Wicked: For Good Is Changing A Pivotal Nessarose Scene

Something has changed within the upcoming Wicked movie. Something is not the same. After the first part of the musical adaptation hit theaters in the fall of 2024, Marissa Bode dropped some hints that Nessarose’s journey might look a bit different on the screen. And now, composer Stephen Schwartz has confirmed that a pivotal moment involving Elphaba’s younger sister is being altered from the stage show.

The scene in question is Nessarose’s transformative moment in Act 2 of Wicked. Oh, and if you’re not familiar with the show, consider this your SPOILER ALERT for some elements of Wicked: For Good. In the musical, Elphaba returns to Munchkinland after defying the wizard to see her sister. With her newfound powers, Elphaba is able to enchant Nessarose’s shoes to grant her the ability to walk. But what Elphaba thought was a gift turns out to seriously complicate Nessa’s fraught relationship with Boq.

This handling of Nessarose’s character as a wheelchair-user who magically becomes able to walk has been criticized by disability advocates for years. And Schwartz confirmed in a June 28 interview with CBN that in response to that concern, the scene has been changed in Wicked: For Good.

“Yes, the scene has changed,” Shwartz told the outlet. “[Playwright] Winnie [Holzman] and I learned a few things from the PCD community. It was important to them that it was clear that their lives would not be ‘solved’ if they could just walk. And that was certainly never the message of the show, because Nessa’s life is not solved, quite the opposite. But we wanted to be respectful and still find a way to tell our story.”

The composer continued by saying focusing less on Nessarose’s wheelchair can hopefully highlight the real issue in her life: “We wanted to make it clear that the problem is Nessa's obsession with Boq, not the fact that she's in a wheelchair, which is what leads to the events that unfold.”

Schwartz’s comments clarify what Bode had been hinting at when she teased a “script change” to People a little over a week after Wicked premiered. “I wasn't there for the actual script change,” Bode said, but added that director Jon Chu told her, “‘Hey, we changed this part in this way just so that it felt less like a fixing moment.’”

Without going into specifics, Bode said the scene is less about Nessa “pleading for a disability to be fixed,” but is instead “just focusing on the magic in general and the magic of the story.”