See How the Original Wicked Broadway Cast Compares to the Stars of the 2024 Film
Iconic performances by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth made the 2003 musical Wicked a phenomenon. See Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande and the rest of the 2024 film’s cast vs. the O.G. Broadway stars.
When Wicked premiered on Broadway on Oct. 30, 2003, there was no guarantee it would become one of the most popular musicals of all time.
Song and dance aside, the source material—Gregory Maguire‘s 1995 best seller of the same name—was pretty dark: The Wizard of Oz prequel about the Wicked Witch of the West’s complicated origin story ending with a tragic melting incident at the hands of Dorothy Gale.
The extravagant stage production, with a book by Winnie Holzman and songs by Stephen Schwartz, didn’t go that route, wrapping up the green-skinned heroine’s journey on a more hopeful note. But critics weren’t all that impressed, the New York Times‘ Ben Brantley judging that the show didn’t “speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical.”
But Wicked deserved a chance to fly, and soar it did thanks to Idina Menzel, who originated the role of outcast Elphaba, the talented sorceress who’d be tagged with the titular descriptor, and Kristin Chenoweth as perky Glinda, the shrewd but good-hearted witch-in-training who’s determined to take her nonconformist roommate under her wing.
And guess who ends up being changed for good?
“The story of the friendship of these two women and how they, through striving for truth in themselves, they really give a wonderful gift to each other and change each other forever—I think that that’s important,” Menzel told Playbill in December 2003. “I think that the idea that when someone’s different from us, we tend to be threatened by them, and that we have to strive to look deeper than the surface, I think that’s the other most important message.”
All of that, plus the show boasts some serious bangers.
A year after it opened, Wicked had recouped its $14 million capitalization and it’s been running at the Gershwin Theater ever since. With almost $1.3 billion in ticket sales, it’s now the second-highest-grossing Broadway show of all time, according to TopViewTix, behind only The Lion King.
So, expectations are sky high for the years-in-the-making Wicked films starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda.
“Characters like this don’t come along very often, they just don’t,” Erivo told the New York Times. “So it’s a real privilege to be able to play these women because they’re so much more than just iconography.”
And yet the performances that preceded them are considered iconic, Menzel and Chenoweth forever linked thanks to the magic they made together onstage.
“We didn’t know it would become the phenomenon that it did,” Menzel told E! News at the film’s Nov. 9 Los Angeles premiere. “But Kristin and I just really zoned in on each other and supported each other telepathically. You just remember what you’re there for.”
And it sounds as though their successors shared a similar experience.
To effectively play Elphaba and Glinda, she and Grande “needed real connection,” Erivo told E! at the premiere, “and we needed to lead this with love—even in the moments that are supposed to be fraught with tension within the piece.”
Meanwhile, the leading ladies in every production have enjoyed a village’s worth of support, Wicked boasting a massive ensemble that’s only grown bigger for the 2024 big-screen adaptation (the first movie of a two-part saga). While audiences are lining up to see how Erivo and Grande measure up to the O.G.s, get a look at the 2003 Broadway cast alongside the actors taking on their characters in the Wicked films:
Idina Menzel/Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba
First to defy gravity as the destined-to-be-different Elphaba in Wicked, which opened on Broadway Oct. 30, 2003, was Rent alum Idina Menzel.
“I think for a lot of women who are known to be larger than life, who fill a room, there’s this thing of wanting to be seen and loving the attention and appreciation for our gifts but also, when people are actually looking at you, feeling terrified and vulnerable,” Menzel, who won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the role, told Vulture in 2023. “That’s Elphaba’s whole journey. For me, it was the same thing.”
And while a number of performers have followed in her footsteps, Cynthia Erivo—who wields the future Wicked Witch of the West’s broom with aplomb in the Jon M. Chu-directed big-screen adaptation—earned a special place in her heart.
“She embraces everything that Elphaba is about,” Menzel told E! News Nov. 9 at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “The fact that she’s unique and different and she’s got this power and this fire—and that’s Cynthia as a human being, but she’s infused that into the role.”
Erivo told E! that getting to spend time with Wicked‘s original leading ladies was “one of the most incredible highlights of our year.”
Kristin Chenoweth/Ariana Grande as Glinda
Kristin Chenoweth originated the role of Galinda—soon to be Glinda, Good Witch of the North—on Broadway.
“People always said that there wasn’t a show in two women together as leads,” she told Vulture in 2023. “When it was pitched to me it was like, ‘You’re very much the side character. You’re very much the supporting character.'”
Chenoweth may have lost the Tony to Menzel, but they were very much a team and both know about popular to this day.
