Latest news with #Witch
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
4 Romance Novels With Delicious Payoffs
A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping Consequences are the lifeblood of fiction; there's nothing more central to the novel than the question And then what happened? In A WITCH'S GUIDE TO MAGICAL INNKEEPING (Berkley, 352 pp., paperback, $19.99), Sera Swan knows all about consequences. The British Guild of Sorcery cast her out when she used a forbidden spell to revive her beloved great-aunt — and worse, the spell cost her most of her magic. Now she runs a charmed inn with that same great-aunt, along with a witch trapped in fox form, a resurrected rooster skeleton and a gaggle of guests with plenty of their own quirks. Until one new guest offers her a second chance. Luke Larsen is a Guild scholar who might know a spell to restore Sera's magic — but he's reluctant to help anyone targeted by the tyrannical Guild leader Albert Grey. Mandanna's earlier hit, 'The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches,' brushed up against a sinister authority figure, but here that danger is magnified: Grey is a real threat to the garden of kindness Sera has spent her years tending. It is glorious, then, watching Sera and Luke figure out how to deliver the consequences his actions deserve — as if someone has stitched a huge, pillowy duvet out of justice and revenge. Love Is a War Song LOVE IS A WAR SONG (Berkley, 336 pp., paperback, $19) also starts with a heroine in metaphorical exile: Avery Fox is a rising Native American pop star who sparked outrage when she posed in a warbonnet on the cover of Rolling Stone. To ride out the backlash, she takes refuge at her grandmother's ranch in Oklahoma. She's out of her depth with her relatives and on the reservation; the ranch manager, Lucas, seems to hold a particularly simmering grudge. (First Luke, now Lucas — it's a classic romance hero name, what can you do.) But doing professional choreography in five-inch heels has made Avery tougher than anyone expects; she makes some beginner mistakes, but soon she's fallen in love with the ranch and with the close-knit community she finds in Oklahoma. And, of course, with Lucas — whose grand plans to restore the ranch will take both their efforts to accomplish. This book feels as lived-in and appealing as your favorite pair of jeans: sexy in an understated way and uniquely American. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Yahoo
North Carolina Sheriff Solves Mystery of Black Smoke Rings Floating in Sky
Residents of Hendersonville, NC, claimed to see a bizarre sight the night of Sunday, June 29.. They reported seeing rings of black smoke floating in the sky, sparking curiosity and confusion. People flocked to social media to post pictures and videos of the odd sight and sent photos to local news stations. Facebook posts from the Hendersonville, NC, group speculated on the weird occurrence. One user asked for insight, stating. 'Mom was driving through Hendersonville today and is wondering what these odd smoke rings may have been caused by. Seeing if anyone has any insight.' However, local law enforcement later reported that they had solved the mystery. Before they made that announcement, the theories varied. Some said that the rings were from tractors. Others claimed aliens as the culprit. A few comments mentioned diesel trucks. One person mentioned, 'It was not a diesel truck. It was an Allegiant plane, about 30 of us pulled over on 26.' The prevailing theory in the Facebook group appeared to be that the black smoke rings resulted from fireworks. However, some people claimed they watched the smoke rings appear and never saw any fireworks. A comment on the Facebook group claimed ownership of the rings, stating that it was from a firebomb that their neighbor shot off. Other residents chose to have fun with the sightings. One comment said, 'The Jolly Green Giant was blowing smoke rings.' Another blamed the Wicked Witch of the West. Videos on TikTok and other platforms show similar sightings from across the country. Local news station News 13 reported that it had received information from Hendersonville resident Monica Stancato, who sent in photos with this caption: "Seen this evening after loud booms; saw two planes circling, around 9p.m., what is this?" However, the matter seems to have been put to rest by local law enforcement. A spokesperson from the Henderson County Sheriff's Office told News 13, "A lot of those photos have been making the rounds on Facebook and TikTok, but the rings are just from certain to be concerned about.'North Carolina Sheriff Solves Mystery of Black Smoke Rings Floating in Sky first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 1, 2025
Digital Trends
02-07-2025
- Digital Trends
