History Headscratchers / Wicked

*** The musical takes place over a much shorter period of time than the book does. Remember, in the book, it is five years after Shiz before Fiyero meets Elphaba, and she Elphaba spends several (seven?) years in the mauntery before she ever goes out to the Vinkus, and then lives out there for another seven or eight years. The musical doesn't seem to indicate more than four or five years, if that, have passed between "Defying Gravity" and the end of the play.

*** Apparently, this Tin Man has the same origin as in the book (probably because it was already tragic). As a man, he fell in love with a young woman, but the Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe to cut off his limbs, one by one. Somehow, he managed to replace each piece of him with tin each time. In fact, the only real difference is in "Wicked", it's revealed the mother of the Tin Man's lover commissioned Nessarose to enchant the axe.

** Because Elphaba believes that the citizens of Oz would turn against Glinda if she went around saying that the Witch of the West wasn't actually wicked.

* Why did Elphaba ask Glinda not to clear her name and to keep people thinking she really was the evil one?

* Okay, so "March of the Witch Hunters" takes place after Dorothy and company meet the Wizard and decide to kill the Witch of the West. Ignoring for a moment that we have the citizens of the Emerald City singing, "Kill the Witch!" (how do they even know that Dorothy's group are setting out to kill Elphaba? What, did Dorothy blurt it out after leaving the Wizard's palace or something?), Tin Man/Boq sings lines like, "I have a personal score to settle with El--with the Witch!" and "And the Lion also/Has a grievance to repay./If she'd let him fight his own battles/When he was young,/He wouldn't be a coward today!" and, if I remember correctly, he mentions that he witnessed the lion cub incident while at Shiz University. Wouldn't singing/saying stuff like that lead to Dorothy asking questions, questions that Tin Man/Boq might not want to answer?

* Okay, so "March of the Witch Hunters" takes place after Dorothy and company meet the Wizard and decide to kill the Witch of the West. Ignoring for a moment that we have the citizens of the Emerald City singing, "Kill the Witch!" (how do they even know that Dorothy's group are setting out to kill Elphaba? What, did Dorothy blurt it out after leaving the Wizard's palace or something?), Tin Man/Boq sings lines like, "I have a personal score to settle with El--with the Witch!" and "And the Lion also/Has a grievance to repay./If she'd let him fight his own battles/When he was young,/He wouldn't be a coward today!" and, if I remember correctly, he mentions that he witnessed the lion cub incident while in school. Wouldn't singing/saying stuff like that lead to Dorothy asking questions, questions that Tin Man/Boq might not want to answer?

* So my question is this: Fiyero is brown-skinned, right? In the book, when he interrupts Dr Nikidik's class, he is described as having blue diamonds tattooed on his "dark skin." A classmate comments that his skin is "the color of shit." Sarima & her sisters, I don't recall being specified as dark, but one could assume they are because Oz doesn't seem to have much variation within each ethnic group. So I have to wonder why Nor seems to be white in "Out of Oz." "Son of a Witch" made little impression on me & "A Lion Among Men" made even less, but why would Nor be white if people from the Vinkus are dark? Unlike Liir & Rain, she has no mixed heritage, so she should look much like Fiyero unless I'm misreading something or forgetting a passage from one of the middle books.

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* If Elphaba was allergic to water, how did she drink? Or did she just not have to?

*** The musical takes place over a much shorter period of time than the book does. Remember, in the book, Elphaba spends several (seven?) years being insane in the mauntery before she ever goes out to the Vinkus, and then lives out there for another seven or eight years (Liir was in his early teens when Elphaba died, if I'm remembering correctly). The musical doesn't seem to indicate more than four or five years, if that, have passed between "Defying Gravity" and the end of the play.

** It can't be Avaric. Elphaba visits him while the Scarecrow is supposed to be with Dorothy. Though I did notice the foreshadowing and thought that might be it myself.

* I'm probably looking too much into this, but I recently watched ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'' while keeping ''{{Theatre/Wicked}}'' in mind, and during the scene where the Tin Man is introduced, he mentions that he became rusted a year ago. But according to ''{{Theatre/Wicked}}'', Tin Man/Boq becoming rusted couldn't have been more than two days before Dorothy and Scarecrow/Fiyero encounter him. I can readily agree with the theory that Scarecrow/Fiyero is lying (or stretching the truth, at the very least) about not having a brain as part of a XanatosGambit, but what reason does Tin Man/Boq have to lie about how long he was rusted?

*** Actually, as far as I'm aware, in the original Oz books there's no mention of the Munchkins being shorter than other people from Oz. They're described as short when Dorothy first meets them, but they're the first Ozites she's seen, so the features that make them different from Kansasians are given extra emphasis. A decent argument can be made that ''everyone'' in Oz is very short by RealLife standards, and L. Frank Baum just rarely bothered to mention it. As for ''{{Wicked}}'', the only non-Ozites we see are the Wizard (who, if the original illustrations are anything to go by, is a rather short fellow) and Dorothy (who's a small child); if everyone's more-or-less equally short, and their surroundings are of an appropriately small scale, there's no reason the height difference should ever come up.