“Playing by the rules of someone else’s game”: Viewing “Wicked” from the disabled seats

The morning after I went to see Wicked at the cinema, I came across a review that called the musical “a movie about female friendship and pushing through difference”. In the case of Elphaba, her disability is seen by the other characters as stemming from her mother’s moral failing: she was conceived as a result of her mother’s drunken promiscuity, during which she is plied with an elixir that is supposed to have produced the her daughter’s green skin. Meanwhile, Elphaba’s sorcery teacher, Madame Morrible, sees Elphaba’s “talents” as something that makes Elphaba more vulnerable to manipulation. When Morrible acts as though she is the only one who sees Elphaba’s disability as a strength rather than as a weakness, she can take advantage of those strengths. The social isolation that comes with Elphaba’s disability leads to a kind of social naïveté — as is the case for many people with disabilities in real life.