive to our imaginations is that it happens right in front of us. From the humble smoke and trapdoor to cleverly placed body doubles to elaborate onstage costume changes, we watch as the sleight of hand happens. In the stage version of Disney’s Frozen,³ Elsa’s dress needs to magically change onstage. (YouTube has a vast collection of times it didn’t.) But that joyful, imaginative play is what makes it all magic. Live theatre can go “wrong” all the time—but I totally believe that just makes it more real, more memorable for the audience. The audience is cheekily let in on the secret and asked to work their imaginations just that little bit harder.

Where minimal budget interferes with having spectacular stage effects, then natural theatrical artifice and group imagination come into play. When we wave these blue ribbons, we are now in the water. Red ribbons spill out for blood. One of the most delightful places on the internet is a Tumblr called Low Budget Milky Whites. Milky White is Jack’s beloved cow in Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods.⁴ It’s not really called on to do much other than follow the characters around and eat a shoe. (Long story.) Productions have created all sorts of charming (and/or slightly terrifying) Milky Whites, from a wooden prop on wheels, to a human in a white onesie, to…whatever this is. (To be clear: I love it.) And so the part of Milky White is a beautiful, absurd business in what we can do as a community to collectively agree there is someone’s adored pet cow onstage.

Since Wicked has never stopped playing on Broadway since it opened, it has never become available to local theaters or schools to remount it. It famously has a couple of big magic elements—Glinda enters in a giant floating steampunk bubble, Elphaba rises into the sky at the end of Act 1. (When Elphaba’s flying mechanism breaks, you get a “No Fly show.”) I’m interested to see what happens when smaller, lower-budget venues take on this piece. I’m sure people will find creative ways to make this imaginative leap—and the audiences will join in the belief that, say, a bunch of rotating pink parasols represent a magical floating bubble.

The Wizard of Oz⁵ and The Wiz⁶ are available to be performed, and they both have plenty of magical elements and costumes to figure out how to stage and represent. The fantastic Paul Tazewell did the marvelous costume design for not only the Wicked movie, but also The Wiz Live!⁷ (a very cool fact I just learned while writing this). And certain Oz characters wouldn’t be the same without that touch of costume magic, the delightful details that assist our collective leap to believe in a walking Scarecrow, a movable Tin Man, a bipedal Cowardly Lion.

One of the many reasons I love writing fantasy is because you can make up strange worlds and scenarios in order to discuss real-world topics. I feel like having a new angle to approach a complicated topic can help explore those ideas in a different way, using new tools. (And conversely, musical theatre can bring new tools to fantasy—Minchin and Rubin’s poignant Groundhog Day,⁸ for example, uses musical repetition to illustrate the repetitiveness of the main character’s day.)

Now, even in more realistic theatre, you get the benefit of using different theatrical devices as new angles—and some of those devices could be considered to have lightly fantastical elements. One of my favorite musicals, Tesori and Kron’s Fun Home,⁹ adapted from the memoir by out lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, uses three “Alison” actors of different ages to explore the complicated family dynamics of her childhood and young adulthood, including her closeted father’s suicide. Grown-up Alison is able to comment on “Medium Alison” and “Small Alison” in their scenes, which brings an adult perspective to her own formative events. And Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton¹⁰ plays with time in a couple scenes. When Angelica and Eliza Schuyler meet Hamilton, time rewinds to show us the same event from different perspectives. And when Hamilton and Burr clash in their fateful duel, an actor plays a speeding bullet—who stops, frozen in time, while Hamilton faces his impending death. It’s a powerful and arresting moment. Both of these time slips are handled within songs, illustrating the way that theatre, fantasy, and music can all work together to enhance each other.

So having a new way to explore ideas can be helpful when discussing complicated subjects, in any media and any genre. But when those new ways are fantastical elements, they bring some immediate benefits. For one, fantastical stories generally have a built-in “hook” to capture the audience and keep us entertained while also exploring challenging themes. Menken and Ashman’s delightfully disturbing Little Shop of Horrors¹¹ addresses themes of greed and abuse. But also—there’s a whole giant man-eating plant onstage. (I humbly submit that I am more excited to sit and consider the horrors of capitalism for two hours when it comes with a singing Venus flytrap.)

