Before I go deep as to why I’m not too fond of this on principle, I’d like to go ahead and address Wicked fans to give them the information they’re looking for up top: Jon M. Chu has made an adaptation you’ll probably enjoy quite a bit. This is, of course, Wicked: Part One, which extends the act-break of the Stephen Schwartz-composed musical from 15 minutes to a full year – a good choice, given that the big climax makes for a decent enough ending all on its own (and, arguably, one that doesn’t need any follow-up). Chu’s one of the strongest big-budget directors (or even the only one) working in the musical space, and if anyone’s been able to seize the post-music video cinematic style and make it work with traditional Broadway vibes, it’s him. His staging is fantastic, per usual, with some wonderful little grace notes sprinkled throughout, such as a lovely shadowplay soft-shoe routine that Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard does or an amusing moment when he lets his camera simply follow Ariana Grande rather than cutting her routine to pieces.
Chu finds the rhythm in Schwartz’s music and can use the cut to provide well-placed emphasis in comedic songs like “What is This Feeling?” – an ideal representation of the song regardless of whether or not it’s on stage or screen. However, he dips heavily into superhero style during the finale, speed-ramping during “Defying Gravity” like if Zack Snyder kept on the track he was on when he started out making Morrissey videos – it’s a wonder Grande doesn’t turn towards one of the Wizard’s guards and starts talking about how Cynthia Erivo is “a silent guardian, a watchful protector, an olive-green knight.” A little Marvel goes a long way, and this is just too much of it.
As far as casting is concerned, your fears or worries weren’t well-founded: Grande, the most controversial casting choice, is shockingly good in this. It’s always surprising when a pop star – even one with a Nickelodeon past – goes out and steals a work away from the more stately cast members, but it’s rarely this astonishing. She strikes a decidedly cinematic compromise between Kristen Chenowith’s iconic stage comedy and various Mean Girls from modern cinema but never really loses sight of the fact that Glinda isn’t simply comic relief: She’s haughty, narcissistic and kind of shallow, but she’s not a person without the makings of a “good” witch within them. She’s a ham, however, and most of the film’s best moments belong to either her or Goldblum (who, as well, is solid casting). The rest of the cast is merely laying the foundation for their second-act dynamism: Erivo is solid enough as Elphaba, but Grande’s dynamism and the narrative’s centering of Glinda’s perspective means that most of her best moments will come later on, and the same applies to Jonathan Bailey (on loan from Bridgerton as Fieyro) and Ethan Slater (Spongebob), who have brains and hearts to lose in dramatic fashion. If there’s any sour note among the cast, it’s Peter Dinklage, a fantastic actor who isn’t that great at voice work – his audio presence as Professor Goat can’t help but remind me of that time he did dialogue for the video game Destiny and was subsequently patched out when Bungie overhauled the game.
So, in short, dyed-in-the-wool Wicked fans are likely going to have a great time, and as such, they can click away and go read Playbill’s coverage or something if they don’t want to read about my frustrations with the enterprise’s very existence as revisionist media.
All that said, I dislike the trends that Wicked, in all of its forms (book, stage musical, movie musical) represents in media, each with its various ways to grate one’s spirit into well-shredded emotional cheese. If there’s one significant contemptible aspect that both Broadway and Hollywood share, it’s an over-reliance on IP to generate audience interest, and it’s a triple-decker here, being both an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s book, which was itself a riff on the iconic Victor Fleming screen translation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s not Rocky: The Musical or whatever, but it is still maddening how hard it is for original concepts to break through in either medium, and the cross-media adaptation cheapens the work unless it’s presented dynamically (say, Julie Taymor’s The Lion King).
One can only abuse iconography so much before it loses its luster, much like the slot machines you’ll find at any MGM casino adorned with Judy Garland’s face. What Schwartz and book writer/lyricist Winnie Holtzman had in their favor was timing: 2003 was just the right point to get in, back when these riffs had novelty, treading in the wake of Phantom and Les Mis before every producer became enamored with the idea of making a Tin Cup musical or whatever. I guess such is the issue when an art form, doubling as a tourist attraction or just an out-of-home entertainment, is beset by extreme competition for the audience’s attention.
