This year's Barbenheimer is here, and this time, there's no question who should win.
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, Logan), J.J. Abrams (Cloverfield, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours), 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: Part I 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-Butera, 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 verdict on which casting philosophy works best, for this viewer at least, falls on the side of the old-school thespian. Playing Elphaba, a lonely outcast turned anti-authoritarian rebel, Erivo marshals a formidable arsenal of skills: She can sing like an angel and convey 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 often quite funny. Her agile soprano voice is just right for the character's virtuosic solos, and her lithe body moves with the grace of a dancer's and looks sensational in the eye-popping costumes by Paul Tazewell. But when it comes to capturing the wit and nuance of Schwartz's lyrics, Grande's enunciation and declamation -- her ability to act through singing -- are not always up to the challenge. Next to the powerhouse that is Erivo, Grande's big solo scenes can at times seem one-note. But luckily 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. As for the movie that surrounds them, a lavish old-Hollywood spectacle bursting with gorgeously designed sets and bravura supporting turns, it's so buoyant it lifts both witches-to-be, along with the audience, into the stratosphere.
The opening flashback goes all the way back to Elphaba's birth and early childhood, making it clear to fans of the stage show that they are no longer in Kansas but rather in the Wicked expanded universe. The film unfolds on a far larger canvas than the play, which ran about as long in its entirety as the first installment of the movie series alone. Two hours and 40 minutes is a long time to sit in a movie theater with no breaks. (If we're really going to bring back the roadshow-style epic, can we consider reintroducing intermission?) But the film is skillfully paced enough to feel much shorter. It could lose a redundant dialogue scene here and there, but it would have felt wrong to cut any of the musical numbers, which provide much of the show's dramatic action.
That scene-setting flashback introduces 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 hunky 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, Broadway's SpongeBob and now Grande's beau).
But college romance is not the only intrigue afoot at Shiz U. In a subplot that's considerably more developed here than in the play, 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).
This animal-rights story arc sometimes feels like a cumbersome imposition on the central female-friendship plot, but it's easy to see why the filmmakers decided to amplify it so as to raise the movie's stakes. As with many hit musicals, the book of Wicked was never its strong point. The dialogue scenes are mostly there to hold things together in between the songs, and it's in and through the singing that the real storytelling happens. Wicked helped to form a new generation of theater kids for a reason: It's a timeless musical that goes far beyond the recycling of IP to truly reimagine The Wizard of Oz's moral universe, asking big questions about friendship and justice along the way. And it's hard to think of another 2000s musical with as many memorable stand-alone songs, classics that need no context to be worthy of belting in the shower or at the karaoke bar. 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.
Wicked serves up many such moments of visual and auditory pleasure. Despite the movie's arguably excessive run time, it takes seriously its mandate to keep the audience not just entertained but dazzled. Though it might make for a long and somewhat scary sit for small children, it seems like a natural pick for family holiday viewing. (This year's Barbenheimer-style battle between Wicked and Gladiator 2 is really no contest.) The premise should hold at least some interest for anyone who loves The Wizard of Oz, surely a Venn-diagram bubble that overlaps with much of the earth's population. If there were any justice in the world, or at least at the box office, this would be a blockbuster hit. But as I started off by noting, with musicals you never know.
In Wicked: Part I, as in the play, Elphaba's fierce power anthem "Defying Gravity" serves as the heartstopping curtain-closer -- but this time, the song marks the end not of the first act but of the whole movie. The curtain won't rise again till next November, when Wicked: Part Two is set for release in theaters. After a first chapter this unexpectedly thrilling, I for one will be pacing the lobby of my mind, treating the next 12 months as an extended intermission.