An elegant Mac app has turned my basic tasks into a whole lot of fun
The concept of an app switcher tool is rather odd. After all, why would you need a tool for jumping between apps, when the Command+Tab shortcut works just fine and the three-finger swipe opens the Mission Control on the Mac? Well, there are solutions that work better. Second, when you bring the mouse and keyboard combo into the picture, the fluid convenience of the trackpad gesture flies out the window. Over the years, the developer community has produced some real app switcher gems. Recommended Videos AltTab has been a favorite in the Mac user groups for a while now. Witch and Contexts have also attracted their fair share of Mac power users. But there was still some scope for making things easier, and more importantly, elegant. Dory fills that gap. Dory is the latest app switcher application for Mac, one that is as flashy as it is about sheer substance. Instead of asking users to shift their hands from the keyboard deck to the trackpad or asking them to remember a special keyboard shortcut, Dory takes things to the elementary stage. C is for Chrome. S is for Safari. T is for Teams. That's how easy Dory makes it to bring your desired app window into the foreground focus. It does so beautifully, with an added dash of versatility. All you need to do is hit the button of your choice on the keyboard, or the mouse. After that, you're just an identifier key away from launching the app of your choice. Alternatively, you can save yourself the second key press and just go with a hover gesture above the desired app's icon. A refreshing solution to a basic problem The idea behind Dory is not too different from the side panel on OnePlus and Samsung phones. The objective is to make it a tad bit easier for users to access one particular app among the dozen running in the background. And with as little effort as possible. In Dory's case, you're a mouse click and an identifying letter away from doing it, without getting overwhelmed by a screen full of small and big app windows. Dory essentially puts the desired app just one key-press away. C will summon Chrome, D will launch Docs, and so on. While working away from my desktop (and the overpriced mouse), I set up the left Control button to open Dory's app switcher. My favorite part is not the ease of switching between the apps, but the extremely non-intrusive way it happens. By default, the app switcher opens as a tall pillar, but that's not where the fun is. You can make the app switcher look like a palette of icons, just the way you see paint color strips. Or better yet, go with the scroll wheel look, which opens with a smooth animation and is pretty cool to witness. I wish there were an option to control the animation speed. Either way, have a look: The whole premise behind Dory might sound meh, but it actually makes app switching a tad quicker, less visually formidable, and easier to execute. It's more convenient compared to the updated Spotlight approach in macOS Tahoe or third-party apps. You are not tasked with remembering a shortcut for each app. Starting with the first letter of an app's name just feels more natural. Plus, the trigger action is not a two-key approach. With a mouse, you are actually dedicating (and giving a purpose) to the middle key, which is hard to forget or even confuse with any other action. Likewise, you can pick any key on the deck that you don't use and assign it a task. Either way, you're not memorizing anything or getting confused among the native or third-party shortcuts. Dory is saving merely a second, or even less, but when immersed in work, it makes a tagible difference by saving you a few 'Tab' keystrokes, a visit to Spotlight, or launching the Mission Control. You don't even have to lift your hand from the keyboard deck to reach for the trackpad. It feels and acts like a native macOS solution. That's a huge victory, and something not many apps can claim to offer. How does Dory work? The best part about Dory is that it lives as a Menu Bar utility. Some of my favorite macOS utilities — such as Antinote and Maccy — also live as Menu Bar items. Setting up Dory is pretty straightforward, and it doesn't offer any overtly complex or deep customization tools. All you need is a mouse, and you're good to go with your Mac desktop setup. On a MacBook, any key of your choice will get the job done. By default, Dory picks the middle button of the mouse — which is usually redundant apart from scrolling — to open the app switcher interface. When you open the app, you pick the app picker design from among three layouts. I love the list view and the pillar design, but my favorite is the card-style wheel of app icons. The app section is where you assign the key shortcut for apps. That's about it. Alternatively, if