Director – Jon M. Chu, Screenplay – Dana Fox & Winnie Holzman, Based on the Musical Wicked (2003) by Winnie Holzman & Stephen Schwartz, Based on the Novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire, Producers – Marc Platt & David Stone, Photography – Alice Brooks, Music/Lyrics – Stephen Schwartz, Musical Score – John Powell & Stephen Schwartz, Visual Effects Supervisors – Jonathan Fawkner & Pablo Helman, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisors – Anthony Smith & Robert Weaver), Visual Effects – Framestore (Supervisor – Jeremy Robert), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Corbould, Prosthetic Makeup Designer – Mark Coulier, Production Design – Nathan Crowley, Choreography – Christopher Scott. Production Company – Universal.
Cast
Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba Thropp), Ariana Grande-Butera (Galinda Upland/Glinda), Jeff Goldblum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Michelle Yeoh (Madame Morrible), Jonathan Bailey (Fiyero), Peter Dinklage (Voice of Dr. Dillamond), Marissa Bode (Nessarose Thropp), Ethan Slater (Boq), Andy Nyman (Governor Thropp), Keala Settle (Miss Coddle), Bowen Yang (Pfannee), Bronwen James (Shenshen), Courtney Mae-Briggs (Mrs Thropp)
Plot
Following the death of the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda the Good reflects back on the time she knew her. This began when Glinda, then known as Galinda, arrived at the Shiz University as a pupil to study magic. At the same time, Elphaba Thropp arrived to accompany her younger sister Nessarose to the academy. After demonstrating powerful magic, Elphaba was enrolled as a pupil at the headmistress Madame Morrible’s insistence. Madame Morrible also insisted that Galinda share her room with Elphaba. However, Elphaba’s green skin made her an outcast. Galinda determined to befriend Elphaba and include her. Elphaba was outraged when a decree came down that the talking animals be placed in cages, meaning the loss of her friend, the goat history professor Dr Dillamond. Galinda changed her name to Glinda in protest. Elphaba was then selected to travel to the Emerald City to meet The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with Glinda jumping aboard the train to come too.
The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on L. Frank Baum’s novel, is one of those genuine American classics. Its enduring popularity has led to hundreds of films making references, in-jokes and spoofs. There have been a number of sequels and spinoffs over the years from Journey Back to Oz (1974), Return to Oz (1985), Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013) and Legends of Oz: Dororthy’s Return (2014).
One of the most celebrated of these spinoffs was the musical Wicked (2003) from Stephen Schwartz, best known for Godspell (1971), plus soundtracks for assorted Disney animated films. This was adapted from the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire, although abandons substantial parts of the book’s plot. The original stage version premiered in San Francisco and then moved to Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and Joel Grey as The Wizard where it won three Tony Awards. It has featured a host of others in the role over the years and has been performed both on Broadway and internationally ever since.
The film version is taken up by Jon M. Chu. Chu comes from a music/dance background as director of the likes of Step Up 2: The Streets (2008), Step Up 3D (2010), Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011) and In the Heights (2021), another adaptation of a stage musical. Chu has also had his hand in various non-music/dance works ranging from action films like G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), Blumhouse’s disastrous live-action version of the cartoon Jem and the Holograms (2015), Now You See Me 2 (2016) and most recently the huge hit of Crazy Rich Asians (2018), as well as the Chinese-language children’s fantasy The Secret of the Magic Gourd (2007).
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba
I am probably the wrong person to be writing about a film like Wicked: Part 1 as I am just not a fan of Musicals. Now there are some exceptions to this as I will happily champion the likes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Tommy (1975), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) and Little Shop of Horrors (1986) to name but a handful. But the big Broadway show type of musical is not a genre that tickles my fancy. So I sit down to watch Wicked: Part 1 with a natural bias against the traditional musical as a genre from the outset. Within weeks of the film opening, the distributors were offering singalong screenings of the film, which is the sort of participatory movie-going experience that makes me want to run away screaming.
Rather than the buoyant, larger-than-life fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, Wicked: Part 1 emerges as a Harry Potter wannabe with more glitz and song and dance numbers. It is, if you like (at least in the early Shiz University scenes), a Harry Potter copycat that seems aimed at teenage girls. We get makeover scenes, songs about being popular and themes all about fitting in with/standing out from the status quo.
The original Broadway musical ran for 150 minutes (with intermission between the two acts). By contrast, the film – of which this is only the first act viz the title Wicked: Part 1 – runs ten minutes longer at 160 minutes. Somewhere between stage and screen, that means a whole lot of bloat has come into the film. There is the sense that every beat of the story is being drawn out and that the film is throwing in any opportunity to go big. For no real reason, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera’s arrival at the Emerald City is greeted by the entire populace breaking into a massive choreographed number. Similarly, the arrival at the Shiz University comes with large oversized numbers, including one that has people dancing around a room that for some reason has a cupola built with wheels of rotating ladders (watching the scene, I could not for the life of me work any possible architectural purpose for such a design scheme).
Ariana Grande-Butera as Galinda/Glinda
Often the better scenes of the film are not the production numbers, but where Jon M. Chu slows right down – like the scene with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera dancing together, mimicking each other’s movements, which comes without any big numbers, nothing other than background score. I also enjoyed the later scenes at the Emerald City (where Jeff Goldblum is perfectly cast as The Wizard), which are more dramatic. Although even then, Chu gets carried away towards the end of the show and blows everything up with Cynthia and Ariana escaping in a hot-air balloon (while still indoors) and chased around the ramparts by guards and flying monkeys.
The problem I have with Wicked is the same one I have with the Star Wars prequels. Both works are tripping over their feet in terms of fanservice, showing how familiar aspects of the series came to be. Thus we get scenes here with The Wizard asking advice on what colour his brick road should be before Glinda suggests yellow; see how the Wicked Witch gets her hat; see how she creates the flying monkeys; and meet a young cub version of the Cowardly Lion (while Part 2 will show the origins of the Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodsman). But it is also laborious over-explanation of things that worked perfectly well as they were first time around. The Wicked Witch was literally black hat evil, there was no need to understand her motivation and how she was a tragic figure and an outcast. This is not even the first film to deal with the origin of the Wicked Witch with Wicked having its thunder stolen in this regard by Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful. There has even been a previous musical version of The Wizard of Oz with The Wiz (1978).
The casting is okay. Cynthia Erivo holds her own as Elphaba but it is just hard to screw your eyes up think of the shy, awkward, relatively sympathetic character here being the same person that was played by Margaret Hamilton in the 1939 film. Similarly, Ariana Grande-Butera has popularity as a recording artist and is perfectly capable here. It is just with 5’½” frame, she looks for all the world like she is only thirteen years old. In The Wizard of Oz, Glinda is seen as the embodiment of good, whereas with Ariana Grande she comes off as an entitled child a background of privilege whose do-gooding seems earnestly naïve at best.
