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The term “stagebound” is familiar to anyone who’s seen enough Hollywood adaptations of Broadway musicals. In the desire to get everything people like about a stage show into the movie, producers move heaven and boards to squeeze it all onto the screen, no matter how antithetical it might be to another medium.
Jon M. Chu and Universal Pictures’ extravagant transfer of Stephen Schwartz’s beloved Wicked musical is the opposite of that. It’s something new. Not in terms of fidelity. Wicked the Movie is slavishly faithful about duplicating your favorite moments from Wicked the Show—but only half of that show. Aye, despite being marketed as simply Wicked, full-stop, this is actually an adaptation and expansion of merely Act One of the stage version. In a modern world where popular novels with mega-fanbases like Dune, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the final Hunger Games installment all got divided by two, Wicked has essentially become the first expanded musical universe.
The show is there, but so are elements taken directly from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel which never would’ve worked on the stage. For isntance, Professor Dillamond (Peter Dinklage) is a full-on goat now, organizing a talking-animal resistance against the rise of fascism in Oz. Meanwhile elements which were always part of the show, such as the cliquey nature of the Wicked Witch of the West’s academy days at Shiz University, are greatly built upon in a way apropos for a media landscape which has already taken 20 years worth of inspiration from Wicked and Harry Potter (see: Wednesday or Percy Jackson).
So from a certain point of view, Wicked is the most thoroughly modern musical to come out of Hollywood in this century. But lest you read that as glib, rest assured it also remains as emotionally, and more impotently audibly, breathtaking as fans of the show will remember. With two powerhouse vocal performances by Ariana Grande and an especially devastating Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: Part One manages to levitate above whatever cynical commercial considerations weigh it down, or for that matter what any critic might have to say about those limitations. This thing is built to last as a monument to theater kids for generations to come, right down to a grandiose finale that will leave the youngest audiences feeling like they’re walking on air out of the theater.
That magic begins by inverting the original Wizard of Oz story so thoroughly that it’s easy to speculate that this will become the definitive telling of Oz for millions to come. Like the stage show, Wicked begins where we traditionally associate the ending of L. Frank Baum’s story (and its 1939 movie). The Wicked Witch of the West is dead, and all of Oz is celebrating her melting. Munchkins dance along the Yellow Brick Road, children laugh and play in the poppy fields, and effigies of the green woman are all but burned by a crowd that gives Glinda the Good Witch (Grande, who is credited as Ariana Grande-Butera in the movie) serious pause. See, Glinda more than knew the “Wicked Witch;” she was her best friend back in college at Shiz, and she comes down from her flying bubble to tell the mob all about it.
When Glinda met the woman who would become Wicked, things were different. For starters, Glinda went by her full-name of Galinda, and the Wicked Witch was simply Elphaba (Erivo), a studious and lonely young woman who initially is only on campus to see her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) off on her first day. Nessarose is wheelchair-bound and eager to conform. Elphaba claims to have zero interest in any such frivolity. She does, however, feel seen for the first time when headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) takes keen interest in Elphaba’s evident magical abilities. She recruits Elphaba to the school and forces her to be the roommate of the most popular, and seemingly shallow, girl in the freshman class, Galinda.
Much of the rest of the film is about a mutual disdain between Galinda and “Elphie” (Galinda’s nickname for her roomie) gradually thawing into admiration and friendship. Galinda belts bubbly pop ballads about making Elphie “Popular,” and gets her to dance with the roguish bad boy of the school, Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who doth protest too much when he sings a catchy anthem about setting low expectations by “Dancing Through Life.” Yet it all becomes radically secondary as Elphaba learns that Oz’s talking animals are being scapegoated and worse by authorities. When she and Galinda are offered a chance to go to the Emerald City and meet Oz the Great and Terrible (Jeff Goldblum), Elphie hopes it is an opportunity to stop the rise of hate crimes against minorities. What she finds, however, is a revolution.
Visually this is the most sumptuous Oz has looked onscreen since 1939. Director Chu and his production designer Nathan Crowley lean into the iconography of Hollywood’s Golden Age when echoing the elements we are more than familiar with: yellow bricks and poppy fields that might as well be growing rubies. But when getting to color outside the lines, and even in spite of Wicked‘s stagey origins, the movie is strikingly cinematic. Consider how the movie expands Shiz’s entryway from a simple gate to it instead being a network of Venice-like canals on which students arrive via gondola.