you don't have a mouse, Dory offers an even more convenient route. Just pick any keyboard hotkey to summon the app switcher. I picked the right Option key on my MacBook Air, since it lies mostly unused and rests within easy reach of the thumb. The only thing Dory misses is the ability to assign two-letter shortcuts, the way Spotlight lets users set quick keys in macOS Tahoe. That's because you will eventually run into an overlap with app names. For example, which app do you pick for 'S' between Google Sheets and Slack? The team behind Dory says when you launch the app picker and hit a shortcut letter, it will prioritize the app that you use predominantly, or visit most frequently. It's a thoughtful idea, but it doesn't fully solve the overlap problem. For example, I run Apple Music and Asana all day. The former is active in the background all day, while Asana is where I track my daily work. Likewise, the situation with Asana and Antinote duplication over the letter 'S' is a bit confusing. To Dory's credit, as you keep pressing the assigned identifier key, it will cycle between the apps until you land on the one you want to open. So, between picking Slack and Sheets, you just have to press on 'S' one more time. It isn't something that ruins the experience, but just a minor naming situation beyond anyone's control, to be fair. Another minor nuisance is that while working across a multi-screen set-up, it sporadically opens the app switcher on the other screen, and not where the cursor is currently resting. But this only happened when activating the app switcher using the designed keyboard shortcut key, and not the mouse. Overall, Dory is the best app switcher I've used in a while. It may not sound like something that will supercharge your productivity, but it grows on you. And for something as fundamentally recurring as jumping between different apps on a Mac, it's absolutely worth the $3.99 one-time fee. View Dory on the App Store.
BBC News
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'It's hard not to be blown away': The 70s rock band putting 'Zamrock' back on the map, 50 years on
Blending the style of The Rolling Stones with African beats and instruments, Zambian group Witch were revolutionary – then disappeared. No one could have predicted their amazing return. In the early 1970s, Zambia produced a unique music scene of its own creation. Zamrock, as it became known, was the southern African country's take on western rock music – a take that mixed the sounds of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath with its own fuzz-guitar psychedelia and African instrumentation, beats and rhythms. Forged out of the country's independence from its British colonisers in 1964, its blossoming came during one of the most significant, fascinating and prosperous periods in Zambian history, and its decline and fall mirrored that of Zambia itself in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A once thriving local music scene became devastated by economic, cultural and health factors that also decimated the wider population, leaving Zamrock as a relic, unknown outside of its own region. Yet over 50 years later, Zamrock is enjoying an ongoing revival. While many of the scene's originators – acts like the influential Rikki Ilonga and his band Musi-O-Tunya, The Ngozi Family, The Peace and Amanaz – have long since either died, stopped performing or are little known, one band has brought Zamrock to a contemporary global audience. Formed in 1971, Witch (an acronym for "We Intend to Cause Havoc") were the scene's biggest and most popular band. Fronted by the charismatic Emmanuel Chanda – better known as "Jagari", a name inspired by Mick Jagger – Witch released five albums between 1972 and 1977 that epitomise the Zamrock sound. "We had the influence of rock and roll, but we were Africans, so we couldn't play the actual rock and roll," Jagari tells the BBC. "We had to fuse some things in." Witch's unlikely rediscovery started in 2011, when Now-Again Records released a compilation of the band's music, We Intend to Cause Havoc!, leading to a resurrection that has seen Witch tour the world, release new music and become the subject of Italian film-maker Gio Arlotta's 2019 documentary, We Intend To Cause Havoc. "It's hard not to be blown away when you hear Witch," says Now-Again founder Eothen Alapatt, known as Egon. "The first two Witch records [1972's Introduction and 1974's In the Past] have this garage, Rolling Stones type of vibe to them, and those are really great. They're heavy and just really raw expressions of rock music. But then you get to the third one [1975's Lazy Bones] and out of nowhere, it becomes like this progressive psychedelic thing. I was like, 'There has to be a breadth of music here that's worth