Wicked
Landmark's Ritz Five
Philadelphia
Nov. 23, 2024
When Ariana Grande — in full lip-filler and eyelashes-extended glory — slid off my meme feed and onto the big screen for the first weekend of Wicked showings, I wasn't prepared to be charmed.
I was more than ready for the blockbuster version of Wicked, a musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire's gritty novel about the perils of societal "othering,” to gloss over the ugly in the name of movie magic. But I was surprised when pop star Ariana Grande’s performance turned out to be a pitch-perfect representation of the new ways that modern Hollywood can make an old story sing.
The Wicked film — to be released in two parts — is the latest adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s original novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire based that story on L. Frank Baum's cinematic classic, The Wizard of Oz, repositioning Baum's two-dimensional villain, now known as Elphaba, as protagonist, and Galinda, the “good witch,” as a blind-to-her-own-privilege best friend. Maguire uses Elphaba, a green-skinned girl with burgeoning magical powers, to examine how societies use violence and propaganda to unify the populace against an easily identified "other.” The book was given a Broadway makeover in 2003, lightening themes and storylines just enough to make it palatable to tourists while maintaining enough edge for critical acclaim.
Watching the stage musical when I was 13 spurred a kind of spiritual awakening. The soundtrack looped on my iPod Touch for years after. The fun theatricalities got a groove stuck in my head that inspired me to sneak the original book off my parents’ top shelf. As I read through pages of political upheaval, sex scenes, and torture, I uncovered a fuller articulation of the weight of the world we live in than upbeat Broadway songs could ever convey. Still, the book became a foundation that only instilled more power into the music that had first captured my attention — together, these works of art piqued my interest in finding more nuanced representations of the power dynamics that define and underlie our everyday lives.
The news that Wicked would be adapted for the screen by Jonathan Chu, a director best known for the rom-com spectacular Crazy Rich Asians and Now You See Me 2, foreshadowed a production too drenched in frivolity and spectacle to see the either the heart or the horror that make the story so resonant.
Sure enough, opulent world-building was the most obvious focus of the two-and-a-half hour interpretation of the story’s first half. There are expansive animations of an enriched Oz, aptly highlighting the increased wealth disparity of the world into which the latest Wicked interpretation has been knowingly released. And there were plenty of references to the cinematic lineage from which Wicked was originally born: Vibrant poppies (a technicolor treat in the 1939 movie) make for a visually stunning motif symbolizing the spell of ignorance cast upon the show’s sky of celebrity stars, who play a school of characters all prejudiced against Elphaba and her broader quest to protect Oz’s outcasts.
Some of those same elements — like an obnoxiously long musical number featuring Kristin Chenowith and Idina Menzel, the actresses who first brought the roles of Galinda and Elphaba to Broadway — are overdone distractions. But generally speaking, the charm offensive worked on the sold-out audience and even on cynical and terminally online little old me: I laughed at a dictatorial Jeff Goldblum, whose face is carved into Oz’s version of Mount Rushmore, and blushed at bad-boy heart-throb Jonathan Bailey’s stupidly seductive performances of songs like “Dancing Through Life,” whose lyrics go like this: “Stop studying strife and learn to live the unexamined life.”
Even Ariana Grande, who has been looking unhealthily skinny and plastic surgery-obsessed as of late, showed off a self-effacing recognition of how blind superficiality has become one of society’s biggest woes, even if it’s also America’s special ingredient as an empire of entertainment. I was glad that Grande got the comedy of it all: Her Mariah Carey-inspired, overzealous vocal runs and extravagant dance sequences all came with a big, voluptuous wink. Grande, just like Galinda, is gorgeous and talented — it’s the worshipping of perfection that’s the problem.
So, no, Wicked the movie was not perfect. It cashed in on overly-emotive performances and dumb jokes. But it kept people, myself included, off their phones and invested in the film for its entire duration — which was enough time to lay out the basic premise of the actual story involving the subjugation of a “second class” of humanoid animals whom Oz’s government wants to put in cages so they can no longer move or speak.
The heart of the film — all of the fun that might seem surface level — came across in this first half of the movie, which focuses primarily on Elphaba’s personal problems as an outsider. The real horrors lie on the other side of intermission between the two movie, when the sequel will have to deal more deeply with the harder horrors: The outright abuse and torture of an entire sector of society. Those are fundamentally different realities to convey on a screen, even if they’re philosophically tied through the lens of oppression.
Cynthia Erivo left us on a high note with her decadent execution of “Defying Gravity.” It was exciting to zoom alongside Elphaba as the “wicked witch” first learns to fly broomstick style — a testament to modern animation capabilities. The director took advantage of all his resources — an all-star cast, overachieving costume designers, and all-out special effects — to bring the world of Wicked itself to life in a compelling way for those of us invested in the story’s evolution.
Chu’s mastered the fun of it all. We’ll have to wait until next year to see if he can dig deep to capture the darkness that lies beneath — while keeping it PG.
