i like when people treat the first drafts of wicked the musical like the snyder cut and not just a bad first draft
listen, every first draft is kind of bad and unpolished. wicked had the challenge of adapting a five part adult political fantasy novel into a two act musical targeted. they had to condense the timeline for the story to work, and musical theater can't really capture subtly and ambiguity in the specific way a novel can. and this creates problems in adapting a novel where imo the emotional payoff comes from the slowburn of elphaba being worn down by decades of abuse, failure, and loss after loss after loss. when condensed into a two act play you lose that steady pressure and you're kind of left with a bunch of things happening that don't have a clear emotional thread
they also needed to disney-fy things for general audiences, so you're left with an elphaba that isn't a domestic terrorist and doesn't severely neglect her son or kill a kid with an icicle and is a lot more palatable for broadway audiences. they also had this problem where the plan was always to have elphaba survive. but they still had the whole "dorothy begs for forgiveness which causes elphaba to crash out and melt," which fundamentally doesn't work if she 100% is confirmed to live and the crash out is just a ruse anyway guys because the big emotional payoff of the novel is elphaba's inability to make peace with her failures and settle her guilt literally killing her (unless...)
the novel suggests she's waiting to come out; you're left with an oz that is still mostly in chaos with most of it's issues unresolved and things decidely, but you have this seed of hope that elphaba will somehow live on. gregory then expands that in his later books, showing that elphaba's legacy lives on through liir and rain and brrr and glinda and nor. so to flip that into "glinda and dorothy's friends take care of oz and elphaba gets her happily ever after with whiteyero HOORAY!!!!" doesn't work, and ends up undermining elphaba's effect on oz. jk everything worked out in the end doesn't work when the story your adapting is a tragedy
the subsequent drafts making it more about glinda and elphaba's relationship basically alleviates most of these problems. it gives a coherent narrative thread to the story. the whole good witch/wicked witch dichotomy allows them to explore the novel's themes in a clear way that's still digestible for modern audiences. elphaba making peace with glinda the way she couldn't in the novel gives real weight to her surviving outside of "we needed to make it friendly for the kids." their losing each other makes the ending tragic in a similar way to the novel being tragic, but they can still allow elphaba to survive. glinda's entanglement in the regime in act ii allows them to explore the political aspect better than in the early drafts
like it's clear the main challenge of adapting wicked was condensing the novel into a three hour musical, and retaining its core themes while making the material more accessible to the public. i don't love how they handled everything, but i think the final product did a lot right. i personally don't really feel like any of the scenes or plot points in the original drafts actually substantially add to the story or get its message across better, which is why they were changed or cut