exploring.'" The Witch revival has spread far and wide, leading to renewed interest in Zamrock as a whole. Jack White is a fan, releasing Witch live music on his Third Man Records label; Beastie Boys' Mike D, Clairo and Madlib are admirers. Moreover, rappers Tyler, The Creator, Travis Scott and Yves Tumour have all recently sampled Zamrock bands, extending the genre's sphere of influence to the biggest names in cutting-edge hip hop. This week, they release a new album, Sogolo, while later this month they will become the first Zamrock band to perform at Glastonbury Festival. "Zamrock is facing a rebirth, if you like," Jagari says. "It had died down, it had sunk in oblivion. But the interest is growing." How Witch formed Zamrock originated amid the copper mines of northern Zambia, known then as Northern Rhodesia. Jagari had grown up in one such area, Kitwe, having moved there at the age of eight to be brought up by his older brother. "The colonial masters didn't completely neglect the black community," Jagari says, and it was at the weekend social clubs built for the miners that a young Jagari first saw music performed. "In the village, I heard people sing, and I saw them dance. Those little things stuck in my head." Jagari would listen to a radio station in Mozambique that played the UK top 40 (often when his brother was working night shifts) as well as jukeboxes in pubs. He was part of a generation hooked on western acts, who wanted to play their music. "Whoever played the guitar during that time was judged by how well he would play [Jimi Hendrix's] Hey Joe," Jagari smiles. Encouraged by his schoolfriends, who saw him dance and mime at local ballrooms, Jagari auditioned for the band that became Witch. He changed his name because he reminded friends of Jagger when performing, although he was initially ambivalent about making the switch. "That bothered me. I don't want to live in somebody's shadow. Yeah, he's a great man. But I'm an African and my nose is flat, and how can I be compared to someone?" But he went to the dictionary and discovered Jagari "meant a brewer of dark brown sugar [in the local language]. Now it made sense to me." It was Zambian Independence in 1964 that laid the cultural foundations for Zamrock. The economic boom that followed, thanks to the rise in demand for copper, had a twofold effect: allowing people more disposable income to spend on going out and on buying instruments, and giving them more exposure to western music on TV and film. But what made a greater difference was President Kenneth Kaunda's "Zambia first" policy. As a former musician himself, Kaunda wanted to promote local talent and gave bands the platform to succeed, ruling that 95% of radio play should go to Zambian artists. "He declared that we should not always be copycats," Jagari says. "So it opened Pandora's box, musically. Now everyone had an opportunity to go and record so they could be heard on the radio." For Jagari and Witch, this meant that rehearsals cultivated a merging of western and African sounds. Witch would practice covers in the morning, then "after lunch, we were experimenting with our own ideas. And it worked," says Jagari. He calls what they came up with as "the Zambian type of rock and roll. That's the Zamrock interpretation. When we tried them at the gigs, we found the audience were overwhelmed. So then we had an opportunity." With no real infrastructure – recording studios were rudimentary, even the studio in Zambian capital Lusaka where Witch made 1975's highpoint Lazy Bones – and no real record industry to speak of, Witch self-released Introduction, the first ever Zamrock record, printing the vinyl in Nairobi, and sold it at their own shows. "I came with 300 copies, because they were all we could carry, and in two shows, they were gone. Because for the people, it was the first time they were going to have a local band, having local material and a local record out, so everyone wanted to have a copy." Witch self-released their first two albums, but would eventually release music under a subsidiary of Teal Records. Zamrock was soon thriving. "There was the exotic element of it being the only scene in Africa that played such fuzzed-out guitars and were really into this heavier side of rock music," says Arlotta. "Whilst in Nigeria it was funky, in Ethiopia it's more jazz and so on." While Witch went heavy on the psych-rock, other acts took the same source material and took slightly different approaches. "The Zambian scene has all the subgenres," Egon says. "It was complete. And that you don't really find in many scenes." Witch's gigs are the stuff of legend – they toured in a truck with a canopy emblazoned with the words: "Trespassers will be eaten" – and were must-see events: these marathon shows could last from 7pm to 2am, and were