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| Bowen Yang, Ariana Grande, and Bronwyn James in Wicked, Part I |
Unbelievably, I have seen the stage musical Wicked three times. I saw the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, with Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, a young Norbert Leo Butz, and Robert Morse (replaced by Joel Grey on Broadway). At more than three hours, it was bloated and unfocused, but I liked two of composer Stephen Schwartz’s songs, “Popular,” which does everything a musical comedy song should do, and the pretty and affecting “I’m Not That Girl.” And Chenoweth was hilarious. (I didn’t much care for Menzel; of course she won the Tony.) I saw it again several years later on tour in SF, when I took a friend’s daughter to see it for her birthday. Dramaturgically (we’ll get into more about dramaturgy later), it was fascinating to see how they had tightened the show up and how solid its construction now was. It still didn’t make it a great show, but there are any number of far worse musicals out there that have become hits, The Outsiders among the latest. The third time a friend, the talented Jason Graae, played the Wizard, charmingly. Making a movie of Wicked was inevitable. And to direct, why not pick Jon M. Chu, who proved he could do conspicuous consumption entertainingly with Crazy Rich Asians, and who proved hopelessly inept at directing a musical with In the Heights? I would say proving yourself hopelessly inept at directing a musical is why not, but what do I know? Not much, because his Wicked is a big fat hit. Wait, that’s not quite correct. Remember I said the pre-Broadway tryout was bloated and unfocused at three-plus hours? What’s in theaters now is Wicked, Part I, because Chu saw the Broadway show and decided that what it needed was three more hours added to it. Wicked, Part I basically covers the material in Act I of the stage show, but stretching it out to 2 hours and 40 minutes, forcing us to wait until next year for the conclusion, Wicked: For Good. Must we, though? (Oy.)
What brought all this about was novelist Gregory Maguire’s idea to tell the story of The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, turning her into a freedom fighter opposing the Wizard’s fascism. From a certain angle that’s a very clever idea; from my angle, it’s tiresome. Why would you want to deconstruct something as exquisitely constructed as The Wizard of Oz? Maguire went on to make millions exposing the dark side of fairy tales by retelling them from the villain’s point of view. Fairy tales have a dark side?? Who knew? Disney quickly learned the lesson Maguire was teaching, hence Cruella and Maleficent. (Two movies I’ve never seen, and you can’t make me.)
As it happens, Grande’s Galinda (how the name is changed to Glinda is a major plot point) is the best thing about the movie. She’s very funny, a combination of Chenoweth at her daffiest crossed with Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods, completely confident in her privilege. She’s the only person at Shiz University, the Oz-ian academy where she and Elphaba (a name Maguire adapted from the initials of Oz’s creator, L. Frank Baum) first meet, who doesn’t have to wear the school uniform. It isn’t pink, her favorite color, so why would she? And who would dare make her? After all, her preternaturally perfect skin, glowing on camera, is best set off by pink. Her alert, wide, brown eyes survey all she sees, and you can see her thinking, Why, yes, I am the best thing here. And in the later emotional scenes, she has a direct, unfussy access to her feelings, a welcome relief from the scenes’ essential triteness.
But Wicked is Elphaba’s story. Cynthia Erivo is a phenomenal talent, an infinitely better singer than Menzel, with a clear, direct voice that can increase in power with taste and ease. But as conceived by book- and screenwriter Winnie Holzman, Elphaba isn’t a human being: she’s prosaic self-actualization writ large. In the movie, she’s initially a bit like Stephen King’s Carrie White: when she gets emotional objects move and crash. As she discovers her true powers and learns to love her green skin (it’s a metaphor!), leading up to her mission statement “Defying Gravity,” we get too many “serious” scenes with dull self-help phrases. “Defying Gravity” sums this all up with banalities like “I’m through accepting limits,” and “It’s time to trust my instincts.” Elphaba isn’t a person, she’s a concept, and there’s nothing Erivo can do to overcome that.
What brought all this about was novelist Gregory Maguire’s idea to tell the story of The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, turning her into a freedom fighter opposing the Wizard’s fascism. From a certain angle that’s a very clever idea; from my angle, it’s tiresome. Why would you want to deconstruct something as exquisitely constructed as The Wizard of Oz? Maguire went on to make millions exposing the dark side of fairy tales by retelling them from the villain’s point of view. Fairy tales have a dark side?? Who knew? Disney quickly learned the lesson Maguire was teaching, hence Cruella and Maleficent. (Two movies I’ve never seen, and you can’t make me.)
