EVERYONE DESERVES THE CHANCE TO FLY

Wicked: Part I 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4 Maryellens

Photo: Universal Pictures

The new students gathering in the courtyard at Shizz University are a mass of nerves and dreams. Don’t worry, says Madame Morrible, the college’s legendary professor of sorcery. “We have nothing but the highest hopes—for some of you.”

That sums up the story of Wicked, ultimately; it describes in painful, hilarious detail the life-and-death tug-of-war between hope and fear that plays out in every young person’s heart. Moviegoers need have no fear, though. Whatever your hopes were for Jon Chu’s adaptation of the beloved musical by Stephen Schwartz, the film is certain to exceed them. It’s simply, as Galinda might say, astoundifying.

It’s also, by the way, one of the gayest movies ever made. In case you didn’t suspect this going in, Chu has set the opening sequence in Munchkinland among rolling hills of tulip rainbow flags. Seriously, Gilbert Baker’s estate should get a royalty. The gayest thing about Wicked, though, is its arch tone. As Madame Morrible (a devious Michelle Yeoh) so wryly illustrates, the truth hurts. It’s also wickedly funny.

And there is nothing funnier in this giddy romp than Galinda (“the Guh is silent”), the one-day-gonna-be-good witch. Ariana Grande gives an utterly Venti performance (sorry!) in the role. Sure, she may be merely doing an impression of Kristen Chenoweth, who originated the part on Broadway—but then, Chenoweth was only doing an impression of Madeline Kahn. No matter. Grande nails the character with each exaggerated flick of her blindingly blond locks and each witheringly chipper riposte of “Mmmhmm!”

Vocally, alas, she’s pretty weak, especially on the high stuff, and Galinda has a lot of high stuff, meaning she’s sometimes shrill and unintelligible. But you know the words anyway, right? And I’ll let you in on a little secret about musicals: The acting is more important than the singing. By the time Grande gets to “Popu-ular,” one of Wicked’s most popular numbers, she’s running away with the movie. The packed audience I saw it with (not quite all of them gay men and teenage girls) was whooping along behind her in hysterics.

And what of Elphaba, Galinda’s roommate, nemesis, and BFF? Funnily, despite her green skin, Elphaba is the less showy part, certainly through the end of Part 1. Be that as it may, Cynthia Erivo holds her own in every way. She’s just as funny as Grande while using far fewer words; consider her dry line reading of one word: “blond.” And vocally she knocks it out of the park, from comic songs (“What Is This Feeling?”) to tender ballads (“I’m Not That Girl”) to the 11 o’clock barn-burner (“Defying Gravity”). On that last one she really, yes, soars. Schwartz lyrics and music don’t ooze originality, but “Gravity” is a mighty tune you will definitely come out humming.

Screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, working from Holzman and Schwartz’s stage adaptation of Gregory Macguire’s novel, have fleshed out Elphaba’s backstory, so her context and motives are never far from our mind. The gifted costume designer Paul Tazewell (whom I got to interview a million years ago, when he did Hamilton) helps out, too, giving her elegant yin-yang eyeglasses, so we never lose sight of the duality at the character’s core. Erivo is a marvelous, subtle actor, gently inviting us in for Elphaba’s humiliation and heartbreak, her explosions and exaltation. Like many musicals, Wicked has an Act II problem, but I’m equally excited for Part 2, just to watch what Erivo does.

The rest of the cast is great, too, starting with the love interest, Fiyero, played by out gay heartthrob Jonathan Bailey. Everyone—girls, boys, even the furniture—spends the rest of the film swooning over him. Following his sexy turns in Bridgerton and Fellow Travellers, Bailey is clearly ready to sizzle on the big screen. Jeff Goldblum is very Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. Marissa Bode and Ethan Slater are sweet as Nessarose, Elphaba’s sister, and Boq, the goofy, freckly Woodsman she’s smitten with. And bigger-than-life comic Bowen Yang is flawless in a small part as Galinda’s queeny friend, tossing off a choice aside every time he scurries out of the room.

There are a couple of cameos in Emerald City I won’t spoil for you, except to say the Times Square theater I was in almost collapsed when a certain pair of actors turned up. The only dissatisfying performance (to me) was Peter Dinklage as the voice of Dr. Dillamond. Even after more than a decade playing Tyrion Lannister, Dinklage still can’t do a British accent. And, like, why the hell is he even doing an accent? He’s a goat.

If Wicked has an issue, it’s just that there is so much of it. So much saturated silliness that we lose sight of the point and sometimes forget if there even is one. The stage musical shared this shortcoming—let’s call it a long-coming—of being exceedingly funny and thrilling but somehow not that moving. And the movie is longer than the play, even though it only takes us up to the intermission. This two-hours-and-forty-minutes of hyperstimulation is merely Part 1—look for Part 2 next Thanksgiving.

It doesn’t help that the political controversy which theoretically animates Elphaba is so half-baked, or that the villain is hiding in plain sight. Someone in power—gosh, who could that be in this Wizardocracy?—is robbing the animals of their ability to speak, so our heroine runs to the Wizard for help. Elphaba is said to be brilliant, with an often-explosive intuition for wrong-doing, yet she can’t guess who the bad guy is?