so popular that there crowds outside the venues, locked out but clamouring to come in. The Times of Zambia once wrote: "The hall where the boys played had its roof ripped off as exuberant fans tried to find their way through the windows." Jagari earned a reputation as a wild and flamboyant frontman. "He just moves around like a madman," Arlotta says. "He's a very hard worker, on stage he gives it 110% every single time." "I don't know whether we should call it a secret ability," Jagari says. "I don't usually plan my moves, I let the music determine what I should do." Perhaps one surprising aspect of Zamrock was its lack of politics. While you might assume a scene spawned from a specific locale known for its historical struggles might carry with it a message, there was – initially at least – little angst or social commentary. That did change towards the end of the scene – Witch's 1975 track Motherless Child being one such example – but for Zamrock bands, most of whom sang in English, music was a celebration of freedom. "Initially, when I first heard Zamrock, I thought it was a very rebellious sort of music," Arlotta says. "When I spoke to the people that lived it, I realised that they had won the battle for their independence 10 years prior to that. So it was more of an aesthetic and a fashion that they followed. There's many of the lesser known Zamrock songs that praise the President, saying, 'He's our leader,' 'We love Zambia,' and stuff like that. You think it's punk, but it's really not. Its [sentiment is]: "We were free doing whatever we wanted.'" A devastating decline Eventually, though, politics became impossible to ignore. Like most scenes, Zamrock couldn't last. But its eventual decline was slow, devastating, and attached to much wider existential events across the country. Copper accounted for 95% of Zambia's exports, so when the price of the metal fell dramatically in the mid-70s, it brought about a sharp economic decline. "If you have to debate between buying [music] or buying a bag of staple food, that impacts negatively," Jagari says. "And to an extent, musical instruments were regarded as luxury. They attracted high taxes. So we couldn't afford instruments." Furthermore, civil war in the neighbouring countries on the Zambian border was intensifying. Unlike in Zambia, where independence had been achieved by peaceful means, conflicts in Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa became violent: as one of the so-called Frontline States – a coalition of countries who opposed South Africa's apartheid rule and supported black liberation – Zambia became a target in the crossfire. "They would bomb some camps in Zambia, where they suspected they had freedom fighters camped," Jagari says. President Kaunda's answer was to declare blackouts and a curfew between 6pm and 6am. It left Zamrock bands with nowhere to play (other than "teen shows" in the afternoon that "nobody wanted to come to", as Jagari says) and no means of income. "The curfews and blackout impacted us negatively, because we couldn't play music at night. If you wanted to play music, you had to be in a venue from that time until the following morning, which was not practical, only machines would do that." In its place, many venues became discotheques, popularising disco and funk music, and moving Zamrock to the margins. To compound matters, Zambia suffered a catastrophic Aids crisis that killed an estimated 1.4 million people up to 2023. This included many leading figures on the Zamrock scene – among them Jagari's original Witch bandmates Chris "Kims" Mbewe, "Giddy King" Mulenga, Paul "Jones" Mumba, John "Music" Muma and "Star MacBoyd" Sinkala. "It was not a very nice time," Jagari says. "And it was not only the musicians that died that during that time, all across the board, soldiers died, teachers died. The economy wasn't too good, we had curfew and blackouts, and then the Aids came to finish the sad story." After Jagari left Witch in the late 1970s, they continued without him as a disco-influenced band under the leadership of keyboardist Patrick Mwondela, who changed the line-up until the band ended in 1984. However, Zamrock slid into obscurity, a once vibrant expression of freedom all-but forgotten by anyone who wasn't there. "A 15-year period where they're making all these records, and then all of a sudden they're all gone." Egon says. "The cassettes have taken over, just like they did in other parts of the world, the turntables get thrown out, and the records become worthless artefacts that no one cared about." Jagari left music behind at the start of the 1980s, training as a teacher before becoming a born-again Christian in the 90s and going into gemstone mining. "It wasn't easy." Jagari says. "I tried to become a gemstone miner, and the purpose