This book was born on a balmy summer night in New York City, in 2013. We were passing the Gershwin Theatre at almost 11 o’clock, when its doors suddenly swung open, disgorging 1900 patrons. As they poured out onto the plaza in front of the Gershwin, we noticed that some were wearing tiaras, some were sporting sparkly red shoes, and many were dressed in green. Talking excitedly, they began to wend their way down 51st Street and climb into cabs, Ubers, subways, and high-rise hotels. The sheer volume of the excited crowd flooding out of the theater, the buzz they created as they walked down the street, and their animation as they discussed—even reenacted—specific scenes and songs from the show they’d just seen suggested to us that a hot new blockbuster was playing at the Gershwin, the largest theater on Broadway. Instead, these patrons had just experienced Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, ten years into its run and still drawing standing room-only crowds. How, we asked each other, does this musical, a decade after its premiere, continue to draw consumers to its doors, not only in the major cities of New York and London, but also in more far-flung American cities such as Schenectady, East Lansing, Providence, and Appleton? And what can possibly explain its success in such non-American locations such as India, Norway, and Singapore?

Panned by nearly every critic who attended its 2003 premiere, Wicked remains a cultural phenomenon. By May of 2016, Wicked had grossed $4 billion worldwide, having played to 50 million people in 14 countries, including the UK, Germany, Brazil, and Japan. ¹ It reached the $1 billion milestone on Broadway faster than any other show in history, according to Variety. ² The Wicked soundtrack has been certified double-platinum. Wicked merchandise, ranging from golf balls to tote bags, at one point generated at least $300,000 per week—more than most Broadway plays. ³ A movie version of the show is promised in December 2019. Only The Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King, both much older musicals, exceed these performance figures. Wicked’s unprecedented success—its ability to sustain itself over time—poses a fascinating question for those of us who work at the intersection of consumer research and cultural studies.

The problem is that answering the question of why—and how—Wicked has been so successful for so long is like joining a game of Jenga in the middle of a round. Suddenly, it’s your turn. You gently pull on a piece, and you immediately become aware that the piece you’ve chosen is critically connected to all the other pieces in the tower. But some pieces feel more “pressing” than others. And some pieces appear to be completely unaffected by what you’re doing—until you move your piece just this way and watch the entire tower sway precariously.

To extend the metaphor: We soon learned that any attempt to precisely extract the Wicked piece on its own—without considering its relationship to all the other pieces in the tower that is the Oz complex—would not only be insufficient; it could annihilate the very tower we were trying to preserve. For Wicked is but one of hundreds of pieces—or, what we refer to as re-consumptions—of the Oz monolith, dating back almost 120 years. That’s how long Oz has occupied a unique space in America’s cultural landscape. For it turns out that before Wicked—and, for that matter, before Hogwarts and Middle Earth—there was L. Frank Baum’s original story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. An immediate bestseller, the story inspired sequels, Broadway musicals, theme park attractions, and, ultimately, the famous MGM musical, The Wizard of Oz, debuting in 1939. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, this film became an annual, ritualized television event, weaving Oz into the cultural landscape of the baby-boomer generation. Even Wicked, the musical, is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is itself based on a combination of the MGM film and Baum’s books.

Thus, Wicked’s sensational reception extends well beyond its fifteen years on Broadway; Oz has long been a place where authors and composers can tell an old tale in a new way, marketing their creations across space, time, and media. And consumers have long responded with equal engagement, eager to see, hear, and experience a new version of Oz—the latest sequel, the newest adaptation, and the untold story. So in order to answer our question about Wicked’s success, we need to expand our query: How has Oz itself remained culturally sustainable? More specifically, how does Oz keep reinventing itself, such that it becomes newly relevant to new groups of consumers, without losing its established consumer base?

In The Road to Wicked, we seek to answer these questions about Oz in general, and Wicked in particular, by examining the production and consumption of America’s classic fairy tale, standing as it does at the intersection of narrative, marketing, media, and technological forces. Our study of the road to Wicked, then, is a study in cultural sustainability. On the one hand, we examine the capacity of artists, narratives, art forms, and genres to remain artistically viable over time; and on the other, we examine the marketing machinery and consumption patterns that make such viability possible. Drawing on the fields of consumer behavior, literary and cultural studies, and theories of adaption and remediation, we bring an interdisciplinary approach to the history of Oz that allows us to examine that history as an ongoing dialogue between producers and consumers.

As with many cultural artifacts, Oz is provoked by a seemingly-simple need-based exchange: consumers desire “more Oz,” as one of Baum’s early fans pleaded, and producers satisfy that desire by bringing to market new adaptations of Oz. The reality, of course, is far more complex than that. From Baum’s 1900 novel, through the original Oz craze, the MGM film and its television afterlife, Wicked and its extensions, to the current post-Wicked years (including Oz the Great and Powerful, Emerald City, and young adult novels), cultural sustainability is born of a complicated interchange of multiple parties, spanning decades. Artists, producers, and distributors must continually make Oz marketable, in theme and form, to new audiences, all the while satisfying older audiences who wish to return to the Oz they once knew. And consumers must maintain their interest in an Oz myth that is now over 100 years old—in a marketplace full of so many younger, flashier alternatives (including Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel action heroes). In the age of social media, Oz offerings must now be presented as consumption experiences that can be shared globally and instantaneously. Critics and bloggers, eager for wider readership and greater influence, must assess the value of these offerings in a way that sparks consumer interest. And prosumers, always eager to take matters into their own hands, must create home-grown variations of such offerings in a way that captures the admiration of online consumers while avoiding the legalistic gaze of producers. Compared to this complex interaction of moving parts and parties, the seminal art production framework offered by Howard Becker almost thirty years ago looks Spartan. ⁴