EvilThe film musical, based on the popular Broadway show of the same name, is one of the biggest hits of the year, opening at No. 1 in North America over the weekend and already causing a stir at the first Oscars. The audience was prepared to love Evilis known for its famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have surprised people: its somewhat clunky but remarkably durable political allegory.

“I noticed that Elphaba is like Kamala Harris and the Wizard is like Donald Trump,” one fan wrote on Reddit. “A charismatic leader who makes a community believe that this woman is evil just because she stands up for a marginalized group of people in society, how could that be (political)?” director John M. Chu joked.

For a silly, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, Evil actually invites political interpretations. His allegory can both elicit eye rolls and still seem eerily prescient more than 20 years after his stage debut.

Evil The musical is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel of the same name, an anti-fascist treatise in which the magician becomes a Hitler-like despot. The musical wouldn’t quite make it as big as it did when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it scored a number of hits under the George W. Bush administration, which had ordered the invasion of Iraq just months earlier.

In EvilIt turns out that the wizard is disenfranchising the talking animals of Oz on the grounds that he needs to give them a common enemy to unite the rest of the country. But the wizard’s persecution of animals – and later Elphaba – is rooted in a lie, just as Bush falsely claimed before the invasion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Some of the references are obvious: When Dorothy’s house falls to the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda adopts the Bush administration’s preferred euphemism for the Iraq War, calling it “regime change.” “Are you a crusader or a ruthless invader?” sings the magician, referencing Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “That’s all the label can stand on!”

Critics’ reactions were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, Evil Ben Brantley explained in The New York Times in 2003, adding that the show “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button.”

Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler, although taken aback by such a dark take on the sunny and magical Oz, found himself drawn to the idea. “It’s hard not to wonder whether the Witch, a difficult figure changed by difficult times, isn’t exactly what our stage needs,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times that same year. “And perhaps, the show suggests, “evil” is what the “W” stands for in George W. Bush.”

When the magician sings the same lyrics today, he is suggesting not Bush but Trump: a leader who consolidates his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between the inflammatory progressive Elphaba and the conciliatory liberal Glinda could hit Democrats particularly hard amid their post-election recriminations.

Both Elphaba and Glinda idolize the wizard and dream of working on his right hand. When Elphaba learns of the plight of the animals of Oz, she heads straight to the Emerald City to ask for his help. She is sure that he will come to their aid when he learns that the animals are being targeted. The Wizard suggests that he could do this if Elphaba uses her magic as part of his administration, but when she learns that the Wizard was behind the attacks, she disowns him, much to the dismay of the practical-minded Glinda.

“I hope you’re glad you’ve damaged your cause forever,” Glinda sings. Finally, Elphaba alienates a potential powerful ally. “I hope you’re proud of how you would grovel into submission to satisfy your own ambition,” replies Elphaba, who has decided not to work with someone who uses their power to harm Oz’s talking animal citizens. Could you see this moment as a symbol of how Democrats should approach trans issues in the future? Sure, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

In some ways it’s strange to think that EvilThe political messages have seemed so forward-looking for most people Evil Fans would agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. Evil lives and breathes by the strained friendship between its two leads, not by its dueling visions of activism.

However, in another sense, Evil was born as an allegory of American politics. It can’t be anything else. That’s what Oz stories are for.

Most of the Anglophone world’s most childish fantasy classics are English: think Peter Pan, Narnia, The sword in the stoneand Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation.

The Wizard of Ozis, however, an American fantasy. A map of Oz, which has the shape of a rectangle with a horizontal long side, is a simplified map of America as drawn by a child: unimaginably large, stretching across the habitable entirety of a continent from east to west. (Oz borders more toxic deserts than oceans.) It is a land where farmers grow fields of corn and wheat and apple orchards; where industrialists build huge, glittering cities; where the West is full of harsh and unsettled land. And it is a country ruled by a fraudster who lies to the people he rules.

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz In 1900, he imagined the Wizard of Oz as a well-meaning, if ineffectual and somewhat dishonest person. “I am a very good man – just a bad wizard,” the wizard declares to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Yet the wizard can serve as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American dream. The magician is a man who promises you everything but gives you nothing, and then he will tell you that the answer was within you all along.

It is this metaphor that gives The magicianthe all-black reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz from the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. In The magicianDorothy and her friends are black people who are promised certain basic rights by a government that never intends to pay. (Evil suggests a similar criticism by casting black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially other, green-skinned Elphaba.)

“Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” scoffs the scarecrow The magicianafter learning that the wizard is a down-and-out politician from Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” The magician crows. “It’s me!”

EvilIn the meantime, this is not a reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz rather, it is a revisionist history. As a result, it is fundamentally skeptical of authority figures – much more so than Baum, who eventually replaced the wizard with the virtuous and almost infallible fairy queen Ozma.

The premise of any story that tells you that the villains of your childhood are misunderstood is that the storytellers lied to you. In Evilthe magician is not only a very bad magician, but also a very evil person. He lies maliciously and strategically.

Here, Elphaba and Glinda become just two more dreamers who, like Dorothy and her friends, travel to the Emerald City because they want the wizard to grant them their heart’s desire: protection for the talking animals of Oz as they become increasingly persecuted.

But the sorcerer they encounter is not only unable to grant them such a request, but even plans to pervert them by using their innocent wishes to commit even more violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her perform magic on his behalf so that he can more thoroughly track the sentient animals he wants to round up and more efficiently spy on the rest of his citizens.

In the end, the wizard calls Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his government while Elphaba refuses. He is America ruled not by a fraud but by a strongman – an authoritarian dictator.

This is the kind of metaphor that revisionist history can give you, and part of why Evil feels so strangely urgent in this moment. In a subversion of a childhood classic, no authority figure can be trusted – which is what makes these stories so appealing when people you don’t trust have found their way into positions of power.