With its flying monkeys and magical shoes, oh my, the story of the Wizard of Oz has been lodged in the popular imagination for over a century. It is, after all, an archetypal American myth: an epic of good and evil, the comfort (and dreariness) of home, the draw (and freedom) of the road, the perils of power and the yearning for transformation. The 1939 film with Judy Garland, in particular, is so embedded in the American cinematic DNA that it’s inspired everyone from Martin Scorsese to David Lynch, Spike Lee and John Waters, who once called (accurately!) the wicked witch “every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style.”
I wonder what Waters will make of “Wicked” and its green-hued, deeply sincere heroine, Elphaba, a ready-made meme machine played by Cynthia Erivo in what becomes a showstopper of a performance. Both the character and the actress are the strongest draws in this splashy, largely diverting, tonally discordant and unconscionably long movie, which is the first installment in a two-part adaptation of the Broadway show “Wicked.” That juggernaut opened at the Gershwin Theater in 2003 and shows no signs of (ever) closing; it will presumably still be raking it in when “Wicked Part Two” is set to open in November 2025.
Like the stage musical — Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics, while Winnie Holzman wrote the book — the movie centers on Elphaba and Glinda, short for Galinda (Ariana Grande, fiercely perky), witches from the enchanted Land of Oz. Written by Holzman and Dana Fox, it opens right after Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, is declared dead. (Dorothy is nowhere to be seen.) Glinda, a.k.a. Glinda the Good, floats in to belt the catchy “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and subsequently goes down memory lane to relate her and Elphaba’s tale, focusing on their tenure at Shiz University, a campus populated by a hardworking ensemble and anchored by a waterfront, Disney-esque turreted castle.
“Wicked” is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” and the big surprise in each work is that Elphaba isn’t as bad as her reputation. Hers is a classic saga of misunderstanding retooled for contemporary sensibilities, a chronicle of alienation and belonging, inchoate desire and heavy-handed moralizing that, onscreen, begins in Munchkinland when her father was the governor, her mother was a cheat and Elphaba the inconvenient result. At some point, her mother dies, as they do in fairy tales, and Elphaba grows into a sober, bespectacled child the color of farm-fresh asparagus (Karis Musongole) and, in short order, a serious, very talented melancholic.
The director Jon M. Chu opens “Wicked” big and only goes bigger, at times to a fault. His credits include “Crazy Rich Asians” and the musical “In the Heights,” but “Wicked” is a horse of another color and it’s filled with huge sets, some dozen musical numbers and many moving parts that generations of fans know intimately. From the start, Chu gives “Wicked” an accelerated pace, amping it with restless, swooping camerawork and overloading it with a surfeit of everything, with ceaselessly moving bodies and eye-popping props. There’s much to ooh and ahh over, be it Elphaba’s eyeglasses with their seashell spiral or her beautiful Issey Miyake-style pleats, but Chu’s revved-up maximalism doesn’t leave much room to savor it.
The movie settles down somewhat once Elphaba and Glinda start warming to each other (they’re forced to room together) and their initial hostility begins melting as fast as a witch doused by water. A nerve-testing variation on the dumb blonde cliché, Glinda doesn’t make it easy. Grande throws herself into the role, wringing comedy from Glinda’s vacuity and self-regard, but Glinda doesn’t have the wit or enough sharp lines to upend the stereotype the way that it’s flipped in, say, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Legally Blonde.” Instead, Chu and Grande lean into Glinda’s shallowness, hair tossing and show-pony flamboyance, sending up the character’s vanity even as the camera drools over her trunks overflowing with goodies.
Despite its bumps, the movie is consistently amusing simply because it is “The Wizard of Oz” and it’s fun watching colorful, off-kilter characters singing, dancing and sometimes flying through the air (without a superhero suit). As the story progresses, a subplot involving Oz’s talking animals emerges — Peter Dinklage voices Dr. Dillamond, a professor who’s also a goat — Elphaba steps up heroically and “Wicked” becomes subtler, more delicate and moving. Erivo and Grande work nicely together from the get-go, their chemistry only becoming more persuasive as the comedy gives way to heavier themes and a story about two snippy, snipping women deepens into a tale of love, mutual respect and female friendship. Dorothy had the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion; Elphaba and Glinda have each other.
Erivo’s performance is crucial both to putting across this transformation, and to the movie’s overall effect. Rejected by her father and mocked by others, Elphaba struggles with her difference from childhood on, an existential plight that isolates her, effectively encasing her in a metaphoric green bubble. It’s one that Erivo makes palpable early on with an air of wariness and a tamped-down, at times almost withdrawn physicality that, crucially, makes a striking contrast with her richly expressive, invitingly warm singing voice, which opens a window onto her inner being. When early on, she races across a field during “The Wizard and I,” the setting recalls Julie Andrews sprinting through “The Sound of Music” while the ache in Elphaba’s voice suggests Judy Garland’s Dorothy at her most wistful and alone.
Although she cares for her sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), Elphaba emotionally awakens at Shiz, where her magical gifts are encouraged by an instructor (Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible), and she and Glinda cozy up separately to a not particularly charming prince, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). The school is also where Elphaba’s humanity is finally recognized by her peers when, in what’s meant to be one of the movie’s big emotional scenes, Glinda reaches out to her before revelers who, moments earlier, seemed more like a mob. Calculated for maximum uplift, it’s meant to be a stirring vision of sisterly empathy; it’s the most magical (thinking) moment in the movie. Less charitable viewers may cringe at the sight of Glinda’s display of munificence, and they also may wonder if it’s just performative self-interest.
One of the sustaining joys of the 1939 “Wizard of Oz,” which is as perfect a film as any made in old Hollywood, is its mixture of narrative simplicity and unforced cinematic brilliance. Like most big-studio productions it’s also awash in sea of white faces that, in the film, is punctuated only by the cackling, sneering green glory that is Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West. Her face serves as a marker of her difference, a distinction that may have scared untold children but also thrilled others, like the young John Waters. In time, Oz generated other stories, most notably “The Wiz,” an all-Black musical adapted for the screen, where it was directed by Sidney Lumet with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.
This “Wicked” doesn’t directly address race, leaving it for viewers to engage with it or not. In his 2003 review in The Times of the original Broadway production, Ben Brantley wrote that the musical “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button.” That remains true. Given that the movie ends where the show’s first act does, it’s impossible to know — well, for those who haven’t seen the show — how the subplot about Oz’s endangered animals will develop, what will become of Elphaba’s desires to aid their cause and whether this vision of a multiracial, multiethnic world over the rainbow will remain intact a year from now. There’s so much at stake and the future doesn’t look bright, but I hope that Elphaba and Glinda persevere.
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