The publicity around Wicked, with millions of TikTok videos and Facebook Reels and Instagram whatevers, has been insane. Its stars, the pop singer Ariana Grande (billed here with her full name Ariana Grande-Butera) and the West End and Broadway star Cynthia Erivo, have been ubiquitous, showing up in color- and character-coordinated outfits (which they claim has all been by coincidence), and doing a lot of crying. So much crying. The most outrageous interview clip has become an internet meme. A self-professed “queer journalist” (I’m not doubting the queer part, just the journalist part) said to Erivo: “I’ve seen this week people are taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that.” Erivo looking stunned, murmured, “I didn’t know that was happening…. That’s really powerful,” and then seemed emotionally overcome. Grande grabbed her hand in support. And the entire Internet responded: Um, what the fuck?
Grande later confessed she didn’t know what the hell they were talking about either, and in a Variety interview with Paul Mescal, he said to her, “I’m watching you guys together in the press tour and you’re like….” And Grande, to her everlasting credit, responded, “Insufferable. Horrible. It’s bad.” It is indeed. (I could explain to you why Paul Mescal was interviewing Ariana Grande, or we could all just hold space for and be emotionally overcome by what social media is doing to popular culture and clasp each other’s hands in support, so let’s do that.) I’m starting to really like Ariana Grande. (Something has changed within me.) Of note is that at the end of her 2017 benefit concert for the victims of the suicide bomber that attacked attendees exiting her earlier Manchester concert, she sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Grande later confessed she didn’t know what the hell they were talking about either, and in a Variety interview with Paul Mescal, he said to her, “I’m watching you guys together in the press tour and you’re like….” And Grande, to her everlasting credit, responded, “Insufferable. Horrible. It’s bad.” It is indeed. (I could explain to you why Paul Mescal was interviewing Ariana Grande, or we could all just hold space for and be emotionally overcome by what social media is doing to popular culture and clasp each other’s hands in support, so let’s do that.) I’m starting to really like Ariana Grande. (Something has changed within me.) Of note is that at the end of her 2017 benefit concert for the victims of the suicide bomber that attacked attendees exiting her earlier Manchester concert, she sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
As it happens, Grande’s Galinda (how the name is changed to Glinda is a major plot point) is the best thing about the movie. She’s very funny, a combination of Chenoweth at her daffiest crossed with Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods, completely confident in her privilege. She’s the only person at Shiz University, the Oz-ian academy where she and Elphaba (a name Maguire adapted from the initials of Oz’s creator, L. Frank Baum) first meet, who doesn’t have to wear the school uniform. It isn’t pink, her favorite color, so why would she? And who would dare make her? After all, her preternaturally perfect skin, glowing on camera, is best set off by pink. Her alert, wide, brown eyes survey all she sees, and you can see her thinking, Why, yes, I am the best thing here. And in the later emotional scenes, she has a direct, unfussy access to her feelings, a welcome relief from the scenes’ essential triteness.
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| Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande |
But Wicked is Elphaba’s story. Cynthia Erivo is a phenomenal talent, an infinitely better singer than Menzel, with a clear, direct voice that can increase in power with taste and ease. But as conceived by book- and screenwriter Winnie Holzman, Elphaba isn’t a human being: she’s prosaic self-actualization writ large. In the movie, she’s initially a bit like Stephen King’s Carrie White: when she gets emotional objects move and crash. As she discovers her true powers and learns to love her green skin (it’s a metaphor!), leading up to her mission statement “Defying Gravity,” we get too many “serious” scenes with dull self-help phrases. “Defying Gravity” sums this all up with banalities like “I’m through accepting limits,” and “It’s time to trust my instincts.” Elphaba isn’t a person, she’s a concept, and there’s nothing Erivo can do to overcome that.
As dream boy Fiyero, Jonathan Bailey pushes too hard for charm. Jeff Goldblum is fun as the Wizard until he has to be pure evil, and Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible looks coolly elegant in Paul Tazewell’s gowns, but when Morrible has to make a choice between Elphaba and the Wizard, hers makes no sense. The rest of the cast—Ethan Slater, Keala Settle, Narissa Bode—fail to make much of an impression. Bowen Yang, as Galinda’s bitchy gay friend (sigh), sarcastically remarks to Elphaba, “We’re going to rouge our knees,” a very odd allusion to the musical Chicago.
As far as the rest of the movie goes, Chu’s camera zips and glides and pans, but he never shows you what you need to see. He’s unable to give you a sense of the geography of Oz or even of Shiz. In one scene Elphaba stands atop huge Dover-esque cliffs that look out to sea. But since Shiz appears to be situated on a tiny Venice-esque island approachable only by small boat, we have no idea how she got there.
