Jazz Hands For ‘Wicked: Part One’

Rest easy, theater kids: you are seen. Hollywood’s plumped-up version of Broadway’s wildly successful Wicked is a sumptuous, glamorous, bedazzled and ardently faithful spectacular-spectacular. Showman director John M. Chu, his jazz-hands cast, all those whimsical costume designers and the hundreds of craftspeople who seamlessly mixed elaborate practical sets with CGI magic have concocted a kaleidoscopic confection worthy of this cultural behemoth. In Chu’s phantasmagoric take on the beloved fantasy, excess equals success.

For those not versed in the gravity-defying, money-gushing musical leviathan, Wicked is an epic frenemy flick set in the Land of Oz. Shiz University students Glinda Upland (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) meet, despise, and then adore each other before colliding with fission-level intensity—in turn polarizing into the good sorceress Glinda and her adversary The Wicked Witch of the West.

WICKED: PART ONE ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Written by: Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox
Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum
Running time: 160 mins

Because no lucrative IP these days can ever be too long or too overblown, this super-sized movie is technically just the first half of a story broken into two films—despite a running time for Part 1 that roughly equals the full length of the actual stage show. Universal’s double-dipping offers them two chances to reap their hoped-for box office reward, which frankly seems reasonable when the combined budget of the diptych is a reported $320 million. Conjuring the Emerald City costs a lot of green, and it sure shows.

Thankfully, all the bloviating is in support of a pretty good story. Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s song-and-dance adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book is a sly speculative riff on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 Oz-based fantasy series—specifically The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its clutch of witches both good and bad. 

Baum concocted one of the great enduring American mythologies: a fairy tale that perfectly captures this country’s can-do sense of wonder and optimism, its Manichean tendency to revere and villainize in equal measure, and its affection for hucksters and con men. It presents a shiny-surface populist political system with an all-knowing leader that uses fear to control the masses. And yet it also celebrates the individual, insisting that everyone already has the brains, heart, and courage to thrive. 

Maguire’s fan-fiction alternative history amplifies and deepens these qualities with its boldly subversive premise: what if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t really so bad at all? Or, more to the point, why does wickedness happen? Wicked is so enduring because it so deftly blends basic notions of good and evil—and does it as a relationship story, one that resonates particularly with teenage girls, marginalized communities and even political junkies. But mainly teenage girls.

The narrative’s seismic pop impact on that broad-stroke femme fanbase is a major reason why seismic pop star and Wicked superfan Arianna Grande is one of its main attractions. But the quality of the material also explains how they enlisted halfway-to-EGOT winner Cynthia Erivo for the dramatic heavy Elphaba. She’s the frothy film’s ballast, epitomizing wounded pride and steely defiance with a bittersweetness that makes her journey even more devastating—giving requisite big-picture pathos to a silver-screen upscaling of this magnitude.

Then again, Wicked feels incomplete—obviously, since it’s missing an Act Two. As with Villaneuve’s Dune duo, this movie contains underdeveloped characters and plot threads in the first installment. Elphaba has the strangest relationship to her paraplegic sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), in what seems like virtue-signaling kinship: she spends almost no time with her, they have very few heart-to-hearts, yet she protects her with a moral righteousness.

And, despite a cast of hundreds, this is very much a two-hander. It fills the periphery with roles that feel more like cameos: Michelle Yeoh’s imperious schoolmarm Madame Morrible, Jonathan Bailey’s charmingly arrogant Prince Fiyero; dorky Munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater); emo goat professor Doctor Dillamond (voice of Peter Dinklage). 

That said, Jeff Goldblum’s spin as the Wonderful Wizard of Oz does much with little: his impish brand of sympathetic eccentricity fits well with the compromised amorality of His Royal Ozness. And film is also savvy enough to slip in two very special appearances that the credits list as the Wiz-O-Mania Super Stars. Brace for two wick-ed-ly talented divas worthy of the adoration. Hint: their names are not Glom Gazingo or Adele Dazeem.

The showboating and zhuzh-ifying that permeates Wicked might leave a few viewers spent by the end. No choreographed troupe number is too busy, no belted ballad has too many trills. But the volcanic climax embodied in “Defying Gravity” is such a worthy showstopper, so pregnant with unspoken pain and unleashed fury, that its jaw-dropping visual pyrotechnics honestly seem a bit understated. Plus: an army of flying monkeys! Audiences won’t be disappointed—or disenchanted.