Like the bony, broom-riding icon of Oz it aims to exonerate, Wicked is neither all good nor all bad. But unlike her, it doesn’t cast much of a spell. Gregory Maguire’s 1995 meta-fictional prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a Tolkien-esque vision of an imaginatively detailed world: an Oz rife with religious and political strife in which the title character is a lime-toned PETA activist turned accountably bitter. The 2003 Broadway smash based upon it, which has set down in Boston for the first time (at the Opera House through May 14) with all the subtlety of Dorothy’s cyclone-blown house on the Wicked Witch’s sister, is an unlikely tale of girl bonding in which the meltable miscreant of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel is a bookish outcast with a Hogwartian knack for magic and Glinda is Tori Spelling. The book, by My So-Called Life writer Winnie Holzman, is alternately campy and sentimental. And Stephen Schwartz’s music, which meanders loudly between Into the Woods’ territory and Les Misérables’, is uninteresting but for the amusement of trying to detect the opening notes of Somewhere over the Rainbow, which the composer has altered rhythmically and inserted like auditory Ninas in a Hirschfield cartoon. It must be admitted, however, that this show has been as eagerly awaited as the second coming of Judy Garland and that the opening-night audience behaved as if such a visitation were indeed taking place.

The real star of Wicked is set designer Eugene Lee, who had the bright idea of setting the whole show in the innards of the book’s prophetical Clock of the Time Dragon, so that, following the death of the Wicked Witch of the West (after which the rest of the musical is a flashback), a smug, blonde, and begowned Glinda can descend in a round clockwork reminiscent of her bubble in the 1939 film. But the dragon itself, poised above the proscenium, wings aloft and eyes flashing electronically, is more indicative of the heavy-handed spectacle in which Wicked specializes, spectacle that includes dry-ice smoke, flying monkeys with flag-like wings, and a first-act finale, the anthemic “Defying Gravity,” in which misunderstood heroine Elphaba (a vanity-plate abbreviation of L. Frank Baum), embracing her witchliness, ascends into a collision of crossbeams. As the Wizard himself says of the thundering, Julie Taymor–esque bronze head that is his mouthpiece, “It’s a bit much, but you have to give people what they like.”

Whereas the book was a contemplation of good and evil disguised as a biography of passionate activist Elphaba, the musical gives equal shrift to the girls who will become the vilified WWW and that angel of PR, Glinda the Good Witch. Shunned Elphaba and vain Glinda are thrown together at Shiz University, where, after a mutually repelled face-off on “What Is This Feeling,” they become friends. Glinda goes so far as to attempt a dorm-room makeover in which Elphaba is encouraged to let her braid down and adorn her scraggly, green-hued beauty with a big pink flower — all of which makes her look like a young woman designed by Lily Pulitzer. But it’s a look no less eccentric than that of her fellow Ozians, whom Susan Hilferty (who won a Tony for her costumes) has done up in a loopily original hodge-podge of periods, headgear, bustles, and ruffles. Some of them resemble 19th-century Teletubbies.

Idina Menzel won a Tony for her portrayal of Elphaba. Julia Murney, who plays the part in the national-touring company, sprints impressively across the character’s considerable vocal range, with particularly round low notes. As Glinda, bouncy Kendra Kassebaum, who has great comic timing and a high soprano sometimes rendered shrieky by amplification, is like an adult version of Little Colonel–vintage Shirley Temple. There are also sparky performances by Alma Cuervo as Shiz headmistress Madame Morrible and P.J. Benjamin as a Mr. Cellophane of a Wizard. If only the show didn’t pummel you like a ton of yellow bricks.

The Wicked Witch gets no joy from her notoriety, and fame’s no fun either in The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, which is at bat in its East Coast premiere by Boston Theatre Works (at the BCA Plaza Theatre through May 6). Rebecca Gilman’s plays — which include that tiptoe through racial quicksand, Spinning into Butter, and The Glory of Living, a foray into the mind of a teenage killer that won the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborne Award and England’s Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright — are spare, tart, and unafraid of turning a log over. This one, a pointed comedy commissioned in 2004 by London’s Royal Court Theatre (where it starred Gillian Anderson), is coyer and less disarming than Butter, but it is clever. The heroine is successful painter Dana Fielding, who is cracking under the weight of her early promise. When a solo show tanks, her dealer stops calling, and a decaying relationship performs its final crumble, she attempts suicide — which lands her in the safety of a psychiatric hospital but, given the limitations of her insurance, not for long. To draw out her stay, she invents a neat little case of multiple-personality disorder and discovers that only in a new guise, free of the pressures of critics and handlers, can she connect with the delight she took in her art before it became her business. The kick is that the persona in which she takes refuge is that of fallen baseball hero Darryl Strawberry, who wrestled his own demons of fame.

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