By Sandra Hall
WICKED ★★★★
(PG) 160 minutes
There is no disputing the popularity of the stage version of Wicked. It’s been a Broadway favourite for 20 years, and has become a durable international hit. But I’ve never quite understood why. It’s always seemed to me that its revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz and the life and character of Dorothy’s nemesis, the Wicked Witch of the West, provided a very shaky basis for a rollicking musical.
Cynthia Erivo brings gravitas to Elphaba.
In recasting the witch as a victim of prejudice and misunderstanding, the story often slips into didacticism. There is so much going on that it’s easy to lose the plot, which is wrapped rather loosely around the friendship between the so-called bad girl, Elphaba, who is stigmatised by the fact she’s been born with green skin, and the pink and pretty Glinda the Good, who’s adored by everybody.
Happily, the film version’s director, Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), is quick to let us know he’s aware of all this. Working from a screenplay co-written by Winnie Holzman, one of the musical’s creators, he’s taken a successfully radical approach to the show, smoothing out the kinks in the narrative by spreading it across two films (part two will be with us in November next year).
He’s brightened up the scenery with a series of spectacularly expansive sets. The Yellow Brick Road is now surrounded by fields glowing with the bulbs of 9 million tulips. And Shiz University, where Elphaba and Glinda meet, is a mixture of Hogwarts and a Venetian palazzo with Arabian flourishes. The dance numbers are brilliantly arranged to make the most of its architecture, and you can better appreciate the wit of the song lyrics because of the potency of the close-ups.
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Sydney for the film’s global premier earlier this month.Credit: Kate Geraghty
All up, everything makes more sense. The plot’s complexities have more time to play out and the switch in tone – from light-hearted coming-of-age story to serious political parable – loses its abruptness and the didacticism melts away.
And it’s perfectly cast. Cynthia Erivo gives Elphaba all the gravitas she needs without losing sight of her sense of humour, and Ariana Grande’s Glinda is a deadpan delight, genuinely baffled on the rare occasions when things don’t entirely go her way. She and John Bailey’s playboy prince, Fiyero, seem made for one another until he falls under Elphaba’s influence and inconveniently develops a taste for thinking.
The finale shifts the action to Emerald City, where Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard of Oz is waiting for Elphaba, having heard of her magic powers from Shiz’s charmingly Machiavellian Dean of Sorcery Studies, Madame Morrible, superbly played by Michelle Yeoh.
Goldblum doesn’t disappoint. He has been honing his talent for satirising preening despots with his role as Zeus in the TV series Kaos, and his wizard is just as flawed – a genial conman who’s successfully disguised his lack of personal magnetism by surrounding himself with the trappings of power plus lots of gadgetry. Madame Morrible could probably turn him to water with one raised eyebrow.
As Chu demonstrated in his film adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In the Heights (2021), he’s a master at transferring the exhilaration of a big dance number from stage to screen.
His cameras know exactly when and where to move, and the cutting is done with a fine sense of the guiding rhythms of the choreography. In other words, he’s achieved everything a film adaptation of a stage show is meant to do. He’s used the freedoms of the screen to make the original bigger and better.
Wicked is released in cinemas on November 21.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.