And Ariana Grande was only 10 when she visited Chenoweth backstage and told her she wanted to follow in her pink-hued footsteps.
“She told me, ‘I want to be you. I want to play Glinda,'” Chenoweth recalled to E! at the L.A. premiere, affecting a higher register. “In that same voice.”
When Grande got the audition, “We both cried,” she added. “We sound like dolphins.”
Grande called Chenoweth and Menzel “a very supportive witch coven.”
“We just feel so honored to be a part of this legacy,” Grande told E! at the premiere, “and to be the ones in the movie. It’s such a sweet thing to share with them.”
And of course they sang live like their Broadway predecessors, Grande noted, because “the spontaneity, the emotional integrity of what we’re singing about, demands it. It wouldn’t have worked any other way.”
Norbert Leo Butz/Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero
The role of Elphaba’s seemingly unserious but ultimately quite discerning love interest went to theater veteran Norbert Leo Butz, a two-time Tony winner since his run playing Fiyero—which only lasted a month after a back injury forced him to take a break from the stage.
But he was with the production long enough to have collected a precious souvenir.
“I met my wife, Michelle Federer, doing that show,” Butz said on New York Live in 2023. “She played Nessarose [Elphaba’s younger sister]. So the memento I took was my beautiful wife of almost 20 years.”
And he was still Federer’s first choice to play Fiyero in the movie version.
Or, she told ET in 2022, “Timothée Chalamet.” Added her husband, “I was just going to say that, ’cause I bet he could sing.”
No offense to Jonathan Bailey, who did score the role and was happy to follow in such illustrious footsteps.
“Norbert Leo Butz is one of my heroes,” he said on Popcorn Podcast With Leigh and Tim. “Beyond. So I’m excited to get to New York on the press tour so we can have a little bev and discuss Fiyero.”
After that, however, there was no place like home for an extra-special screening.
“It was just so present in my childhood and my family,” he told E! at the L.A. premiere. “And I remember watching with my grandparents. And so, I’m really excited to get to London and get home and to watch it with my 93-year-old grandma.”
Michelle Federer/Marissa Bode as Nessarose
The Wizard of Oz industrial complex never told you that Dorothy’s house fell on a girl in a wheelchair, albeit one who had become increasingly tyrannical toward the citizens of Munchkinland (and whose sister put a spell on her silver slippers that turned them ruby and enabled her to walk).
Federer made her Broadway debut in Wicked playing Nessarose, Elphaba’s younger sister who is the one who really wants to go to Shiz and becomes resentful of her sibling’s natural talents. She stayed with the show for three years and married Butz in 2007.
The film’s Marissa Bode, meanwhile, is the first actress who uses a wheelchair in real life to play the part.
“How I feel as a disabled person in a world that is not necessarily built for me, in a world where people just don’t understand or aren’t always fully educated on disability as a whole—I definitely took those with me and leaned that into my character,” Bode said on TODAY. She was “over the moon” about being in Wicked, she added, and hoped her turn as Nessarose, while steeped in sorcery, was also a relatable portrayal of an independent person who happens to use a chair.
“Thankfully, the University of Shiz is accessible,” she said. “There are ramps everywhere.”
Carole Shelley/Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.
The late Carole Shelley, a Tony winner in 1979 for The Elephant Man, played Shiz headmistress Madame Morrible for the first 19 months of Wicked‘s historic run.
“It’s a nicely important role in the story line,” the actress, who died in 2018, told TDF Stages when she reprised the role on Broadway for five months starting in August 2007. “And it was terribly exciting to be in it at the very beginning. It was sometimes a little nerve-racking; it can be difficult to keep up. When they get going with a big show like this, they really expect you to deliver it yesterday.”
Looking back, “I knew that the subject matter was just dynamite,” Shelley said, “but who’d ever think it would go over like this?”
Ironically, it went right over Michelle Yeoh‘s head, the Oscar winner admitting at the film’s L.A. premiere that she “had no idea” what Wicked was when Chu asked her to be in it.
“I knew Wizard of Oz, who doesn’t,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, “but not Wicked, because I hadn’t been going to the theaters and not doing what I love, which is watching musicals, for quite a while.”
And while she was “terrified” about singing in the movie, she studied with a voice coach and, Yeoh said, “the process of exercising, learning to use the muscles in a different way, was actually very, very good for me because it helps with my voice as an actor. So I had fun.”
Joel Grey/Jeff Goldblum as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Life is a cabaret—i.e. pure theater—for the so-called Wizard of Oz, so Tony winner Joel Grey was the likely choice to originate the role of the charming charlatan.
