1/12/2025 WICKED: PART ONE Area Movie Theatres / Streaming Amazon Prime
DEFYING FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I’ll confess it at the top. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the musical Wicked. Sure, I’ll admit most of the songs are catchy earworm traps and the roles are Broadway belt memorable (not to mention the eye-candy of the brilliant spectacle and stagecraft of the original production tour). But the truth is, long before the show hit Broadway, I read Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and fell in love with its fill-in-the-gaps backstory of Oz and its culture. I also loved its sequels, Son of a Witch, Out of Oz, and A Lion Among Men. To my mind, the musical skewed the novels’ themes of the nature of good and evil, oversimplified its layered political milieu, compressed the multi-year timeline into too short a span, and wreaked havoc with the sequels (not to mention the original plot of Baum’s novel) by having Fiyero and Boq become {Deleted by the Spoiler Police – It’ll happen in Part Two}. Numerous other changes and deletions of Maguire’s book were annoyances, but not “show-stoppers.”
Imagine my surprise when I not only loved the first part of the Wicked movie, I rapturously embraced it, seeing it multiple times, and obsessing over its look, its performances, and even its dramaturgy. It seemed to restore Maguire’s complex political structure, relegating the theme of friendship to be more a secondary flourish than a primary raison d’etre. The fear remains that Part II may still take the story off the rails and wallow in all the parts of the stage production that marred my memory of the novel, but at least now, I will watch it with less skeptical bias-tinted glasses.
If you need a recap, the film, like the novel and the musical before it, begins with the end, Oz has been freed from the terror that was the Wicked Witch of the West and the land is filled with Ding-Dong-the-Witch-is-Dead Glee and Celebration. But when good witch Glinda is pressed on whether she knew the Wicked witch, we see the Glinda-filtered tale of the birth of a green baby named Elphaba, her childhood as a misfit and embarrassment-to-her-family, and her mission to “protect” her younger sister (Nessarose) at Shiz University. When it is discovered that Elphaba exhibits exceptional power with any lost-control emotion, she becomes the prize pupil of Madame Morrible as well as the bête noir of the campus’s more popular students.
Throw in a campaign against sentient animals, a happy-go-lucky prince named Fiyero, a love-stricken munchkin named Boq, and a Wizard with a taste for propaganda and power, and Maguire’s original examination of Good and Evil is given song-filled, vibrant life. Part One ends as Act I of the musical did, with Elphaba controlling her power and defying gravity and the Wizard.
Chief among the movie’s assets is its cast. Led by Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (Galinda / Glinda), the roles are filled with an amalgam of big-voiced Broadway belters, faces-that-love-the-camera movie talents (Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum), and familiar names with credits on both stage and screen (Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage). The combination is not as jarring as you may think – the different singing styles succeed in underscoring the mottled political map of Oz, and no one fails to “sell” their role (or songs). The adaptation smartly tailors the music to the actors, giving the belters full rein to shake the rafters and the not-so-belters room to explore character and subtext without requiring them to evoke their Broadway antecedents. Yes, purists will quibble about the song edits, but, in the context of the film, they are (if you’ll forgive me) pitch perfect.
Credit also needs to go to Production Designer Nathan Crowley and the team of sixteen Art Directors working with him. Each location is over-the-top phantasmagorical, with tiny details grounding them and relating settings and props to characters. Galinda’s pink-infused dormitory room is especially gewgaw-filled and larger than most hotel suites, instantly glorifying her high social status and rubbing it in Elphaba’s face. It is all used to impressive effect during “Popular” as well as between-songs sequences. I also loved the cafeteria used in “What is This Feeling?” (aka “Loathing”) and revolving library bookshelves used beautifully in “Dancing Through Life.” The Green Train that takes us to Emerald City is, quite simply, a work of art evoking not only Steam-Punk imaginative excess but also real-life locomotive design. And Emerald City itself, the Wizard’s lair, and the clock tower are more magnificent than anything I could imagine.
Costumer Paul Tazewell is also a star here, creating gowns and tunics and ensembles and “looks” that perfectly capture character, place, and style, beautiful to behold, and impossible to forget.
Let’s face it, this movie is as beautiful to look at as anything I have seen recently. It is a showcase for two performers in peak form as well as a director (Jon M. Chu) succeeding in enhancing his own high-bar reputation (after Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights). He has in development a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians as well as an adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, both of which I’m now chomping at the bit to see (in spite of the fact that I’m not the biggest Joseph fan around). He just may be the finest director of musical films today, and those of us who love musicals can be hopeful he’ll boost an inevitable renaissance of musical films.
I for one can’t wait!
In the meanwhile, we have Wicked in which to wallow. There are worse ways to dance through life!
-- Brad Rudy (BKRudy@aol.com #Wicked)