Wicked (Touring)

A novel nobody expected to sing

Stephen Schwartz found Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel while on holiday and secured the stage rights in 1998, then spent roughly a year building the book with Winnie Holzman. What they made was not a dramatisation of the novel so much as an argument with The Wizard of Oz: the green girl is clever and awkward rather than evil, the blonde one is a social operator, and the Wizard's regime runs on manufactured enemies.

The show began previews at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco on 28 May 2003 and opened there on 10 June. After heavy rewriting it started Broadway previews at the Gershwin Theatre on 8 October 2003 and opened on 30 October. The notices were divided, which in the end mattered very little. It took three Tony Awards and seven Drama Desk Awards, and the original cast recording won the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album in 2005. By 2016 the Broadway production had passed a billion dollars in cumulative revenue.

Two tours, and the one that never stopped

The first North American tour, known inside the company as the Emerald City tour, opened in Toronto on 31 March 2005 and closed in Los Angeles on 15 March 2015 after 4,160 performances. Long before it finished, a second tour was launched to cover the rest of the map: the Munchkinland tour opened in Fort Myers, Florida, on 12 March 2009, and it is the production still on the road today. It marked its 5,000th performance in July 2022.

The economics behind that longevity are unusual. The tour was capitalised at ten million dollars in 2009 and recouped in under a year, which is close to unheard of for a touring musical of that size. Rather than one-nighters, it books long sit-downs — three weeks in a mid-sized market, six or seven in a large one — which keeps the freight bill down and lets a city absorb the demand at its own pace.

Thirteen trucks and a 45-second change

The scale of the thing is easiest to grasp from a load-in. When the tour reached the Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas for a run from 6 May to 14 June 2026, it arrived on thirteen semi-trailers. The build took about thirty hours spread over two and a half days: crews start at eight on the Monday morning and the curtain goes up at half past seven on the Wednesday. The lighting rig, trusses and flying scenery — the air show, in the company's shorthand — go in above the stage first, then the deck is laid underneath it.

Sixty-five people travel with the production full time. In Dallas roughly eighty-five local stagehands joined for the build, with a few dozen staying on for performances. Wardrobe unpacked hundreds of costumes and more than a hundred wigs made from human hair. Six musicians travel; nine more were hired locally to fill out the pit. Touring company manager Steve Quinn described one transition as a complete change of wig, costume and shoes in forty-five seconds, and put the whole operation at about a third the size of The Lion King or Hamilton.

Where it is now

A new set of principals took over on 9 June 2026 at Fair Park: Aline Mayagoitia as Elphaba, Claudia Bennett as Glinda, Susan Cella as Madame Morrible, Pablo Laucerica as Boq and Cristina Sastre as Nessarose, joining Tom McGowan as the Wizard, Ethan Kirschbaum as Fiyero and Drew McVety as Doctor Dillamond. Mayagoitia had originated Itzel in Real Women Have Curves on Broadway and toured as Katherine Howard in Six; Bennett graduated from the University of Southern California in 2025 and is making her first national tour.

That company played the Orpheum in Minneapolis from 8 July to 9 August 2026, the Music Hall in Kansas City from 12 to 30 August, and the Des Moines Civic Center from 2 to 20 September. The route ahead runs to Boston's Citizens Opera House from 23 September to 15 November 2026, then Greensboro, Cleveland over Christmas, Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, Durham, Greenville, St Louis, San Antonio, a five-week stop in Houston from 23 June 2027, and Columbus to 15 August 2027. On Broadway the show is in its twenty-third year and stands as the fourth longest-running production in the history of the street.

What the films did to the room

Jon M. Chu's two-part adaptation reset the size of the audience. Part one opened on 22 November 2024 and finished on 758 million dollars worldwide. Wicked: For Good followed on 21 November 2025, took 150 million domestically in its first weekend — the largest opening for a film of a Broadway musical — and had passed 504 million worldwide by 29 December 2025.

The consequence for the tour is a house full of people who know the story from a cinema rather than a theatre, and who arrive with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in their heads. Reviewers have been direct about the comparison and have generally landed on the side of the stage version, arguing the material moves better in two acts and one room than across two films.

Universal is now building a separate live event on the back of the same properties. Announced on 9 September 2026 with Hurwitz Concerts, the live-to-film concerts screen each film in high definition while a symphony orchestra plays Schwartz's songs and the score live. A preview runs in San Francisco on 16 January 2027, the premiere is at Radio City Music Hall on 23 January, and dates follow in Chicago, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver through July 2027. It is a different show from the tour, and worth not confusing with it.

The performance itself

Eugene Lee's set is still the clockwork Oz built for 2003 — the mechanical dragon over the proscenium, the gear-work framing, the map curtain — with Susan Hilferty's costumes and Kenneth Posner's lighting doing most of the transformation between Shiz and the Emerald City. Reviewing the Kansas City run on 17 August 2026, BroadwayWorld praised a newly installed digital sound system in the 2,400-seat Music Hall, called the design a wonderfully eccentric Oz, and singled out McGowan's Wizard as an ingratiating showman rather than an obvious villain.

On the leads, the recent verdicts agree. Mayagoitia was described as a strong, expressive contralto giving a layered account of a very familiar part; Bennett's controlled soprano and comic restraint drew notice for a performer in her first tour. A reviewer in Minneapolis, attending for a third time, picked out For Good and Mayagoitia's Defying Gravity, and credited the pit under music director Faith Seetoo for holding the emotional line.