Wicked production designer talks turning the Yellow Brick Road into a "form of oppression"

In all of cinema, there are few images more enduring than the Yellow Brick Road – the dazzling centrepiece of Victor Fleming's beloved Technicolor marvel, The Wizard of Oz.

Of course, the road is just one of many iconic landmarks from the classic film to prominently feature in Wicked: For Good – another example being Dorothy's farmhouse, which unsuspectingly lands atop the Wicked Witch of the East – and so you might wonder how the team behind the film went about recreating these sets for the new film.

With that in mind, when RadioTimes.com exclusively spoke to production designer Nathan Crowley ahead of the two-part movie musical's second instalment, we put exactly that question to him.

In the case of the farmhouse, he explained, it was relatively straightforward. "I know Dorothy's house is a slice of Americana, I know it belongs in Andrew Wyeth paintings. I know its Midwestern," he said. "So I know there's a language there that I can't veer off – and you shouldn't veer off – because [it's] the most famous flying house [and] we have to land that visually without question."

But when it came to the Yellow Brick Road, things were a little more complex.

Read more:

• Who plays Dorothy in Wicked: For Good?
• Wicked: For Good's early Rotten Tomatoes score revealed as wave of reviews arrive - is it as good as the first?

"The Yellow Brick Road is slightly harder because we are telling a different story with [it]," he said. "We're telling you that it's a form of oppression, not joy. The Wizard is using it to cut down the forest of Oz. And so we have to tell that story."

He continued: "We also have to tell the story of how Oz made the Yellow Brick Road, which is, you know, the Munchkin story – they were farming all the colours of the rainbow, but now they're only farming yellow tulips. So for this film, we grew a million yellow tulips off in another field, and then we showed the process of using that yellow dye to make the bricks in Munchkinland.

"But that's the only colour they're dealing with. So they're being oppressed, too. They're losing their colour and they're losing the rainbow, and so it has big consequences, that road. And that's what I love about Wicked – telling you that story, rather than the story we all know."

Back when the first film was released almost exactly a year ago, many fans were staggered to find that as many as nine million tulips had been planted specifically for the production. But it turns out that that was actually an underestimate: when the one million extra yellow tulips are added, the total is actually 10 million.

Meanwhile, Crowley added that when it came to crafting the set, he and his team had to find multiple different shades of yellow as they were filming on both sound stages and on location – due to the different effects of sunlight and stage light.

"We have to use different glazes and different yellows, and it's a lot of trial and error," he said. "We sat and looked at an enormous amount of yellows!"

While many of the sets in the new film will already be familiar to fans from last year's Part One, the sheer scale went up another notch when it came to For Good, Crowley explained.

"There's a big difference in terms of the world building [and] environment building we had to do," he said. "Because in [Part One], the focus is on youth, the youth of high school, and Shiz and the journey to the Emerald City. But then the second one is much more epic, and we have to look at the landscapes... we have to define Oz as a much bigger place.

"It's telling a much bigger story in For Good... I mean, it gets sort of epic!"

Wicked: For Good is scheduled for release in UK cinemas on 21st November 2025.

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