The bloat didn’t bother Wicked fans that much on stage; nor is it an issue here, either, judging from the passionate reactions in the theater. Probably because we know this story anyway. Young people have been born with uncontrollable magical powers they have to master and ominous destinies they have to meet in probably thousands of books, plays, shows, and films—and that just covers The X Men, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. And there are probably millions of movies about fierce women who have to learn the hard way that a man (the Wizard, Fiyero) isn’t the answer. I’m a big fan of Grrl Power; preachy retreads, not so much.

In Wicked, there’s truly precious little for Elphaba to discover. From the first frame, she’s infinitely more interesting and powerful than anyone else in Oz, especially the boys. And the denouement is written right on her face. Green, after all, is the color of power in Oz. The gorgeously sinuous emerald high-speed train that comes to fetch the emerald sorceress is taking her to the Emerald City—not Pink Town. Of course, Wicked throws one wet wrench into its predictable formula: It starts with that deadly bucket of water from The Wizard of Oz. Is our girl gonna melt? Can that fear generate enough suspense to get us through five-plus hours of this?

Nah. But suspense has nothing to do with Wicked’s appeal. Its genius is not dramaturgy, it’s silliness and style. And on those scores, the movie rocks. The photography is beautiful throughout, though with a special-effects-heavy film like this I have to admit I’m never sure how much of that is down to the DP and how much is “fixed in post.” Cinematographer Alice Brooks specializes in musicals—she also shot In the Heights and Tick, Tick… Boom!—and she definitely keeps up with the dancers. If anything, she and Chu keep the camera so fluid and close to the cast that it’s sometimes hard to follow the action. (This is a problem contemporary musical films share with Marvel movies, where directors purposely bring the fight scenes right up against the glass so we can’t pick apart the punches.)

It’s only a slight annoyance here, because Christopher Scott’s choreography is just about perfect. It’s especially sharp in the jaunty schoolyard numbers “What Is This Feeling?” and “Dancing Through Life,” which contain as much high school wit and wisdom as Heathers, Clueless, and Mean Girls combined.

I mentioned Tazewell already; his endlessly inventive costumes range from chic, elegant gowns for Galinda, Elphaba, and Morrible to hilarious getups for the denizens of the Emerald City. But to my eye, nothing in the movie is as satisfying as Nathan Crowley’s production design. Crowley, who’s been nominated for Oscars multiple times for his work with Christopher Nolan, devises all sorts of magical sets, from the popup books that welcome the young Elphaba in to the rotating clock-face library at Shizz to the Wizard’s terrifying mechanical mask. The Emerald City is stunning, a Technicolor Metropolis filled with malachite art deco jazz. But Shizz, where the bulk of Part 1 takes place, tops it all. Crowley gives us a Gaudiesque Alhambra, with beautiful horseshoe arches, sparkling mudejar tile work, arabesque stucco, reflecting pools, and minarets.

Obviously there are scores of delightful Wizard of Oz Easter eggs (pay close attention to the scene on the bike), but Chu’s nods to other films are even more exciting. The wondrous underwater shot that introduces Galinda seems inspired by the movies of Hayao Miyazaki or Walt Disney. At the end of “The Wizard and I,” Elphaba gets the sweeping “Don’t Rain on My Parade” aerial reverse zoom right out of Funny Girl. The nightclub scene in the Ozdust Ballroom channels the jazzy “Broadway Melody” joint in Singing in the Rain. And there are two great Chaplin references—the fabulous rotating library riffs on the machines of Modern Times, and the Wizard’s brief dance with an inflated globe, summoning The Great Dictator, provides a nice bit of foreshadowing

Speaking of dictators, Wicked, released in the fall of 2024, could have been the most topical movie ever—in fact, I suspect it was timed to line up not with the holidays but with Election Day—because…

SPOILER ALERT!

…it features a brilliant young Black (well, Green) woman standing up to a fraudulent old white man. In triumph, Elphaba defies gravity, as the song says, and flies. Not only does she fly, she draws power from all the pain in her past and veritably explodes, rocketing skyward in a righteous rage.

This was the stage musical’s most celebrated and—let’s keep it real, mocked—moment: Idina Menzel jerked skyward on a cherry picker and belted out what is essentially Tarzan’s yelp. Menzel even mocks it herself, in this movie. But there’s nothing remotely silly about the moment here. Erivo, floating before her terrified foes and former friends, her midnight cape billowing out behind her, her hands outstretched in glory like the resurrected Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration, blasts out that famous melismatic howl, and the megaplex parts like the Red Sea.

Wicked has always been about race, and with this brilliant Black actor in the part on the big screen, Elphaba’s otherness finally resounds with its full impact. In truth, Black women have played Elphaba onstage before; the first was Alexia Khadime in the West End in 2008. But for the vast majority of audiences experiencing the work, the witch’s verdigris was only ever metaphorical. Not anymore.

No one’s gonna stop her now.