Even as a child I thought I was above Wicked. I was raised in a household filled to the brim with Disney animated musicals on VHS; I knew the original Broadway cast recording of Les Misérables by heart; each Christmas I sat with my family to watch the televised adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) starring Donny Osmond on PBS. What’s more: I watched The Wizard of Oz (1939) over and over again. A poster for the film hung in my childhood bedroom, and I went as Dorothy for Halloween more times than I could count. For all intents and purposes, then, I should have basically been Wicked’s target audience. My friends fawned over the soundtrack; a few of them even had shirts with the now-iconic poster. I devoured Gregory Maguire’s novel on which the musical is based, and when the National Tour came through town, I insisted we go as a family.
But when the night came, I sat through the musical, stone-faced and cross-armed. I didn’t like what I was seeing. I didn’t like it at all.
To be a fan of musicals is to be largely disappointed with the movie musical landscape. For all we’ve gained in lush cinematic orchestrations and a new bevy of triple-threat talents, the movie musical often reaches for a kind of performative realism that rarely translates the source material to the screen. Tom Hooper’s close-up-laden adaptation of Les Misérables oscillated between gritty wartime set designs and bizarre high-camp fourth-wall breaking. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story recontextualized the original musical’s racial politics as a diatribe on gentrification. In order to see something silly and truly magical, I’d usually have to dip into the world of children’s animated musicals—most of which are toying with familiar IP and dense lore.
Wicked plays with similarly familiar work: the musical is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, and presupposes that the Wicked Witch of the West was not so villainous after all. Like many bad guy origin stories, the Witch—or Elphaba, named as a hat tip to L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books—suffers from the trauma of social isolation. Wicked charts her meteoric, magical rise in the Oz schooling system by way of “Shiz University” (were there no alternative names up for contention?) where she rooms with popular girl Galinda (aka Glinda), who is not as clever but far more accepted than her green roommate. The two spar, then bond. They are more alike than they realize, but their internal struggles—to be understood and to be adored, respectively—eventually give way to separate political goals. Their paths divide, they struggle, they fall, they rise again.
If this all sounds very silly to you, that’s because it is indeed very silly. In fact, to pretend Wicked is anything but silly is to deny yourself the many pleasures of musical theater. Because some, if not all, of this is supposed to be funny—on purpose.
It helps, of course, that Chu’s cast leans into the comedy of the situation. In the original Broadway production, starring Idina Menzel (“Adele Nazeem”) as Elphaba and Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda, Elphaba’s anger and hurt were barbed and uneasy. Menzel’s prickly presence lent the character an uneasy jaggedness. You felt bad for Elphaba, but didn’t want to be around her much, either. Chenoweth’s Glinda, on the other hand, was bubblegum incarnate. Their relationship was still funny, sure, but it was also uneasy and hesitant. Their platonic love for each other felt less fated, more coincidental. Magic, if you will.
In Chu’s Wicked, the duo is more comedically driven: Erivo plays the gentle straight man, so to speak, and Grande the goofball. Erivo’s Elphaba is sensitive, though no one’s fool. Her power is there, in song; Erivo overcomes the story’s hammy material as soon as she starts to belt. Grande, on the other hand, flies through the pitter-patter of Glinda’s dialogue with a manic charm. Her voice is undeniable—this is a world renowned pop star, after all—though it’s also a bit less self-assured, a sign of her character’s lack of self-confidence.
Much has been made of the visual ugliness of Wicked, its washed out quality and how the film’s most thrilling sequences are often backlit. I have no real explanation for the ugliness, but I did admire the sense of unreality it gave the whole thing. Chu has argued that he was aiming for a kind of realism—but realism is a huge pitfall for something like Wicked. This shouldn’t be real; it wasn’t real for Dorothy all those years ago, and it shouldn’t be real for us now. The faux-realism and backlit, washed-out sets lend Wicked’s performances a bit more, uh, gravity (sorry). We’re all aware this is very expensive dress-up, a kind of make-believe. You can buy into the allegory if you want, but where’s the fun in all that?
Chu’s two hour and forty minute film—about the length of the Broadway show—is only the first act. In one year, we’re going to have to do this all over again. The songs in Wicked (Part One) are stretched and expanded, recobbled together to include extended dialogue scenes mid-number. Still, for all that extended material, Wicked is almost shockingly well-paced. The story gallops along with the energy of, well, the first half of a musical. Things are looking up, the characters are coming together, and we feel excitement for what might come next. There’s even a case to be made at the end of Chu’s Wicked that maybe we should just leave it all at this, and close up shop as Elphaba flies off into the cotton candy clouds.
Wicked is at its best when it leans into practical magic—the kind of stage tricks that dazzle both in real life and on the big screen. “Dancing Through Life” and Shiz University’s rotating bookcases bring to mind the aerodynamic wonder of Christopher Nolan’s rolling hotel hallway. Glinda’s suitcases pop open to reveal lightboxes like little toy vanities, each pink box a present unto itself. Chu stuffs his Emerald City with kiosks reminiscent of the new and remodeled LaGuardia Airport, where I’ve spent many a bleary-eyed morning watching a fountain show set to an EDM cover of “New York, New York.” Is the refurbished LaGuardia any good? I’m not sure. It’s entrancing, almost moving. My eyes ache and water—but in both cases, I can’t look away.