“For me, I’m always looking for the truth of the man,” Grey told Playbill in 2003. “I didn’t look at the movie [The Wizard of Oz] when I knew I was going to do this. I wanted to rediscover it on my own.”
Jeff Goldblum, who acknowledged needing “many Kleenex” when he saw the musical early in its run, leaned into the ambiguity of the character.
“It’s part of the theme of the whole movie—that nobody is really evil or good,” he told InStyle. “Everybody is a complicated, elaborate tapestry of many, many things. And to reduce it to bad or good is to falsify it.”
And like Grey, he wasn’t trying to emulate what had come before.
“I have no particular approach, really, or goal,” he said. “I’m just doing what feels right.”
Christopher Fitzgerald/Ethan Slater as Boq
As Boq, who reluctantly succumbs to Nessarose’s affections (only to trigger her insecurities and end up a Tin Man courtesy of her sister), Christopher Fitzgerald at times felt like “a small dot” in the giant sea that is Wicked.
But even the supporting cast has their fanatics and, he told Talkin’ Broadway in 2009, “I’ve seen people with tattoos of Boq on their arm. Wicked probably will outlast us all. It’s the new Cats.”
But while Boq’s crush on Glinda is unrequited on stage and screen, the sparks flew off-camera.
“She’s incredible,” Ethan Slater told E! News of Grande, who became his real-life girlfriend after the two met on set in 2022. “She’s not a singer who wants to be an actress or an actress who wants to be a singer. She’s just the best of both.”
William Youmans/Peter Dinklage as Doctor Dillamond
Doctor Dillamond, Elphaba’s favorite Shiz professor who happens to be a goat, was first played by William Youmans on Broadway.
“When I took my final bow in 2005, I came out with a sign that said, ‘I’ll be back,'” the actor told Playbill when he reprised the role in 2023. “Because Wicked was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. My career was completely revolutionized.”
Reflecting on the character’s impact, Youmans noted, “The main story is about the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, of course. But what the animals are going through activates their main break. Glinda goes one way, and Elphaba goes another, and it’s all over what the Wizard is doing to the literal scapegoat.”
While the history teacher who warns that “something bad” is afoot in Oz is full CGI in the film, his unmistakable voice belongs to Peter Dinklage.
“It was a bit of a lonely process, recording in a sound booth apart from the rest of the cast,” the Game of Thrones alum told Cinema Express, “but it’s such an honor to be part of something this universally loved and amazingly creative. My daughter has seen the Broadway show five times, and her friends still want to go for every birthday party.”
Ultimately, he added, “Wicked resonates because everyone feels like an outsider at some point. It’s about defining your independence and strength within that feeling of isolation. Above all, it teaches kindness, which is the most important thing.”
Bowen Yang as Pfannee
Saturday Night Live standout Bowen Yang plays Pfannee, Glinda’s witchy best friend at school and a new character in the Wicked cinematic universe.
“I can’t believe I’m in it,” Yang said on TODAY. “It’s still a pinch-me thing.”
He recalled telling his buddy—director Chu—years ago that he’d “play anything, I’ll hold the boom mic, I’ll do whatever you want,” so long as he had something to do with the movie.
And now he also counts Grande as a close pal IRL, Yang marveling over “how organically it happened.” He didn’t want to push it, he explained, so he let her gravitate toward him, and it turned out “she’s the most wonderful, splendid person there is.”
Bronwyn James as ShenShen
Rounding out the snarky trio with Pfannee and a pre-enlightenment Glinda is Bronwyn James as mean girl ShenShen, another character written for the film.
“When I knew there was going to be a movie adaptation of Wicked, I thought, ‘I have to be part of this,” the English actress told Wonderland magazine.
ShenShen and Pfannee are “obviously sycophants to Glinda,” James explained, “but more like toxic devotees. I kind of see them as little yipping Chihuahuas you keep in your purse.”
Pairing up with Yang in that capacity was an “absolute blast,” she added. “He’s so funny and quick witted, so having someone like that to bounce your character off is amazing.”
Keala Settle as Miss Coddle
Another new-to-the-world face at Shiz: Faculty member Miss Coddle, who’s tasked with some of the campus dirty work as dictated by the powers that be.
Because she played a part “that didn’t even exist” in the original musical, The Greatest Showman actress Keala Settle said on Smallzy’s Surgery in July that she wasn’t nervous about how her performance would be received. “They created the character so we all sort of worked together to make it happen. But there’s a lot of those in there.”
As for the film itself, she added, “It’s just so beautiful, I can’t even express to you, everything looks like an oil painting.”
(E! and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)
