Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Maureen Dowd, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Lydia Polgreen about the new movie “Wicked.”
Patrick Healy: I have a confession to make. While I love “The Wizard of Oz” and I love theater, I was never interested in the Broadway musical “Wicked.” I had assumed it was for teenage girls and saw it only because of my job (when I was the Times theater reporter). I remember enjoying its two biggest songs, “Defying Gravity” and “Popular.” But I didn’t feel very invested in the two main characters: Elphaba, who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and her frenemy, Glinda. So I am genuinely surprised to report that the new movie “Wicked” melted me. I was swept up in Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba and found myself crying almost every time her character cried. I felt righteous anger when Elphaba fought against a roundup of talking animals by the authorities and rescued a scared lion cub locked in a cage. A big-budget “Wicked” movie with a strong antifascist message? I did not expect that. What surprised you most about your experience with the movie?
Lydia Polgreen: I came to “Wicked” completely cold. “The Wizard of Oz” was not part of my childhood, nor was musical theater. My knowledge of the Oz story is entirely shaped by my wife’s exuberant enthusiasm for “The Wiz.” When Patrick asked me to join this conversation, I decided not to read or watch anything about the musical or movie and thereby play the straight man, as it were. So I had low expectations: Why would I be drawn in by a back story to a classic tale that never resonated for me?
I guess my surprise was mostly that … I loved this movie? It is a sly illustration of one of my favorite modes of creativity: using one form of art to remake and redefine an existing one. The perfect musical version of this for me prior to seeing “Wicked” was “Fun Home,” the wondrous Alison Bechdel graphic-memoir-turned-musical. Musical theater does seem to be an ideal medium for such reinterpretations, and this is a particularly impressive one.
Maureen Dowd: I agree, Lydia, about flipping the script on classics. They’ve done this for a long time with monsters. John Gardner’s “Grendel” from 1971 took the “Beowulf” story from the monster’s point of view. “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys took “Jane Eyre” from the point of view of the Creole heiress who married Mr. Rochester and became “the madwoman in the attic.” And sometimes, it’s not a monster but a marginalized character. Percival Everett just won the National Book Award for “James,” reimagining the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim. Then there’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard.
“Hamilton” arguably does to the American Revolution and the early Republic what “Wicked” does to “The Wizard of Oz,” decentering the traditional protagonists — Dorothy must move aside, as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must — and retelling the story beat by beat through a peripheral character, making that character more sympathetic. Both these musicals reorient famous American narratives with an eye toward 21st-century identity politics.
Healy: “Hamilton” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” are my high-water marks for flipping the script in theater, Maureen. But “Wicked” drew me in like few revisionist tales have onscreen. It’s a good commentary on who we turn into monsters and heroes and does so as grand entertainment. Tressie, you saw the stage musical of “Wicked” just last summer. How did the movie version land for you?
Tressie McMillan Cottom: The film is phenomenal. Its power comes from the comfort of a familiar moral trope: The outsider becomes the hero in an epic tale. Humanity has loved that story since we started storytelling around a fire. “Wicked” is an allegory for difference and a pretty straightforward embrace of one of the feminism waves — third, maybe? It’s pro-female rage but with a lot of apologies for traditional femininity.
The story line about fascism and oppression was always there in the different “Wicked” versions. But a couple of things make that story line stand out in the film. First, casting the absolutely phenomenal Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba makes the story’s heavy-handed but indirect message about racism obvious. She is Black, which is like being green. I am surprised by how many people apparently missed that note in the story’s 20-year run. Erivo’s casting takes away any pretext. That allows the authoritarianism critique to shine a bit more.
And second, we see the movie meaning that we need to see. Everyone in my world is still deeply distraught about the election. The election turned on propaganda about power and scapegoating of women and feminism. Frankly, we see the anti-fascism message clearly because we see fascism so clearly in our everyday lives.
Dowd: The movie was OK. It was preferable to watching the Sunday news shows. But Erivo was amazing. She’s such a good actress, she could act with her fingernails, like Barbra Streisand! Erivo’s manicurist said they wanted those nails as a nod to Black culture and because they were part of her magic.
Polgreen: I could not agree more about Erivo’s performance. I first saw her on Broadway as Celie in “The Color Purple,” and her performance of “I’m Here” is still a go-to when I feel like having a good cry. Just an extraordinary performer who can work in so many emotional registers, and my lord, the pipes on that one.
Cottom: Lydia, I could watch Erivo perform the phone book. She interprets songs like a blues woman. It is a real gift.
Healy: Early in the movie, Glinda refers to Elphaba’s green skin as a “problem.” As Tressie mentioned, race and identity are subtext in “Wicked,” but the movie makes things more explicit by casting a Black actress, Erivo, as Elphaba. I went into the movie wondering if that casting would make the movie feel heavy-handed — like a woke “Wicked” — but Erivo’s mixture of resilience and vulnerability knocked that thought out of my head. Elphaba takes pride in who she is. I’m curious how you saw the treatment of identity in “Wicked.”
