Author: Spencer Ashcroft
Publisher: Interactive Media Licensing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Book Description
The tale of Elphaba, the green-skinned sorceress of Wicked, is one that is often misunderstood. Most know her as the Wicked Witch of the West, the villain from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, as Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West reveals, Elphaba's story is far more complex than the one-dimensional villain often portrayed in popular culture. The biography of Elphaba, which this book seeks to unfold, is not simply the story of an evil witch bent on conquest and destruction, but a story of a woman grappling with identity, power, love, and loss. Her life is one marked by both extraordinary achievements and devastating failures, a journey filled with both dark and light. Elphaba's existence begins with a significant challenge: she is born with green skin, a condition that sets her apart from everyone she encounters. Her appearance alone forces her into a life of isolation and loneliness. But this isolation is not merely physical; it is psychological and emotional as well. From an early age, Elphaba is forced to contend with a world that is hostile toward her, and yet, despite this, she becomes one of the most formidable characters in the world of Oz. The biography of Elphaba is not just a recounting of events; it is an exploration of the forces that shaped her into the person she became. From the very beginning, Elphaba's life is marked by tragedy and hardship. Her mother is emotionally distant and neglectful, and her father is absent, leaving her to be raised in a home that is devoid of warmth and love. This lack of a nurturing environment, combined with her unique appearance, makes it difficult for Elphaba to form meaningful relationships. Despite these challenges, Elphaba's intelligence, independence, and defiance emerge as central characteristics of her personality. Throughout her life, Elphaba is forced to confront the expectations and limitations placed upon her by society. She constantly struggles with the labels others apply to her, from "Wicked Witch" to "monster," and grapples with her internal conflicts about her purpose and place in the world. Her journey is not only one of self-discovery but also one of rebellion against the constraints of the world around her. She challenges the societal norms and expectations, often doing so in ways that are both dangerous and revolutionary. One of the central themes of Elphaba's story is the weight of power and its ability to both elevate and destroy. Elphaba's power, both magical and intellectual, is formidable, but it comes with a heavy burden. Her struggle to reconcile her desire to use her abilities for good with the darker forces that often accompany them is a significant part of her journey. As she faces betrayal, loss, and heartbreak, Elphaba's character grows more complex, and her understanding of her power evolves. The culmination of Elphaba's story is one of tragic irony. She is both a victim of her circumstances and a perpetrator of her own downfall. Her transformation from an idealistic young woman to the feared Witch of the West is both heartbreaking and inevitable. In the end, Elphaba's life serves as a commentary on the ways in which individuals are shaped by both internal and external forces. Her story challenges us to consider the impact of social expectations, familial bonds, personal choices, and the power of self-determination.
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780982525487
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 61
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Book Description
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061792942
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
The New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination. Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz’s most promising young citizens. But Elphaba’s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard’s secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name—one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel’s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire’s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch.
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062101234
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 526
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Book Description
“Maguire’s work is melodic, symphonic, and beautiful; it is dejected and biting and brave. How great that people flock to these magical novels.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review Bestselling author Gregory Maguire’s remarkable series, The Wicked Years, comes full circle with this, his fourth and final excursion across a darker, richer, more complex landscape of “the magical land of Oz.” Out of Oz brilliantly reimagines L. Frank Baum’s world over the rainbow as wracked with social unrest—placing Glinda the good witch under house arrest and having the cowardly Lion on the lam from the law as the Emerald City prepares to make war on Munchkinland. Even Dorothy makes a triumphant return in Maguire’s magnificent Oz finale—tying up every loose green end of the series he began with his classic Wicked, the basis for the smash hit Broadway musical.
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061719781
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 564
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Book Description
The long-anticipated sequel to the million-copy bestselling novel Wicked Ten years after the publication of Wicked, beloved novelist Gregory Maguire returns at last to the land of Oz. There he introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully, Liir is shattered in spirit as well as in form. But he is tended at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by the silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts. What dark force left Liir in this condition? Is he really Elphaba's son? He has her broom and her cape -- but what of her powers? Can he find his supposed half-sister, Nor, last seen in the forbidding prison, Southstairs? Can he fulfill the last wishes of a dying princess? In an Oz that, since the Wizard's departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enough to grow up? For the countless fans who have been dazzled and entranced by Maguire's Oz, Son of a Witch is the rich reward they have awaited so long.
