when was wicked written

The Broadway musical Wicked was written in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with most of the actual songwriting and script work taking place roughly between 1998 and 2003, leading up to its Broadway premiere in October 2003. The core creative development (outlining and then writing the score and book) is often described by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz as a four-year process before it reached the stage.

Origin and timeline

• Wicked began as an idea after Stephen Schwartz read Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West in the mid‑ to late‑1990s, during a vacation where the book was recommended to him.

• Schwartz then spent about a year with writer Winnie Holzman and producer Marc Platt working only on a detailed outline before they started writing scenes and songs.

Writing period

• After securing rights and finishing the outline, Schwartz and Holzman spent several years turning that outline into the full script and score, a process they describe as taking “about four years” of active development before Broadway.

• Because the show premiered on Broadway in October 2003, this places the main writing window for Wicked approximately between 1998 and 2002, with tweaks and rewrites continuing through early 2003 tryouts.

Premiere connection

• The show’s writing phase concluded as it headed into out‑of‑town tryouts at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco in early 2003, where songs and scenes were still adjusted based on rehearsals and audience reaction.

• By the time Wicked opened on Broadway at the Gershwin Theatre in October 2003, the writing process that began in the late 1990s had effectively reached its finished staged form.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.