Cottom: So, “Wicked” in all its forms has always been a “woke” story — if I’m to accept the pejorative of the term from my ideological contrarians. It is a story that champions the marginalized, moralizes about our politics about difference, and makes it palatable for the masses. The only way to un-woke this movie is to have made something other than “Wicked.”
Casting Erivo and fading to her non-green skin in one early moment of the film seemed like a way to move beyond race as quickly as possible. I took it as a nod to racial pride and not wanting to have a Black actress spend more than two hours hating being Black. James Brown did not shout “I’m Black and I’m proud” in 1968 for us to still be tap dancing about racial shame in 2024. That’s a good move.
The identity politics of the film are arguably more about gender and liberalism. The long history of persecuting witches has been tied to political campaigns to acquire land, own the labor of workers and control women’s economic freedom. When Elphaba goes to Oz, the Wizard is a stand-in for that history. He basically proposes a gentrification plan for Oz! And he needs Elphaba’s labor, or magic, to achieve it. The gender politics don’t get more obvious than that. I thought about Silvia Federici’s classic book “Caliban and the Witch” throughout the movie.
Polgreen: Knowing nothing about this musical, I had assumed (wrongly, it turns out!) that the character of Elphaba had always been Black. Now I understand that green is a metaphor for difference, and I think there is something interesting in casting a Black actress. Given how Elphaba’s green skin is so explicitly rendered as a revolting form of difference, it has such power — especially in this Ozian world where Black-white prejudice does not appear to exist.
Cottom: There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good, but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in “Wicked” does these great “yasss girl” ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being “good” is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters.
Dowd: “Wicked” is about gender in parts, using old tropes in the plot: the women competing for a man, a prince no less! And a makeover to be more attractive and popular! But in other ways, the moral of the story is genderless. You can’t judge a book by its cover. All that glistens is not gold. The anthem, “Defying Gravity,” emphasizes the centrality of this as a story about “the other.” Marginalized groups have to leap over more hurdles to fly higher. The ultimate lesson of the movie is for everyone: Almost nobody is as good or bad as they seem. And the question the movie asks is: “Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”
Healy: Maureen, say more about this — how our culture and politics often build stories and narratives about women being good or being wicked, as if those two caricatures and extremes are all there is?
Dowd: Women get typecast by men into the “Madonna-whore complex,” perceiving them as either pure or wicked. The Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. My older brother used to refer to “Wednesday night girls” and “Saturday night girls.” In old movies, like “Waterloo Bridge,” prostitutes had to die by the last reel. At least, in “Pretty Woman,” Julia Roberts could be carried off by Richard Gere, so there has been some progress.
But at the dawn of feminism, I naïvely thought we would move beyond catfight tropes. They’re bigger than ever, with “The Real Housewives” and “The Bachelor” franchises. Hollywood loves its vixens, and it loves frenemy stories. “Wicked” preaches that women are not monochromatic.
Cottom: I always thought that “Wicked” mixed some contradictory feminist messages in its story. Those contradictions are even more obvious in the film. Something about the scale of the production and the significant gap in performance between Ariana Grande’s Glinda and Erivo’s Elphaba made them really clear. These characters are mirror images. In one big music number, they literally pantomime each other. Erivo’s power comes from her rage, which she spends a lot of time struggling to control. Glinda’s power comes only from soft power — by manipulating how others see her. But I like female rage. I don’t want it tempered with social graces. I want Elphaba to burn down whatever she wants, including Glinda if she gets in her way. Women deserve rage. We have a lot to be angry about.
Polgreen: It’s funny, to me this movie just seemed so … queer? I guess that says more about me than anyone else, but there is something about the hothouse of same-sex environments (like Glinda’s super-girly dorm room) that will always read as charged with queerness. I joked to my wife that this was the second queerest film I’d seen this year, after “Conclave,” which we had seen a week or so earlier, coincidentally, in exactly the same theater in our local multiplex. But I think that the charged rivalry and the combination of repulsion and attraction of young female friendships is especially ripe territory in that regard.
Cottom: YES, LYDIA! SO QUEER! I would love Yang’s character version of femininity to intersect Glinda and Elphaba’s for a fun and critically-engaging take on what gender even means.
Healy: Can fairy tales change hearts and minds anymore, in this age of media oversaturation and political polarization?
Dowd: I think everything is more powerful with a mythic underlay. Hollywood has done this for a long time. “Ball of Fire,” a 1941 movie with Barbara Stanwyck, offered Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea — a gangster’s moll hiding with a group of professors, a spin on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” “Wicked” has a couple of the seven basic plots: the Quest, where you find buried treasure (Elphaba reading the Grimmerie), and it’s also the Voyage and Return, where the hero, or heroine, journeys to an unfamiliar place and encounters a lot of wonders, tests and temptations — like the “Odyssey.”
