Wicked

Adapting a beloved stage musical for film is a dicey business. Sometimes a near-flawless screen translation of a classic show, like Steven Spielberg’s 2021 reimagining of West Side Story, fails to click with audiences. Other times, a contemporary musical like In the Heights can’t quite seem to fit into the frame of a classic Hollywood-style movie musical. What feels on the stage like soaring exuberance can come off in close-up as corny cringe (or, in the case of 2019’s Cats, a sort of eldritch horror). And finding the right casting—stars who are famous enough to be a draw at the box office, while also possessing the technical song-and-dance chops of a Broadway performer—has stymied many a would-be successful adaptation.

The project of turning the Tony-winning smash hit Wicked into a movie—or two of them, since the on-screen title of this installment is Wicked: Part I—has been underway for well over a decade, with a revolving door of possible filmmakers, stars, and writers attached at one time or another. After considering directors Rob Marshall (Chicago), James Mangold (Walk the Line), J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot), the producers eventually went with Jon M. Chu, who made In the Heights, along with Crazy Rich Asians and the second and third films in the Step Up series. The screenplay, credited to Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, was adapted from Stephen Schwartz’s music and lyrics and Holzman’s own book for the stage musical, itself originally based on a bestselling novel by Gregory Maguire.

As for the cast—well, the cast is a great example of the above-mentioned dilemma about whether to fill the lead roles of a musical adaptation with seasoned stage veterans or supernova-size stars. Wicked splits the difference. As Elphaba, the title character who’s a youthful version of The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch, we have Cynthia Erivo, already a Tony and Grammy winner for the Broadway revival of The Color Purple but a less well-known figure to movie audiences, though she has done acclaimed work in films like Widows and Harriet. And as Galinda, the pre–Wizard of Oz incarnation of Glinda the Good Witch, there’s Ariana Grande, pop diva and former Nickelodeon TV kid, a singer with a four-octave range who’s been releasing hit albums and filling arenas for more than a decade, but who has rarely acted on the big screen (she played a small role as a pop star in Adam McKay’s 2021 satire Don’t Look Up).

The characters these triple threats portray are entirely different and so to are the approaches each takes to bring them to life. Playing Elphaba, a lonely outcast turned anti-authoritarian rebel, Erivo marshals a formidable arsenal of skills: She can sing with raw power and conveys a full spectrum of emotions—dejection, outrage, longing, triumph—using only her face and body. As Galinda, who when we first meet her is a harebrained girlboss along the lines of Mean Girls’ Regina George, Grande is charming and pretty hysterical. Her agile soprano voice is just right for the character’s virtuosic solos, and she leans right in to portraying a character that requires not a single eyelash be out of place. I would be remiss if I didn’t lend a tiny bit of both of these character’s success on Paul Tazewell’s excellent costumes. With such different approaches and characters it could be easy for one of these actors to outstrip the other but I believe the two of them in combination create such believable chemistry as frenemies, romantic rivals, and dueling divas that each performance winds up elevating the other. The movie that surrounds them is a lavish old-Hollywood spectacle bursting with gorgeously designed sets and bravura supporting turns.

The opening flashback goes all the way back to Elphaba’s birth and early childhood introducing us to the Thropps, a respectable Oz-ian couple who are aghast when their first child is born with bright-green skin. Elphaba loses her mother at an early age and grows up as a kind of second-class citizen within the family, with her father (Andy Nyman) openly preferring her younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode). Nessa (like Bode herself) uses a wheelchair, and their father is so overprotective and anxious about her well-being that when she is dropped off at Shiz University, the Harvard-meets-Hogwarts of the land of Oz, Elphaba is expected to stay with her sister as a kind of assistant, with no chance to take classes herself. But soon Elphaba’s latent magical powers, which she barely understands yet, are spotted by the school’s headmistress Madame Morrible (a regal Michelle Yeoh).

Elphaba is offered private tutoring in the magical arts, provoking a wave of jealousy from her roommate, Galinda, a hypercompetitive perfectionist who’s so popular she has a retinue of adoring sycophants (among them the always-welcome Bowen Yang). The two young women enter into a mostly unspoken rivalry that intensifies when they both get a crush on a handsome new student, Prince Fiyero (an absolutely delightful Jonathan Bailey, star of the Bridgerton TV series as well as the London stage). Meanwhile, Nessarose is being romanced by the shy Munchkin youth Boq (Ethan Slater, another new broadway star).

But college romance is not the only intrigue afoot at Shiz U. Oz is undergoing a political crisis that has created chaos on campus. The old world, in which animals and humans could speak the same language and live as equals, is giving way to a ruthless new order in which animals are being caged and deprived of their capacity to talk. The school’s history teacher, a wise goat marvelously voiced by Peter Dinklage, becomes a victim of the institution’s crackdown on animals, enraging Elphaba and eventually sending her to the Emerald City in search of help from the Wizard (an unusually wistful Jeff Goldblum).

I’ve never seen the stage production of Wicked but even growing up in the backwoods of Massachusetts in the mid-2000s, the show’s reach was inescapable. There’s a reason for that. Wicked is a timeless musical that goes far beyond recycling what we know of Baum’s Oz books and the 1939 classic film. Instead it uses a world we’re already aware of to ask big moral questions about friendship and justice. It’s songs are strong enough to stand on their own two feet completely removed from the musical itself (I had friends in high school with the soundtrack in their cars). The film’s staging of these big numbers is almost always just right: intimate or grand-scaled according to the song’s requirements, with witty choreography by Christopher Scott performed against a backdrop of spectacular and intricately detailed sets by production designer Nathan Crowley. For some scenes, “backdrop” is too weak a word: One dance number set in the school’s library features circular revolving bookshelves that the characters swing through and dance inside as if in book-filled hamster wheels, to ingenious effect.

I should say though that one of the film’s biggest moments might be its quietest. When she finds herself ostracized at a school party because of the soon-to-be familiar black hat Glinda has made her wear, Elphaba creates her own rhythmic dance movements, without any music for accompaniment. For me it’s the movie’s emotional high point, as Chu and Erivo turn Elphaba’s glower from an expression of defeat into one of defiance, laying the groundwork for her eventual transformation.

Wicked takes its adaptive task seriously and I believe it meets it head on. I went in apprehensive but came away fairly dazzled. I’m actually looking forward to next year’s sequel. I saw this film in a sold out theater and as a lifelong movie goer it was incredible to be in an audience of that size. In 2024 that’s a rare thing, and I have to thank Wicked for bringing so many people to one place to take part in something together.