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061981745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Return to a darker Oz with Gregory Maguire. In A Lion Among Men, the third volume in Maguire’s acclaimed, New York Times bestselling series The Wicked Years, a fuller, more complex Cowardly Lion is brought to life and gets to tell his remarkable tale. It is a story of oppression and fear in a world gone mad with war fever—of Munchkins, Wizards, and Wicked Witches—and especially of a gentle soul and determined survivor who is truly A Lion Among Men.
Author: Winnie Holzman
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema
ISBN: 9781423492764
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Each title in The Applause Libretto Library Series presents a Broadway musical with fresh packaging in a 6 x 9 trade paperback format. Each Complete Book and Lyrics is approved by the writers and attractively designed with color photo inserts from the Broadway production. All titles include introduction and foreword by renowned Broadway musical experts. Long before Dorothy dropped in, two other girls meet in the Land of Oz. One, born with emerald green skin, is smart, fiery, and misunderstood. The other is beautiful, ambitious, and very popular. The story of how these two unlikely friends end up as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch makes for the most spellbinding new musical in years.
Author: A G Marshall
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
All mermaids long for the magic of a human soul. Briony won't drown sailors to get it. She makes potions instead, earning a reputation as a witch and becoming a social outcast. When a little mermaid asks for a potion that can reunite her with the human she loves, Briony reluctantly agrees. But there is more to the mermaid's plan than a quest for love. The more Briony interacts with the human prince the mermaid wants to claim, the more she suspects that he never loved the little mermaid at all. Discover a retelling of The Little Mermaid that turns the classic fairytale inside out and upside down. Where mermaids lure men to their deaths with siren songs and the sea witch will be the hero if she survives the final battle. The Prince and the Sea Witch is one of twelve short novels in A VILLAIN'S EVER AFTER, a collection of standalone stories featuring villainous twists on some of your favorite classic fairytales. Read the series in any order for magical adventures . . . and fall in love with villains as you've never seen them before. Who said villains can't have happily-ever-afters?
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063093987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The first in a three-book series spun off the iconic Wicked Years from multimillion-copy bestselling author Gregory Maguire, featuring Elphaba’s granddaughter, the green-skinned Rain. Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with Wicked by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac Out of Oz. But “out of Oz” isn’t “gone for good.” Maguire’s new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after Wicked first flew into our lives. Volume one, The Brides of Maracoor, finds Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices. As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island’s civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. Is it myth or magic at work, for good or for ill? The trilogy Another Day will follow this green-skinned girl from the island outpost into the unmapped badlands of Maracoor before she learns how, and becomes ready, to turn her broom homeward, back to her family and her lover, back to Oz, which—in its beauty, suffering, mystery, injustice, and possibility—reminds us all too clearly of the troubled yet sacred terrain of our own lives.
Author: Carol de Giere
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1540043711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 640
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Book Description
Stephen Schwartz is among the rare American composer-lyricists whose Broadway musicals have inspired passionate followings, resulting in blockbuster hits like Wicked, Godspell, and Pippin. In the revised and updated second edition of Defying Gravity, biographer Carol de Giere reveals how Schwartz’s beloved musicals came to life, adding four new chapters that shed light on the continuing Wicked phenomenon and exciting projects that include stage adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Alan Menken and The Prince of Egypt. A popular feature of the first edition remains intact for the second: the story of Schwartz’s commercially unsuccessful shows, how he coped, and how he gave himself another chance. The new edition also features an acclaimed series of “Creativity Notes” with insights about the creative process. Wicked enthusiasts are treated to a revealing, in-depth account of the show’s evolution that takes readers from developmental workshops, to the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, through the arguments over changes for Broadway, and finally to productions around the world. Movie musical fans know that Disney’s pairing of Stephen Schwartz (for lyrics) with composer Alan Menken (for music) led to award-winning movie musicals “Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Enchanted. Menken’s revelatory “Foreword” that introduces the second edition of Defying Gravity explores their “wonderful chemistry” and creative challenges. The abundance of behind-the-scenes stories in this Stephen Schwartz biography came by way of the author’s unprecedented access to this legendary songwriter for interviews. She also drew from conversations with his family members, friends, and colleagues (librettists, composers, directors, producers, and actors) to render a rich portrait of this complex and gifted artist. She rounds out the book with photographs, Schwartz’s handwritten notes, and highlighted quotations. Performers and others involved in productions of Godspell, Pippin, Children of Eden, Working, Rags, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, will discover the intentions of the shows’ creators. Singers, writers, fans, and anyone interested in the development of stage and film musicals will enjoy multiple insights from this backstage journey, from Godspell to Wicked, and beyond.