was if I struck big in the gemstone mining, I would buy my own equipment and set up a studio. That was my dream." A watershed moment The course of history changed for Jagari, Witch and Zamrock more widely when Now-Again released We Intend to Cause Havoc! in 2011. Around 20 years ago, Egon, who specialises in unearthing and re-issuing forgotten music, was given unmarked cassettes of Zamrock music via friends of friends through his hip hop label Stones Throw Records. Most of it was Witch; Egon then tracked down Jagari. "He had bought the master tapes, then lost them. But he had the tapes transferred. When I met him, he was selling CDRs of Witch's music on the streets in Lusaka." It led to interest in the band outside of Africa for the first time. In 2012, Arlotta was sent the 1975 song Strange Dream by a friend. "And I was like, what is this? It was something that sounded very familiar, but also completely different, because they had their own twist to it. The recording quality and the way it was recorded was different. The drummer was a lot groovier." He took a trip to Zambia with some childhood friends in 2014 and decided to track Jagari down to make a documentary. He found Jagari at work in a mine, doing what looked like hard labour. "He's an intelligent man," Arlotta says. "I think at first he thought that music was 'something that I used to do'. And there was this battle between being a rock star and being a born-again Christian. Obviously, in church, if you're leading a band called Witch, they're very superstitious about these things down there." More like this:• How Led Zeppelin became the ultimate 70s rock band• The group who soundtracked US counterculture• Who is Cindy Lee? Pop's most mysterious sensation Both Egon and Arlotta, who managed Witch until January 2025, brought Jagari out of Africa for events and one-off gigs. Arlotta organised Witch's first tour outside Africa in 2017, with a band including second-era member Patrick Mwondela. Rapturously received shows across the UK, Europe and America led in 2023 to Witch releasing their first album in 39 years, Zango, recorded at Lusaka studio and released on Desert Daze Sound, in partnership with Partisan Records. Witch's new album, Sogolo, cements their position as pioneers. "It's pushed a lot of boundaries," Arlotta says of Sogolo. "It's got the roots there, but it's also experimenting a lot with a more modern sound, which is what they were doing back then." In many ways, Jagari is the last man standing: Arlotta calls him "an evangelist" for Zamrock. "There are others just as important," Arlotta. "But he is certainly the only one touring the world." He is the artist shaping the legacy of Zamrock. "Legacy is an interesting question," Egon says. "Because I think the Zamrock legacy is that great creativity can come from anywhere, and it can last. The stuff about Zamrock is that there were artefacts left. And it proves you could be from anywhere. You didn't have to have a great studio, you didn't have to have a major distribution deal. You didn't have to have anything. Your music could literally stay in the confines of one country. And you could create something so good that decades later, people aren't just going out and looking for it, but people are totally taken by it." "I think the success that Witch is having worldwide," Arlotta says, "and with things that are happening, like Tyler, The Creator, sampling [Ngozi Family] in one of his latest tracks, it's slowly putting Zamrock on the map." As for Witch, they have reached an audience around the world. "With Witch, you can make a case for them alongside any other great band, from anywhere," Egon says. "Anybody who hears their music doesn't say, 'That's cool for African rock music.' They're just like, 'Wow, that's great.'" And now Witch will become the first Zamrock band to play at Glastonbury, a hugely significant moment for a genre that began 55 years ago. "It's a good feeling," Jagari says with a smile. "But there's this tendency at the back of my mind to think how I wish that the [rest of the original] band was still alive, and some of those bands which were prominent that time, if they were alive, then the world would see what Zambia was doing that time. Unfortunately, somebody has to carry the torch on. And that is me. Because it's ours. The way Rhumba is to Cuba and Congo. The way Amapiano is to South Africa. The way highlife is to Nigeria. Zamrock is our own." Witch play the Shangri La stage at Glastonbury on 26 June. The Glastonbury Festival takes place from 25 June to 29 June. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wicked For Good: Your Questions About The Cast And Release Date (Plus The Scarecrow And Tin Man) Answered
