The Secret Design Language Behind ‘Wicked: For Good’

Wicked production designer Nathan Crowley treats Oz like an island, and not metaphorically. Every tower in the Emerald City looks in a specific direction, the Impassable Desert makes exile a death sentence, and when Dorothy’s house crashes into Munchkinland, a singular scroll of Yellow Brick Road unfurls. Nothing here is purely decoration: the color, architecture, and landscape serve the story.

The Oscar-winning designer behind The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and the first Wicked film spent years building this world across four massive backlots and soundstages at Sky Studios Elstree and Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden outside London. Both films were shot simultaneously over 160 days, but the design challenge evolved as Crowley expanded the geography of Oz. Where Part One defined it through spectacular scale—famously nine million real tulips planted across British farmland, a 58-ton train constructed from scratch, sets so vast they required mapping by boat—Part Two required the team to think even wider. “We had to design on a bigger geographical level,” Crowley says.

Color is perhaps Crowley’s most powerful storytelling tool, a visual language that operates on a subconscious level. Take the Yellow Brick Road, which most audiences remember as nostalgic set dressing from the 1939 Wizard of Oz. But Wicked has always reframed it as something a bit darker: a form of authoritarian control woven into the landscape itself. “The Yellow Brick Road is oppression,” Crowley says. In Gregory Maguire’s original novel, and carried into and the Broadway musical, the Wizard forced the citizens of Munchkinland to grow only yellow tulips so he could manufacture yellow bricks, effectively draining an entire region of color, autonomy, and agricultural freedom. For Part Two, the greens department grew another million yellow tulips on top of the nine million from Part One, creating fields that visually represent how deeply the Wizard’s regime has embedded itself into the land—a totalitarian monoculture disguised as whimsy. Yellow symbolizes the Wizard’s greed—the Emerald City is green like money, while the brick road is yellow like gold.

This oppressive landscape is ground zero for one of the film’s most pivotal moments. When Dorothy’s white Midwestern house—designed to look like “an Andrew Wyeth painting,” as Crowley tells us, complete with wood siding and an American porch—crashes into Munchkinland, the Yellow Brick Road unfurls toward the Emerald City like a tongue. “It’s a singular scroll that goes off towards the Emerald City, which represents which path Dorothy obviously takes,” Crowley notes.

But the Yellow Brick Road is just one color in Crowley’s palette used to paint control and resistance into his landscapes. For the Emerald City itself, which had to grow and explain itself in ways the first film didn’t require, he took inspiration from the robust geometries of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, the Beaux Arts elegance of Daniel Burnham’s White City, and the intricate ornamentation of Louis Sullivan. It took 15 weeks to build, making it the most substantial design challenge of the production. “We have to explain the three towers: The Wizard’s Tower, Morrible’s Propaganda Tower, and Glinda’s Tower,” he says. “We have to explain the geography. We have to go a bit more wide.” Each tower looks in a different direction, each serves a narrative purpose in the triangle of power that controls Oz, and the expansion had to feel seamless so audiences wouldn’t question whether this matched what they’d seen in Part One. “We have to keep you there,” Crowley says. “And in a weird way, go unnoticed, so you just don’t question it.”

Unlike the first film, the second lingers in emotionally complex spaces, where power reveals itself. For example, when Morrible creates a tornado in her propaganda tower, Glinda wrestles with whether to pop her bubble and save a friend in her Art Deco apartment lined with French pink silk, or when audiences see behind the curtain of the Wizard’s control room and realize he’s lost in an authoritarian existence. “He’s done so much damage to these people,” Crowley says. “We have to start emotionally showing those walls.”

Beyond the towers, Crowley had to establish Oz’s outer boundaries—the places where the Wizard’s control ends and exile begins. If Oz is an island, the Impassable Desert becomes the boundary that makes leaving a death sentence—a detail Crowley planted as visual DNA throughout both films. In Part One, when Elphaba sings The Wizard and I on the cliffs outside Shiz University (itself a massive practical set blending Moorish and Italianate architecture with genuine corridors and a water tank for boat arrivals), she’s looking out at the Impassable Desert, though you might not have registered it consciously. In Part Two, that desert reappears when you look out from Kiamo Ko’s round window, and again when the animals flee Oz, reinforcing the tragedy of displacement.

This kind of geographical storytelling only works, Crowley believes, when everything is built for real. “If you don’t do things practically, it doesn’t develop to something better in my opinion,” he says. “The actors can’t engage with green screen.” Building everything—from Elphaba’s hand-woven forest hideaway to Kiamo Ko’s gravity-defying architecture to Glinda’s symmetrical apartment with hinged walls—meant actors could discover emotional truths inside spaces that actually existed. “You cannot do this stuff alone,” he says. “You need everyone in on it.”

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