Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande rock the not-so-merry old land of Oz
Wicked
Starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jeff Goldblum & Michelle Yeoh
Directed by Jon M. Chu
PG
In theaters Friday, Nov. 22
What’s the biggest, greenest, most Wicked-ly wondrous thing in the world?
Right now, it’s this dazzling new movie adaptation of the long-running Broadway blockbuster swooping onto the big screen with the fabled backstory of the witches from The Wizard of Oz. One the most hotly anticipated films of the year does not disappoint; it’s a visually stunning, fantabulously festooned song-and-dance extravaganza with magical moments and sweeping emotions, all built majestically around costars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as the young women who eventually become Oz’s polar-opposite sorceresses…and the premise that the green “Wicked Witch” didn’t start out wicked, the beautiful Good Witch wasn’t always so good, and “merry old land of Oz” holds, and hides, some not-so-merry secrets.
Fans of 1939 movie, and the Tony-winning musical it became more than 20 years ago, will delight in the sights (Extravagant costumes! Fantastical sets! Retro-riffic gizmo-trons!), the sounds (Toe-tappers! Showtunes! Big Broadway ballads!) and the movie’s meticulous attention to detail. (If you’re looking for ideas for a new pair of glasses, Wicked wire-rims rock.)
And if you’ve seen the musical, you probably know how Wicked foreshadows events and characters that would come later in the timeline of Oz, including the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow…and the witch who gets smushed under Dorothy’s house. You’ll find out the origins of the Yellow Brick Road (and why it’s not some other color), get a quick glimpse of the Wizard’s real name (it’s Oscar Diggs), and learn the reason those flying monkeys got their wings. And you’ll understand how Erivo’s character, an “outsider” born with freakishly green skin, becomes shaped by fate and her own empathetic sense of right and wrong, only to become reviled and feared as evil, twisted and wicked.
Jeff Goldblum serves up a touch of seductive whimsy—and wily deception—as the Wizard. Michelle Yeoh (who also starred in director Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians) is Madame Morrible, the head of sorcery at Shiz University (Oz’s version of Hogwarts), where Glinda (Grande) and the green-skinned Elphaba (Erivo) meet as young students. Peter Dinklage is the voice of a history teacher, who happens to be a goat. Jonathan Bailey, an award-winning British actor, steals his scenes (as well as hearts) as Prince Fiyero, a self-centered hunk of eye-candy charm.
It’s all a fab fantasy, for sure, but the musical also fleshes out allegorical undertones in the books by L. Frank Baum (on which the 1939 movie was based), about lies, politics, racism and the dangers of daring to different. When Elphaba arrives at the university to the gasps and giggles of her classmates reacting to her skin the shade of grass, it harkens back to the turmoil of racial integration in the 1950s—with Wicked green as the new black.
But you won’t get hung up and weighed down by the incidental heaviness as this jubilant musical soars and unfurls its heart-tugging, fiercely pro-feminist saga of two rivals who overcome their differences and become friends—and eventually diverge onto separate paths to their future. You may be moved to applause—or tears—by infectiously buoyant songs like “Dancing Through Life” and “Popular,” the melancholy “I’m Not That Girl” or “Defying Gravity,” the colossal closing number that reminds us that “everyone deserves a chance to fly,” to be who they are, and who they want to be. There’s a lot to make you smile, think, and even laugh.
And you’ll be wholly gob-smacked by the performances of Erivo—all but surely headed now to EGOT-ville with the growing buzz about an Oscar to round out her Tony, Emmy and Grammy—and Grande, a spectacularly gifted pop singer who absolutely crushes her first major film role, in a film that will certainly wear the crown as the movie musical event of the year, a grand-scale gollywhopper that will leave audiences wide-eyed…and hungrily waiting for its part two, set to arrive next November.
Until then, keep it green, keep flying—and don’t make any winged monkeys mad!
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 