Some Broadway musicals begin to show their age after years of touring. Narratives become slack and tedious. Casts turn careless in their execution. Set pieces begin to fray around the edges.

None of that applies to "Wicked," which has landed confidently at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theatre for a six-week run in its third Twin Cities go-round.

From the moment Glinda, ruler of Oz, arrives by delicate bubble carriage to the finale when she leaves by same, "Wicked" sparkles like, well, fairy dust.

It's gratifying that Joe Mantello's flawless and lyrical production, with its seamless transitions, is still in such tiptop shape. It allows the show to reveal more of its depth and meaning, even if Stephen Schwartz's score hasn't gotten any more hummable from repeated exposure.

The power of "Wicked" -- created by Schwartz and librettist Winnie Holzman from Gregory Maguire's fanciful 1995 novel -- rests on its portrait of two young women figuring out their relationship to each other and to men. Loyalty, friendship and love grow out of shallowness and seemingly unbridgeable differences.

Told in flashback, "Wicked" also imaginatively explains how some of the characters in "The Wizard of Oz" came to be. We see the future Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba (Vicki Noon), as a shy girl who's shunned because her skin is green. Her rival is Glinda (Natalie Daradich), a perky, confident stereotypical blonde who barrels on oblivious to her flaws, including an amusing propensity for Sarah Palin-esque malapropisms.

Daradich has the ditz down pat, inhabiting Glinda with a hair-tossing silliness but also with tremendous vocal agility and a wonderful sense of play. She is well-matched by Noon, a charismatic vocal powerhouse whose Elphaba grows steadily out of the limitations of her skin. The strong chemistry of the two principals helps us to clearly see these maturing characters, who are more alike than different.

They also open a deeper dimension of "Wicked," that of a feminist work that does not wear its politics on its sleeve. The show, in which women come to rule after a corrupt, male-dominated order, cleverly reworks archetypes from literature, fairy tales and wizardry. The fun, entertaining result points to a technique that could be applied to many a classic.