Although viewing it was not always encouraged in my household growing up (apparently Venerable Mom had a bad reaction to those pesky flying monkeys as a child), I have seen the 1939 musical-fantasy classic The Wizard of Oz countless times, in both its big screen glory and during the annual television broadcasts that were as much of a ritual as the Super Bowl and the Oscars, and, like so many others over the years, rank it as one of the all-time Hollywood greats. However, at no time during any of those viewings do I recall emerging from it thinking “Well, it was great but darn it—I just wish that I knew more about the complex personal relationship between the cackling, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West and her counterpart, the epitome of sweetness and light that was Glinda the Good Witch.” (That said, even as a child, I suspect that I liked the former more, if only because she wouldn’t have pulled that “Oh, you had the power to return home within you all the time” shit on Dorothy.)
Apparently I was in the minority in that regard because Wicked, the stage musical adaptation of the Winnie Holzman book based upon that very concept, has gone on to become one of the biggest entertainment juggernauts of the past couple of decades (it is the longest-running Broadway musical of this century), culminating in the release of the long-awaited film version. Considering how intense the fan base there is for this film, writing a review of it seems almost superfluous—barring some astonishing twist of fate, this is almost certainly going to be one of the biggest titles at the multiplex this holiday season. To get straight to the point, those who already identify themselves as fans of the show are most likely going to love it while those going in cold will no doubt find some things to admire but at the same time wonder exactly what all the fuss was about.
As the story begins, green-skinned outcast Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) arrives at the prestigious Shiz University to help get her wheelchair-using sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) settled in. It is there that she first crosses paths with Glinda (Ariana Grande), a walking cloud of pink-hued self-absorption who basks in the constant praise of her personal entourage (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James) while scheming to get the school’s top teacher, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), to take her on as her protege. However, after witnessing an inadvertent bit of magic performed by her in a fit of anger, it is Elphaba that Morrible decides to take on, not only enrolling her in the school as a student but making her Glinda’s roommate. The two naturally clash at first but when an attempted public humiliation of Elphaba doesn’t go quite as expected, the two finally become friends and Elphaba even convinces Morrible to take on Glinda as well.
While the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda grows, things are not as sanguine in the outside world. Recently, the Wizard, the mysterious man who arrived in Oz and became the unquestioned leader in accordance with some prophecy, has begun imposing draconian sanctions against the land’s talking animal population, among them Shiz history professor Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage). As an outcast herself, Elphaba thinks that stinks and yearns to be granted an invitation to meet the Wizard in person to make her case—Glinda joins the cause as well, though perhaps more out of an interest in Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), the super-handsome fellow student (and a prince, naturally) who has also become friends with Elphaba. Finally, the summons comes and, with Glinda at her side, Elphaba makes the journey to the Emerald City and the two finally meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), who makes some revelations that upends pretty much everything they thought they knew about the world and leads to a definite split in their friendship.
The key problem with Wicked is the sense of bloat that infuses practically every scene. Granted, this is not the kind of story where one wants to go the spare, minimalist route but director Jon M. Chu goes way over the top with a maximalist approach that the fan base may find delightful but which newcomers may consider slightly excruciating. For starters, although the title doesn’t really suggest it (though it does on screen), the film only covers the events of the first of the show’s two acts with part 2 arriving in theaters next Christmas. That kind of arbitrary splitting of a narrative in order to create a second movie requiring viewers to pay twice in order to see one story is already irksome but what makes it especially irksome here is that this one film clocks in at 160 minutes, which means it takes slightly longer to watch the first half of the story in this permutation than it does to watch the entire thing on stage. If this added stuff had brought new dimensions to the material or the characters, this extended length might have been justified but, for the most part, it just feels like padding that could have easily been excised. (In perhaps the most egregious example, there is a scene involving a couple of cameo appearances—I won’t reveal who, but I suspect you can probably guess—that is amusing first but goes on for so long and is so self-congratulatory in nature that it practically grinds the entire enterprise to a halt.)
Beyond the sheer ponderous length of the enterprise—which is reminiscent of the overstuffed and glacially paced musicals of the later Sixties that attempted to replicate the roadshow success of The Sound of Music and only succeeded in all but killing off the entire genre—Wicked has other problems, some inherent to the material as a whole and some due to the interpretation. The show has contributed one song to the list of Broadway all-time show-stoppers in “Defying Gravity,” the powerful tune that ends the first act and which serves as the film’s literally soaring climax. That song is a classic but with the exception of Glinda’s “Popular,” the other songs by Stephen Schwartz are too similar to each other and sound like they were designed to serve as American Idol audition pieces first and ways to further develop the story second.
As for the filmmaking, Chu—who previously directed the marvelous adaptation of the stage hit In the Heights—clearly knows how to make a musical but doesn’t quite know how to integrate the stuff that worked on stage with the technological elements that could only be accomplished on the screen. Since the film obviously takes place in a fantasy land, a certain departure from realism is to be expected, of course. However, when they made The Wizard of Oz, that fantasy land was designed and built on soundstages and while it was not necessarily realistic by any stretch of the imagination, there was a tactility to it all that helped blur the lines between reality and fantasy in ways that helped to bring an immediacy to Dorothy’s journey that is one of the key reasons why that film has resonated so strongly for so many people over the years. Here, Chu and his army of technicians have laid the CGI imagery on so thickly that you are always aware of it—it is so insistent on celebrating its own elaborate nature that it never feels quite real, which leads to a constant clash between it and the more human elements that are always threatened with being subsumed by the gloss surrounding them.
And yet, it is that human element that proves to be the film’s saving grace, particularly the spot-on casting of the two leads. Obviously, both Erivo and Grande have the musical chops to do justice to the songs and their renditions are as good as anyone could possibly hope them to be. However, they both prove to be just as strong even when the soundtrack is taking a much-needed break. Although the show’s revisionist take on the Wicked Witch and the notion of what it is that causes one to become a so-called villain is sometimes a little too on-the-nose for its own good, Erivo manages to tackle it in nuanced and recognizably human terms that allow viewers to really feel for the character of Elphaba in ways that probably could not have been fully achieved on stage. As for Grande, the idea of having her play Glinda is almost too obvious of a move but she is really good as well masterfully tackling both the character’s hilariously outsized sense of self-regard and the quieter moments detailing her friendship with Elphaba. Although his presence is relatively limited in this half, Goldblum is effectively hilarious and malevolent in equal measure to such a a degree that he may be the one element in the film that you wish there was more of here.
Of course, since Wicked is only one half of a film, it is pretty much impossible to fully assess it in the way that I might with a review of a normal film. Based on what I have seen so far, though, I suppose I can say that it is a sometimes awkward, sometimes exhilarating spectacle that is far too long and lumbering for its own good but which contains enough things that do work (particularly the performances from Erivo and Grande) to help you forgive, or at least temporarily overlook, the stuff that doesn’t. That said, fans of the show will no doubt love it and it will most likely go down as a perennial play at high school drama club parties. Is it as good as The Wizard of Oz or even the long-forgotten nightmare-fuel 1985 semi-sequel Return to Oz? No—those were films fueled by a genuine sense of imagination while this one occasionally has the feel of a marketing plan come to fruition. Is it better than such recent misfired musical adaptations as Dear Evan Hansen, The Color Purple, Mean Girls and, most infamously, Cats? Most definitely because unlike those efforts, Wicked has stuff in it that really does work—enough to make you wish that Chu had cut down on the surrounding excess a tad and allowed them to shine even brighter.
I enjoyed your article. Carrie Potter is a great title!