“Wicked,” the eagerly awaited major motion picture version of the smash revisionist “The Wizard of Oz” Broadway musical, features all the pros and cons that plague modern big-budget musical adaptations. A long-in-development project that had Lady Gaga at one point queued up for the title role; “Wicked” flies into theaters not just as a single film but as a PART ONE, as I am sure most audience members will leave the theater being confused by. But it’s doubtful they’ll be overly concerned, as “Wicked” (already being rebranded as “Wicked: Part 1”) has the good fortune of featuring the two standout numbers of the show, including “Defying Gravity,” that will have audiences decidedly ear wormed from their seats to their cars and beyond. What remains to be seen, however, is whether or not the spell cast by this glitzy production will be enough to entice that same audience to traverse the yellow brick road back to the theater in one year’s time for the story’s conclusion.
“Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” was published in 1995, and later adapted for the stage in 2003. The movie begins where “The Wizard of Oz” ends; with the Wicked Witch of the West dead from a spritz of bucket water and the denizens of Oz celebrating the conclusion of her alleged tyranny. It is Glinda The Good Witch, coming down in her pink bubble, who regales the citizens of Munchkinland, and us as well, the true story of how once, long ago, she and the WWW were good friends. We are then transported back to witness the life of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), daughter of the Governor of Munchkinland, who had the unfortunate luck of being born green. When her sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), future Falling House victim, is sent to the illustrious Shiz University; Elphaba’s dormant magical abilities are unintentionally displayed for a green-phobic student body, including the privileged and ditzy Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), and an intrigued sorcery professor named Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Before you can say “Popular,” Elphaba is enrolled in Shiz, forced to be Galinda’s roommate, and set to be trained in her magical abilities by Madame Morrible with the hope of one day being granted an audience with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) to be gifted her heart’s desire.
The “characters go to a magical school and get into hijinks” sub-genre of fiction has essentially run its course over the past 20 years, although you can’t blame “Wicked” for taking that long to be adapted. But the film is so propulsive and the performances so engaging that we seldom care whether or not the tropes that “Wicked” partly helped usher into culture are being perpetuated past its sell-by date. Erivo (“Widows”) and Grande carry the movie by making iconic roles, from multiple mediums, decidedly their own. Erivo’s Elphaba grips our hearts from the second she is on screen and holds the emotional center of the film with the deftness of a star coming into her own. Grande, the less-known talent from an acting standpoint, finds the perfect balance of ditzy obliviousness and passive cruelty so that we enjoy Galinda’s gradual evolution from spoiled rich girl to still-spoiled friend of Elphaba. Their relationship is the secret sauce of the movie and is crystalized in the film’s best scene; although I doubt those who know the musical could assume to which I am referring.
At a party held for students of Shiz, Galinda vindictively tricks Elphaba into attending and wearing as her costume a black, pointy hat. All the other students laugh at Elphaba, who for her part tries to play it off by dancing without music to “UNO-Reverse” the mockery. She wants them to think she does not care. But the depth of her pain can no longer be hidden. Galinda sees this and joins Elphaba in solidarity. What follows is an incredibly effective, nearly silent, improvisational dance between the two. Director Jon M. Chu (“In The Heights,” “Crazy Rich Asians”) takes the camera intimately close to the pair. We see Elphaba’s steely persona melt away, with Erivo playing a lifetime’s worth of ridicule and “other-ing” on her face in a devastating way that no staged adaptation could ever truly represent. I found myself crying along with her, despite myself, and was fully enraptured by the raw emotionality on display. This is what the movies are made for.
As I found myself crying at Elphaba and Galinda’s dance, something came into focus for me that I couldn’t quite articulate before. When you are singing onstage, playing everything to the back row, that level of performance is taxing and difficult; emotions have to be maximalized through movement and song. But in a film, that fixed barrier of theatricality is shattered. The moment of intimacy between Galinda and Elphaba stood in stark contrast to the remainder of the film, where that level of visual specificity was largely lacking. The lighting throughout is mostly uniform and flat; the better to see the lush costumes and grand crowds of dancers, but the worse for utilizing shadows and contrast for thematic purposes. And the sets, while tailor-made to one day be built 1:1 at a Universal Studios Theme Park, are often large open areas, perfect for ease of production and visual cohesion but horrible for creating unique images that rise above the already immortal iconography at play. These factors are par for the course with modern studio filmmaking; where simply placing characters we recognize on camera is often seen as giving the audience what they want. But I would contend that, in adaptation, mere visual representation is inadequate. We do not want to be shown something that only the movies can show us, we want to FEEL something unique that only a filmmaker’s vision can articulate.
Once home from the film, I turned on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” a criminally underseen musical from the dog days of the pandemic that is painterly not just with how it uses light and shadow but with how it creates meaning through visual inventiveness, from the simplest close up to the grandest continuous take. While this comparison might not be fair, comparing most filmmakers to Spielberg isn’t; it drove home what I might often hope to find but rarely do in modern movie musicals; a sense of adaptation, of re-invention, of finding levels of emotionality that would be lost on a stage. “Wicked” is a lot of things, and fantastic at most of them. But beyond a single moment when a good witch and a mean witch find commonality and companionship, the experience feels more like a trick conjured by Oz himself; loud, bright, and even fun, but ultimately without that special spark that makes true movie magic.
Fans of the musical will have a blast, even a neophyte like myself left the theater humming “Defying Gravity,” and I’m sure you and your family will too. Just do me a favor and don’t be one of those folks who sing the songs along with the movie.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Wicked” is playing at The Broad Theater, Prytania Theater Uptown, and Prtyania Theatres at Canal Place.