Polgreen: Maureen’s invocation of the “Odyssey” reminds me that one of my favorite allegorical films based on a myth about a journey, “The Warriors,” might be remade as a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, no less. It is a perfect movie, so I wish him luck, and can’t wait to regroup with you all to talk about it.
One of the most powerful things about fairy tales is their ability to receive multiple meanings and interpretations. “Wicked” could be seen as an allegory for either side in our current culture war. Both sides think they are courageous truth tellers who are being oppressed by the powerful. So an anti-woke activist could see themselves in Elphaba’s battle for justice and truth against a would-be totalitarian just as easily as the reverse. Galinda’s transformation into Glinda as a tribute to the maligned professor she had never cared for makes for a sly critique of a kind of unreflective woke-ism. It is notable that this movie largely takes place in a university setting, the bloodiest battleground of our culture wars! And as Tressie noted, the Bowen Yang character seems tailor-made to puncture empty liberal pieties.
Cottom: The university setting is great, Lydia. That clearly put it in my wheelhouse. I never watched all of the Harry Potter movies (or read the books) but a fantasy set at a boarding school or college town comes with inherent politics. All college towns are liberal bubbles to the extent that college life is one of the few places where Americans experience some kind of social safety net. That it takes the bubble to tell a story about power and difference says something about us. We want to have these fights about identity and power through college campuses because those campuses represent a lot of American contradictions about social mobility, belonging and citizenship.
Polgreen: I wonder if, like “The Matrix,” this movie could be read by different audiences as an allegory that flatters their priors? The creators of that film, the Wachowski siblings, came out as transgender years ago. Lilly Wachowski has said publicly that it is a trans allegory, but that doesn’t change the fact that being “red pilled” is used most commonly these days as a synonym for conversion to a right wing point of view.
Healy: We’re seeing some divisions appear now on “Wicked,” Lydia, with some members of the MAGA movement dismissing the movie as if it’s an attack on them. The film has a pretty strong antifascist message, with the diabolical leader plotting to scare people and rally them together against a common “enemy,” and the roundup and arrests of opponents; the way that characters are cowed by authorities into silence; and the desire by authorities to spy on Ozians.
Dowd: Remarkably, some people on TikTok are comparing Elphaba to Donald Trump, saying that the green-faced girl is like the orange-faced man because she too is a victim of the Deep State (Jeff Goldblum in green boots). Most people, of course, will see shades of Trump in the Wizard, a con man with authoritarian tendencies who is set on uniting people against a common enemy. (“You’re not being told the whole story!”) The “Glicked” weekend echoes the election in tone — male vs. female — and a big gender gap. On opening night, according to The Ankler substack, the “Wicked” audience was 72 percent women and 28 percent men. The “Gladiator II” audience was about 61 percent male and 39 percent female.
Polgreen: Wow, Maureen — that is fascinating. And the Green/Orange thing is kind of perfect. At the end of the day a big part of MAGA culture is seeing liberals/the left as the REAL fascists. I do think that the story lends itself to a kind of ideological flexibility. It is human nature to imagine the choices we make to be the good and right ones, and to see ourselves as aligned with the hero. But to the movie’s credit, it doesn’t let either character stand in completely for good or bad, strong or weak. We need to understand where they both came from to understand how they ended up where they are.
Healy: Aside from Erivo, my M.V.P. award is split between Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, for bringing the humor while looking dreamy, and Peter Dinklage as the voice of the talking goat, Dr. Dillamond, whose tone of fury and despair was just right. You?
Dowd: I kept thinking Jonathan Bailey must be Rupert Everett’s son. He was appealing, but you didn’t care if his prince carried away either of the girls. I am in love with Peter Dinklage; he really is the GOAT.
Cottom: Patrick, I want Jonathan Bailey to play every prince. His Fiyero is delightful. He embraces himbo the way Ryan Gosling embraced Ken in the Barbie movie. I’m on record as a fan but Bailey is also delightful in “Bridgerton.” He is beyond delightful in the British comedy “Chewing Gum.” Have I mentioned that Jonathan Bailey is just delightful? His infectious energy even pepped up Grande’s Glinda at one point.
Polgreen: I loved Peter Dinklage as Dillamond. It was an interesting choice to make the Munchkins into people of slightly smaller stature rather than casting people with dwarfism, and it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, engendered some controversy.
Healy: The other lead, Ariana Grande, was an engaging Glinda for me, but her big number, “Popular,” wasn’t a home run in my book. There was a lot of directorial and set-design busyness that kept the song from building in power for me. How did you all feel about Grande?
