Lucy Durack and Jemma Rix bring so much outstanding depth to their roles in this unexpectedly moving and ultimately fascinating show it easily wins the heart.

The show is colourful, has magnificent costume design. It is not trite but emotional and well tuned with various highs and lows even though the characters are so strained. Well, strained may not be the best way to describe Glinda (Lucy Durack), but she sure is something else - very funny for one thing.


If you know the story of The Wizard of Oz as told in the movie starring Judy Garland you will immediately recognise the landscape and some of the situations, almost as if you have somehow stumbled upon some kind of new 3D DVD special feature that takes you behind the scenes from a different storyline perspective.

You will discover a different type of Hogwarts with a strange young student who doesn’t quite fit in. Is she an alien?

Well she is treated like one by the other kids at school even though the Widow Twanky, Angela Landsbury monster woman Madame Morrible (Maggie Kirkpatrick) selects her for special training.


Elphaba (Jemma Rix) is green and it is not easy for her to fit in.

Her beautiful sister (Elisa Colla) is not green, and as it turns out there’s a long lost bastard father out there waiting to be found at the end of the yellow brick road in this epic tale.

The complexities in the story run deeper than this as well, for people who have always had a sense of The Wizard of Oz as it stands in the film, here is a reboot that brings you back to the film with new eyes. A new secret rests in your creative heart that tells you there is more going on than you realise at face value.