Paul Tazewell’s costumes are similarly stunning, particularly in all the shades of pink applied to Grande’s wardrobe, which runs the gamut from the familiar Good Witch gown to designer peignoirs. It’s a luscious production, albeit the color-grading strangely seeks to mute a film that should have leaned harder into its oversaturated MGM influences.
The designs of the film provide a beatific backdrop. Yet it is the movie’s old-fashioned theatrical impulses that prove to be its real superpower. Or, to put a finer point on it, Erivo and Grande can really sing, and they do so often in live and spectacular fashion. A friend I saw the picture with was even surprised to learn that most of their singing was performed in-camera, even when Erivo is being flung on wires and a broom 40 feet above the soundstage floor.
There’s of course been “live-sung” movie musicals before, including the uneven Les Misérables adaptation from about a decade ago. Yet that movie made the seeming gimmick both obvious and lamentable when more than a few actors proved beneath the material (and that includes more than just Russell Crowe). Yet you might not even notice the singing is being done on the day by Wicked’s two leads since one is a pop star with a soprano’s range, and the other a Tony winner for her work in The Color Purple musical.
In terms of character performance, however, they’re far less evenly matched. While Grande has proven herself to be an adept comedian with lightning-quick timing on Saturday Night Live, Wicked is the first time in her adult life she’s returned to playing full characters on the screen, and it shows. A more seasoned thespian might have brought Glinda’s nuances and manic joy to bear. However, Grande’s Glinda is flatter and comes across as a self-loathing Regina George, lost in her own doe eyes, rather than Carole Lombard reborn. The character is obviously meant to be the incandescent comic relief of the musical, yet this Glinda is perhaps a little too mean and self-conscious of her defects to steal the show like Kristin Chenoweth’s infectious hair-flipping did on the stage 20 years ago. Intriguingly, whether by accident or design, this does make the adaptation much more Elphaba’s story—and Erivo’s movie.
Erivo’s Elphie is more forlorn than I recall the character being in the mid-2000s. She’s steelier too. Once this Elphaba gets going and starts climbing her crescendos, she’s like a sword sheathed in half-chipped crystal that’s finally exploded from its damaged wrapping. The loneliness at the beginning is palpable; the rage at the end transcendent.
That ending really does fly, too, not least of all because the movie has the dubious fortune of coming out in a moment where the musical’s anti-fascist allegory no longer seems quite so distant or childlike. While the musical’s political trappings were always heavy-handed in a way befitting its 2000s and YA-adjacent origins, the more heightened elements of racism and bigotry in the movie land different in 2024. Yet getting there remains the movie’s biggest challenge.
As aforementioned, Wicked is only half the story. And it handles that detriment better than many other incomplete “Part Ones” littering Hollywood, including the similarly themed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But at two hours and 41 minutes, the Wicked movie is just a few minutes shy of the stage show’s entire length. And like most part ones, that expansion ultimately leads to the film having a rather padded and meandering pace. We spend so long on the note of Elphaba and Galinda being enemies that their sudden friendship at around the 100-minute mark comes too little, too late. It’s hard to care about the mean girl when she’s mean for over half the movie.
Other supporting characters, like Fiyero, also feel strangely underdeveloped because too much of their arcs are dependent on Act Two of the show. Bailey certainly has charm and his one big musical number is a crowdpleaser, but the character is ultimately superfluous to a film that has no use for him beyond standing in for Elphie’s secret crush.
Still, I recognize these sizable narrative problems will be completely nullified (if noticed at all) after audiences get enraptured by the film’s spectacular climax. Wicked takes too long to get to the Emerald City, but when it’s there, the thing erupts exactly in time with Erivo’s magnificent rendition of “Defying Gravity.” Much of it, again, is achieved while the actress is hanging by literal threads. It is the definition of a showstopper—the show indeed stops!—and it is achieved by Chu and company creating enough oomph to ensure it goes down as a classic movie moment for its target audience.
Wicked is a big Hollywood undertaking, with many of the modern pitfalls therein. But like its emerald witch, it defies the laws of gravity and conventional wisdom. Occasionally, it even soars.
Wicked opens in theaters on Friday, Nov. 22. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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