Cottom: I am going to get pilloried for this but it has to be done.
Healy: Pouring my tea now.
Cottom: Grande’s Glinda was technically perfect and emotionally void. I don’t subscribe to that “never talk about bodies” philosophy. When bodies reflect politics in our culture, ignoring them is unproductive. It is fine to talk about bodies humanely but critically. The internet is abuzz with people commenting on how thin Grande is in this film. We are in the midst of a cultural reclamation of the ideal female body that is suitable for our conservative/authoritarian politics. Our politics are back to projecting thin, pale, weak bodies. Ideally, blonde, but that is occasionally negotiable. Being thin is never negotiable. This is a family movie, popular with girls and women. They’re seeing a body politics of gauntness in this film. It shouldn’t be ignored. Glinda’s physical frailty undermines the message of her idealized wholesomeness.
Healy: No question she is meant to convey an Ozian (if not American) beauty ideal. But I saw Grande as athletic more than frail, actually, carrying many of the dance numbers.
Cottom: Athletic! We will agree to disagree, Patrick.
Dowd: I agree with Tressie. She didn’t bring a sassy or satirical edge to the Dumb Blonde trope. (She was no Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday” or Lesley Ann Warren in “Victor/Victoria.”)
Cottom: Maureen, I would have settled for Elle from “Legally Blonde.” Anything to bring her Glinda to life.
Dowd: Elle Woods’s energy would have been perfect!
Polgreen: It feels a little unfair that Grande had to play opposite a powerhouse and future EGOT like Erivo. She was … fine? But this is no Kristin Chenoweth/Idina Menzel matchup (see, I’m learning!). I wonder how Lady Gaga might have done in this role?
Healy: I think Gaga would have pulled our attention too much as Glinda, and probably wouldn’t nail the perfect-pixie element like Grande did. What made Chenoweth so special was that she had a cutting edge as Glinda that she wasn’t afraid to show — her Glinda seemed in on the joke that this good-girl act was an act. I didn’t get that self-awareness from Grande, but I suspect that’s probably how she was directed to perform in the best-friend role.
Dowd: Grande must have known what was up by the time she was entered for the Oscars as Best Supporting Actress and Erivo was entered for Best Actress. Bad day for blondes!!
Cottom: Maureen, it’s never a bad day for blondes. Grande following Chenoweth’s iconic performance couldn’t have been easy. It is strange because Grande’s public persona has a lot of zany humor. She is funny on “Saturday Night Live,” for instance. I also wondered about how she was directed to play Glinda. Just playing a version of her own public persona would have been a better choice.
Dowd: Yes, Tressie, she does fab impersonations of other singers. But that sly, sardonic quality was missing.
Healy: I think any “Wicked” rises or falls on how you feel after its climatic number, “Defying Gravity.” I thought it was a smash in the movie — 10/10, no notes. What do you think?
Dowd: It was no “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Ariana Grande was no Judy Garland.
Polgreen: Again, Erivo just smashed it. Did Grande sing in that number? If so I have forgotten.
Cottom: Ouch, Lydia. LOL Grande did indeed sing in that number. But Erivo owns this scene, as she should. It’s a blockbuster moment in the stage play, but the production value and Erivo’s power took it to a different stratosphere. That last four or five minutes is one of the best film sequences that I have ever seen. The audience I saw it with stood up and cheered. I felt like an old woman at a Southern Baptist church revival, clapping my hands wildly. It was great.
Healy: Finally — this movie is just Part 1 of “Wicked” onscreen. There’s also a Part 2 movie coming out next year. If you could write Part 2 of “Wicked,” what would you have happen? I’d have a “Defying Gravity” reprise where Elphaba flies around with Glinda. I’d put Dr. Dillamond in charge of Oz. And I’d cast Liza Minnelli as Aunt Em in some sort of flashback.
Dowd: If I could write Part 2 of “Wicked” I would stuff it into Part 1. Ridic we have to wait a year for half-a-movie that could have been better told in two hours and change. (I’d have had less Shiz University.) When “Gone With the Wind” opened in 1939, it had an intermission long enough to grab a drink or a sandwich before the epic rolled on. That would have been more gratifying with “Wicked.” (Even though we know how the story ends!)
Polgreen: I am slightly annoyed with myself that after seeing the movie I read the whole plot synopsis on Wikipedia. It would have been much more fun answering this with no idea of what comes next! I am a sucker for a 90-minute movie, so this one really tested my patience, much as I loved it. I am pretty happy to wait for Part 2 next year.
Cottom: No one told me this was a two-parter! When the film credits rolled, I thought it stopped for an intermission. I went to the bathroom and actually came back. I clearly missed a memo. I don’t like cliffhangers. We can be different people by the time it is released. The cultural conversation will almost certainly be in a different place. Also, I’m getting too old for all of this.
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