Excitement for the musical sequel Wicked For Good is really starting to build following the release of the new film's first trailer. We'll admit that when we first heard that the stage musical Wicked was being split into two, we rolled our eyes a little – but after seeing Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in action last year, we now can't wait for the second instalment. There are still a few months to go until our next trip to Oz, but we know you might have a few questions between now and then. So, here's everything we know about the second movie… Initially billed as Wicked Part 2, it was revealed towards the end of 2024 that the sequel would be given the subtitle For Good, based on the show-stopping eleven o'clock performed as a duet between Elphaba and Glinda towards the end of the musical. The decision was met with a mixed response, but Ariana has claimed that Wicked For Good was actually already being touted as a title for the project when it was being filmed. 'I'm glad it's official now because we grew rather attached to it,' she said last year. 'It's just the perfect title because this project really has changed us for good.' Fans of the original musical will know that the second act begins with Thank Goodness, an ensemble number that helps catch us all up with what's gone down among the cast of characters since we last saw them. Besides that, we can look forward to the dramatic Elphaba number No Good Deed, her duet with Fiyero, As Long As You're Mine, and, as mentioned above, For Good, which has become one of Wicked's signature tunes. There's also another solo for the Wizard, Wonderful which… yeah… let's not even go there. While Wicked's original composer extended the One Short Day sequence in the first film, he's gone one step further in the sequel, and penned two new songs. Director Jon M Chu recently confirmed that one of these will be a new solo for Cynthia, while another will be performed by Ariana. Wicked itself is a retelling of the events of The Wizard Of Oz, retold from the perspective of its witches, Elphaba (known in the 1939 film as simply the Wicked Witch Of The West) and Glinda (who comes to be known as the Good Witch Of The North). Act one begins with Munchkinland celebrating the news of Elphaba's death, before taking us back through her younger years to explore her years at school. The second act – on which Wicked For Good is based – revisits the characters later in life, with Elphaba exiled and a public enemy, thanks to efforts from the Wizard Of Oz and Shiz professor Madame Morrible, and still harbouring feelings for Fiyero, to whom Glinda is now engaged. It also addresses more directly how specific events in the Wizard Of Oz came to be, including Dorothy's arrival in Oz, and her becoming friends with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion. Evidently, yes. While Dorothy is never seen on stage in the original production of Wicked, we've already caught a glimpse of her in the opening moments of the first film. Dorothy is also seen – once again from behind – in the latest trailer for Wicked For Good, suggesting the character will be more prominently featured in the movie than the stage musical. Chu told Vanity Fair: 'We tread lightly, but try to make more sense of how [Dorothy's arrival] impacts our girls and our characters than maybe the show does.' 'We're delicate. We're delicate. We're delicate,' he then insisted, reassuring anyone concerned about him taking any big swings away from the source material. It was previously reported that Matilda star Alisha Weir portrays Dorothy in the movie, though this is yet to be confirmed. Alright – we're going to be giving away some major Wicked spoilers now, so if you've never seen the stage musical and want to avoid these twists, just keep scrolling down to the next section. Did you hear that? Spoilers are ahead. Scroll to the next section if you want to avoid them. OK, we think they're gone. Let's proceed… So, Elphaba inadvertently creates the Scarecrow when she casts a spell on Fiyero – played by Jonathan Bailey – in an attempt to save his life in No Good Deed. The Tin Man, meanwhile, is created by Nessarose, who is played in the film by Marissa Bode. She attempts to use magic herself for the first time on Boq (Ethan Slater's character) to prevent her from leaving him, only for it to go awry, and turn him into the mechanic woodsman. As you've probably guessed, the Cowardly Lion is that same cub who Elphaba and Fiyero rescue in the first movie. Right here! Enjoy: The film will hit cinemas on Friday 21 November, with the film expected to be re-released in selective cinemas before then, to allow everyone to revisit the events of the first film. 9 Things We Need To Talk About Immediately In The New Wicked For Good Trailer 22 Weird And Wonderful Behind-The-Scenes Secrets You Probably Never Knew About How Wicked Was Made
