Wickedly strong word-of-mouth

The producers of “Wicked” have made a TV commercial for their steamrolling musical hit, but people here are probably never going to see it. Not because the quality is poor or the airtime too expensive. No, they won’t be exposed to it because, to put it plainly, “Wicked” doesn’t need the help.

Running the spot would be tantamount to the production thumbing its nose at the pitiably ticketless multitudes. “Wicked,” you see, sells like rock salt on the cusp of a blizzard. When tickets went on sale for the 32-performance run that began last week in the Kennedy Center’s 2,300-seat Opera House here, “we sold out the inventory in seven hours,” says David Stone, one of the musical’s lead producers.

The numbers tell a breathtaking success story, of a magnitude the theater has not witnessed since the peak years of “The Phantom of the Opera.” Not even “The Producers,” showered with a record 12 Tonys and now available in a new movie version, rings up the kinds of figures “Wicked” generates.

In New York, the show has advance sales totaling $31.5 million, the highest on Broadway, where it routinely sells out the theater district’s biggest house, the Gershwin, raking in as much as $1.3 million a week. It’s a monster on tour too -- making, for example, $6 million over three recent weeks in St. Louis. “Wicked’s” cast album sales are sailing toward gold, and the combined grosses from its New York, Chicago and touring productions easily could be weighed on a Hollywood scale: about a quarter-billion dollars since the Broadway opening Oct. 30, 2003.

Not too shabby, especially when you consider its dismissive reception from theater insiders. “Wicked” -- which tells the fanciful story of the rivalry of the girls who would grow up to be the good and bad witches in “The Wizard of Oz” -- got a brushoff from many critics, as well as the Tony voters, who recognized “Wicked” for scenery, costumes and leading actress -- all of which were perceived as consolation prizes. The show failed to secure the coveted trophy for best musical, won by “Avenue Q.”

The second-class treatment deeply offended “Wicked’s” creative team. But in the larger cultural marketplace, the snubs didn’t seem to hurt the show one bit. That some reviewers complained about the overstuffed, preachy quality of the plot and a plastic, pop slickness in the score appeared hardly to concern audiences.

“There’s that phenomenon going on,” Stone says. “I can’t tell you exactly why it happens. It’s the word-of-mouth that has taken over completely.”

Levitating ever higher on a buoyant grass-roots campaign, “Wicked” is proving to be that most elusive of theater properties: a populist juggernaut. Some of its success no doubt is the result of smart marketing: In many cities they book, the producers keep the visits short to drive up ticket demand. Still, the show has a following wherever it goes and, what’s more surprising, seems to be burrowing into the consciousness of places years before it arrives.

The conjecture on “Wicked’s” mystique touches on everything from its pedigree to its politics.

The show, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a libretto by Winnie Holzman, is based on a popular 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” by Gregory Maguire. The novel is a skillful, fantastical expansion of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories that gives psychological, even tragic, weight to characters frozen in moviegoers’ minds by the 1939 MGM film. Maguire explodes old myths about these characters with new ones, his most resonant being the story of green-skinned Elphaba, the principled, bookish outcast who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West -- the hag immortalized on the screen by screeching, cackling, broccoli-colored Margaret Hamilton.

A pivotal ingredient in the novel is the relationship between Elphaba, a wallflower if ever there was one, and the gorgeous, uppity Glinda, who ends up as Elphaba’s roommate at Oz’s Shiz University.

Over time, the producers and creative team became ever more confident that they were not merely playfully re-engineering images from a beloved movie. They found they were also exploring the realm of the spiritual, in the alchemy of improbable friendship and the kinds of beauty hidden only from those who have no faith that it might exist.

How teenage girls -- among “Wicked’s” most vociferous devotees -- might fall into communion with Elphaba is easy to see. What 13-year-old does not feel as if the world misunderstands her?