There’s an on-set clip of Chu addressing the large company of dancers, assuring them that he will do justice to their hard work. Never has a director lied more. In In the Heights, there were scenes where a camera would look down a cross-street, capture hundreds of dancers performing, and then move on seconds later, as if there were nothing to see there. Lots of people are posting videos of themselves doing the choreography to a short segment of the song “Loathing,” which seems an odd choice to go viral, but it’s the only bit of choreography that’s at all comprehensible. Jonathan Bailey’s introduction as Fiyero is “Dancing Through Life,” a mildly humorous ditty on how good looks and wealth are all you need (“Life is painless, when you’re brainless”). But the choreography doesn’t show him off as it should: you see him working when he should be relaxed and nonchalant, as Butz was in the Broadway cast. And Chu chops the sequence up so much that we have no idea what the background dancers are doing. (It doesn’t look like we're missing much.) When Elphaba first appears in her witch’s hat, the music stops at the Ozdust Ballroom, a noisy dance club where everyone appears to be doing steps from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” (Only in movies does the club music stop for an awkward entrance.) In what’s supposed to be defiance and then triumph, she starts doing some bizarre modern dance moves in the silence. If we’d seen her moving this way before, the scene might work, but we have no idea where this movement comes from -- from choreographer Christopher Scott, of course, but certainly not from Elphaba’s character or from the story. And when we finally get to the Emerald City, the choreography for “One Short Day” is so spastic and overdone that from the little we can see of it, the whole city seems to be having seizures, the air rife with chiropractic cracks and snaps. (It almost makes the Emerald City sequence in the movie of The Wiz look good, a highly dubious achievement.)
When the Wizard shows Elphaba the Grimmerie, the book of spells that allows her to unleash her powers, Madame Morrible tells her that it contains wisdom and enchantments, and “dramaturgy.” If so, it’s the only thing in the movie that does. It’s possible that was my mishearing of “metallurgy,” but dramaturgy is a mysterious concept to a lot of people. It certainly is to Jon M. Chu.
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| Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh |
As far as the rest of the movie goes, Chu’s camera zips and glides and pans, but he never shows you what you need to see. He’s unable to give you a sense of the geography of Oz or even of Shiz. In one scene Elphaba stands atop huge Dover-esque cliffs that look out to sea. But since Shiz appears to be situated on a tiny Venice-esque island approachable only by small boat, we have no idea how she got there.
There’s an on-set clip of Chu addressing the large company of dancers, assuring them that he will do justice to their hard work. Never has a director lied more. In In the Heights, there were scenes where a camera would look down a cross-street, capture hundreds of dancers performing, and then move on seconds later, as if there were nothing to see there. Lots of people are posting videos of themselves doing the choreography to a short segment of the song “Loathing,” which seems an odd choice to go viral, but it’s the only bit of choreography that’s at all comprehensible. Jonathan Bailey’s introduction as Fiyero is “Dancing Through Life,” a mildly humorous ditty on how good looks and wealth are all you need (“Life is painless, when you’re brainless”). But the choreography doesn’t show him off as it should: you see him working when he should be relaxed and nonchalant, as Butz was in the Broadway cast. And Chu chops the sequence up so much that we have no idea what the background dancers are doing. (It doesn’t look like we're missing much.) When Elphaba first appears in her witch’s hat, the music stops at the Ozdust Ballroom, a noisy dance club where everyone appears to be doing steps from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” (Only in movies does the club music stop for an awkward entrance.) In what’s supposed to be defiance and then triumph, she starts doing some bizarre modern dance moves in the silence. If we’d seen her moving this way before, the scene might work, but we have no idea where this movement comes from -- from choreographer Christopher Scott, of course, but certainly not from Elphaba’s character or from the story. And when we finally get to the Emerald City, the choreography for “One Short Day” is so spastic and overdone that from the little we can see of it, the whole city seems to be having seizures, the air rife with chiropractic cracks and snaps. (It almost makes the Emerald City sequence in the movie of The Wiz look good, a highly dubious achievement.)
When the Wizard shows Elphaba the Grimmerie, the book of spells that allows her to unleash her powers, Madame Morrible tells her that it contains wisdom and enchantments, and “dramaturgy.” If so, it’s the only thing in the movie that does. It’s possible that was my mishearing of “metallurgy,” but dramaturgy is a mysterious concept to a lot of people. It certainly is to Jon M. Chu.
– Joe Mader has written on film and worked as a theater critic for various publications including the SF Weekly, The San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and The Hollywood Reporter. He previously served as the managing director for the San Francisco theater company 42nd Street Moon. He currently works at Cisco Systems and writes on theater for his own blog, Scene 2.
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