And for two, the fantastical elements can show us real-life issues writ large. Maybe we are tempted, like Little Shop’s Seymour, to make ethical compromises to gain a small amount of power. But we don’t usually have the option to increase our fame by feeding somebody to a plant. (I am now imagining a contemporary version of Little Shop with more social media.) Wicked powerfully addresses othering, scapegoating, the nature of good and evil. We’re not currently having a massive reckoning over whether talking animals should be treated like humans. But I’d like to think that a kid who recognizes that the winged monkeys should have equal rights might grow up to believe that all humans should, too.

Of course, many of the exciting hooks and powerful imagery of these shows come from seeing the fantastical elements live in front of you. But I think that even when a show is not fully staged, you can reap their benefits—still discuss these topics, still make those creative leaps. I recently got to see a video of a new musical, Hereville. The musical was created by Robby Sandler, Lizzie Hagstedt, and Jess Kaufman, based on Barry Deutsch’s graphic novel series of the same name, the first of which was a Nebula/Norton finalist. The story follows a young Jewish girl named Mirka, who is dealing with grief and family changes…and also strange magic. The musical is still in development, so the linked video is a staged reading, with Deutsch’s wonderful line drawings projected on the backdrop. Even in this simple staging, I felt the collaborative creativity as my brain leaped into the illustrations, imagining a whole comic book world while the actors were singing. And, just like Little Shop and Wicked, Hereville uses the magical elements to explore serious themes—in this case, the family dynamics of losing a mother and gaining a stepmother.

I’m currently working on my own fantasy musical theatre project, which is a bucket list item I didn’t know I had till we started it. It’s called The Devil and Lady Midnight, and I’m writing it with C. S. E. Cooney and Dr. Mary Crowell. It’s currently conceived as a musical podcast, meaning the audience will have to join in and fill in all the visual details, not just the ones too elaborate for our (currently non-existent) budget. Fantastically, it’s about a devil who comes to New York to find a few more souls. Thematically, it’s about making art and finding community. But also, because it’s a fantasy musical, you get: Dramatic vampires! Magical flames! Playwriting cats! And of course, the everyday question of how far will you go to get what you want—but writ large with a hungry devil who just wants you to love her forever.

We began writing this musical deep in the middle of the pandemic, so it makes sense that we started asking questions about art and community. That, with everyone isolated, we wanted to create some sitting-around-the-campfire magic. That we wanted to find a place to play.

And that’s what I believe is truly so wonderful about fantasy musical theatre. Theatre asks us to live in the moment, to all be there together. (And even musical movies can do this—witness the decades of sing-a-longs for The Rocky Horror Picture Show,¹² as well as recent ones for Wicked.) Fantasy musical theatre is far from the only place to build powerful creative community, but it is definitely a tremendous place to make immersive, communal art. Art that asks the audience to be creatively, joyfully, playfully-yet-powerfully engaged. To think about important topics—but also to marvel at winged monkeys and singing cats. It’s a place where we can all say yes to a game of “Let’s Pretend”…and embark together on a fabulous journey.

 

¹           Wicked (film)—music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, screenplay by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox. 2024.

²           In the Heights (film)—concept, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, screenplay by Quiara Alegría Hudes. 2021.

³           Frozen—music and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, book by Jennifer Lee. 2018. (Note: in musical theatre, the term “book” refers to the script.)

⁴           Into the Woods—music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine. 1986.

⁵         The Wizard of Oz—music by Harold Arlen and Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by E.Y. Harburg and Tim Rice, book by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Sams, 2011.

⁶         The Wiz—music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, Timothy Graphenreed, Harold Wheeler, George Faison, Luther Vandross, and Zachary Walzer, book by William F. Brown. 1974.

⁷         The Wiz Live! (film)—music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, Timothy Graphenreed, Harold Wheeler, George Faison, Luther Vandross, Shaffer Smith, Elijah Kelley, Harvey Mason, Jr, and Stephen Oremus, book by Harvey Fierstein. 2015.

⁸         Groundhog Day—music and lyrics by Tim Minchin, book by Danny Rubin. 2016.

⁹         Fun Home—music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. 2013.

¹⁰         Hamilton—music, book, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. 2015.

¹¹         Little Shop of Horrors—music by Alan Menken, book and lyrics by Howard Ashman. 1982.

¹²         The Rocky Horror Picture Show (film)—music, book, and lyrics by Richard O’Brien. Screenplay by Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman. 1975.

© 2025 Tina Connolly