Wicked Soars, Roars, and Casts a Heady Spell

There is some tricky calculus to be done when bringing a hit stage musical to the screen. Timing, talent, and interest in the property beyond the scope of musical obsessives all must be factored in. But even when that math is done seemingly correctly—Steven Spielberg + beloved canon classic + warm newborn rising talent = success—you get a relative flop like West Side Story (a good movie that was, of course, hampered by the pandemic). Director Jon M. Chu learned that lesson the stiff way with In the Heights, a well-reviewed movie based on a hit Broadway show that failed to make sparks at the box office (again, at least in part because of the pandemic).

He’s now trying it again with what Universal and many other people certainly hope might be sturdier IP. Chu is the director of Wicked, Part 1, the opening salvo of a diptych adaptation of the global smash-hit musical—itself based on a book, which is based on another book (and, of course, the movie The Wizard of Oz). Wicked has been running on Broadway for 21 years, often still to sold-out crowds. It has toured the globe. At least one song from the show, the act-one-closing belt-a-thon “Defying Gravity,” has skipped the plane of musical fandom and become known in its own right—a very infrequent musical-theater feat these days. All parts seem aligned for Wicked to be a success. Maybe.

Most critical to the film’s prospects is that Wicked is, well, good. Chu has a natural flair for the shape and movement of musicals, knowing just when to ponderous for a poignant moment and when to go whooshing through a montage of change, to send his camera spinning around a stage full of sprightly dancers. Wicked—an origin story about the eventual Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, befriending Glinda the Good Witch at university—glides and flits along nicely, giving each indelible song its proper due and engagingly filling the spaces between them. Chu has coaxed sturdy work out of Cynthia Erivo, a boggling singer who can sometimes be a tad flat in her acting, and Ariana Grande, a child actor turned grownup pop idol now finding her movie-star groove.

Also of crucial importance: the Wicked movie (part 1, anyway) does justice to the spirit of the stage musical, balancing its silliness with its pathos, its magical flights of fancy with its more grounded entreaties about tolerance and decency. I am not the most die-hard of Wicked fans, but I am decidedly a fan, having first trekked down to New York in the spring of 2004 to see the original cast I’d just spent months listening to in a kind of dorky reverence. I felt sated, I daresay respected by what Chu and company have put forward.

Musical fans are somehow both straightforward and impossible to please, so what I see as justice done may well be another’s travesty. There are certainly nits to pick here: The sound mix is such that it often feels that we are merely watching music videos of the Wicked songs, as though it doesn’t much matter if we believe the characters are actually singing in the moment. Some of Chu’s CGI gleam—the rosy skies and glittering cities—is perhaps a little too gleam-y, too far afield of the tactile texture of the live show. Darkness does arrive, but I missed the forbidding loom of the stage version, which is established immediately upon entering the theater.

Much of that technical wobbliness is offset by the work of the film’s two leads. Erivo and Grande give lively, soulful performances in their dialogue scenes—the Ozdust Ballroom sequence is especially effective, a scene of communion and apology that resonates with surprising timbre. And they are in fine voice in each of this first act’s iconic songs. Erivo’s “The Wizard and I” is alternately gentle and blustering, an “I want” song so hopeful and triumphant in its present-tense context but so terribly gloomy when considering what’s to come. Grande puts a tart, sideways, decidedly Millennial spin on “Popular,” shrewdly calibrating the genuine generosity and lingering vanity of its lyrics.

And then, of course, there is “Defying Gravity,” the moment the entire film is building to. There is a lot of action—digital flying monkeys, the arrival of major plot twists—swirling around this show-defining number, but Chu gives center stage to the song, for the most part. While some wide-shot cutaways to Elphaba on her newly enchanted broom mean we miss a few desired closeups on Erivo wailing away, the impact is only slightly lessened. It’s a stirring close to a rousing, consistently engrossing 160-minute film.

Or, at least, the finale was stirring to someone like me, for whom these melodies conjure up memories of an aged wonder, of a younger self. Because it is tough to separate one’s mind from one’s heart, I am struggling to imagine how Wicked might land for the audience members the film needs to attract in order to flourish commercially: those who are not familiar with the original show, who do not have the same Pavlovian, nostalgic theater-kid response to the first fanfares of horns and tinkling bells that announce each beloved song. Just how supplementary is the Wicked movie to cherished memories of seeing the show, of listening to the soundtrack with equally geeky friends two decades ago?

I suppose box office receipts—and, sigh, online audience scoring—will answer those questions soon enough. But I hope that Wicked is able to make that great leap, casting a spell on all the necessary quadrants so that it may provide a reliable road map for any future such endeavor. Wicked succeeds because of some unreproducible, lightning in a bottle convergences—of director, stars, craftspeople, and high-status material. But Wicked also makes a broader case for patience and careful thought, for grand ambition honed over the course of many years. In order to defy gravity, gravity must first be understood.