My main issue with Wicked is a thematic one. I don’t think revisionist fiction works particularly well when it is represented as an extra-canon parallel narrative that disregards the original work’s meaning in the first place. There are plenty of exceptions to this – John Gardiner’s Grendel, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, to say nothing of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the spiritual predecessor to Maguire’s novel – but it has to age, and it has to do something that other adaptations or sequels can’t do themselves. This tale doesn’t fit the former attribute, being a cask of wine uncorked before its time. The century mark is a decent approximation of the time needed for proper perspective to form and for thought to evolve. The shortest time between all the examples I’ve cited above is Rhys’ case, which took nearly 120 years and a dramatic restructuring of the global geopolitical landscape to accumulate its resonance. Maguire nearly hit that mark, but, for whatever reason, 95 years just wasn’t enough. Perhaps it’s because American children’s fiction as we know it hadn’t even existed for much longer. It wasn’t a short fable or religious exercise; it was a full-fledged hero’s journey. Even harder, in Maguire’s case, was that Fleming’s adaptation is the platonic ideal of Oz itself, finding real potency at a poignant point in time.
I adore a Vonnegut quote about the absurdity of criticism: it’s “like dressing up in a suit of armor to fight a hot fudge sundae” (I wear my chainmail proudly, fully aware of how ridiculous this art is). Yet this simile feels nearly literal when applied to what Maguire does to Baum’s fiction. Its adult jaundice colors a narrative intended for children, rendering the wonder of its world banal by applying the contrast of humanity’s ills to Oz itself. The Ozians are prejudiced and genocidal maniacs united under faux-technocratic fascist rule (one can imagine Oz’s Christopher Isherwood penning a volume called Goodbye to Munchkinland), the good witches aren’t good, and the man behind the curtain isn’t just a charlatan but a tyrant as well. The first two are boring, similar to how Amazon Logistics seized the North Pole for Red One, and the third is already present in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz itself.
Yet Wicked, the musical, takes it a step further. Not only is The Wicked Witch not evil in the first place but did you know she actually did everything Dorothy was supposed to do? She made her companions (or freed one of them from their cages), the very virtue of her existence ensured the downfall of the Wizard, and she precisely planned that her would-be death would be the spark that ignited the revolution. Oh, and she’s also the most powerful being who is real magic not fake magic like the Wizard’s gizmos and is the only person who can read the pivotal spellbook and is pretty witty and funny if you only got to know her. She is the vengeful nerd, endowed with the power of her fantasy, her every wish fulfilled by the narrative: at least Maguire, for all of his bitterness, knew not to put that fine of a point on it. Elphaba is a static character, to an extent: She’s self-righteous and independent long before she discovers the origin or extent of her powers, and her evolution over the narrative is the accumulation of things rather than transformative.
This is the problem with taking Oz out of the mind of Dorothy Gale. The dream logic becomes drearily mundane, the romance is made literal rather than enchantingly thematic, and the story becomes a martyrdom narrative with a happily-ever-after ending instead of a sainthood-worthy sacrificial flaying. The point of Oz, to an extent, is that it’s an accidental hero’s journey that explores the consequences of getting what one wants. In Dorothy’s case, it’s an adventure in a fantastical land, one that she finds only makes her homesick. She finds her dream world full of charm and magic, yet only misses Kansas. Her journey isn’t accumulative in stature or status: she discovers that what she wanted all along, much like her companions’ desires, was within her the whole time. We’ve never quite been able to overcome the disappointment that a black-and-white farm might mean more than the technicolor world she discovers. It’s why Baum wrote sequels, it’s why Disney made Return to Oz (the only good revisionist take on the Oz books and drastically underappreciated as such), it’s why Wicked exists.
Indeed, this fabulous land must be deeper than what we’re shown on the page, the stage, or the screen! We identify with the conscious men and women of action within this world – the two major screen versions of Oz this century should be about the Wizard and the Witch, as they did things with purpose and intent rather than by sheer fairy-story accident. Yet none of these continuations or revisionist takes will ever eclipse the poignancy of that arc, and the power fantasy of Wicked, with its crushing needs to recenter the world’s locus and to establish Oz as a mediocre Narnia, makes it all the more powerful. After all, one can only defy gravity before the sun melts your wings.