Some critics are calling Jon M. Chu’s Wicked adaptation “the best movie-to-musical adaptation since Chicago and Mamma Mia.” This may be an indictment of the movie musicals of the last 15 years rather than an endorsement of the film. Chu’s Wicked (2024) is a big swing and a miss, capturing the content of the stage musical but failing to hit on all of the beats that make it so great.
Wicked had to follow in the huge footsteps of its Broadway predecessor, which starred two of Broadway’s most iconic actresses, paid back its production budget in a year and became one of the longest-running Broadway shows in history. Not only that, but the film also acts as the prequel to one of the most important movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz. It is often falsely said that The Wizard of Oz was the first color movie, and while this is not true, it utilized the vibrant Technicolor film process in an era where black and white was still dominant. When you watch The Wizard of Oz come to life, Jon M. Chu’s pastel prequel quite literally pales in comparison. The lifeless digital look is dominant in movies today, but if there was any movie where vibrancy should have been a given, it was absolutely this one.
Wicked follows The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, before Dorothy ever landed in Oz. At Shiz University, Elphaba and Glinda the Good roomed together and formed an unlikely friendship. What Glinda lacks in power, she makes up for it in popularity, and while Elphaba is the most powerful witch anyone has ever seen, she is ostracized for her green skin. While in The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West is the villain that could keep Dorothy from returning to Kansas, in Wicked, she is scapegoated by the rulers of Oz for refusing to help them silence and subjugate Oz’s talking animals.
Chu’s Wicked is spectacle itself, filled with impractical shelves, underwater nightclubs and self-opening books. There’s a lot to look at, which seems to be how we’re doing movie musicals nowadays, an interpretation that contrasts with the stage musical’s bare sets, which allow the focus to be on the music and the story. In the stage musical, when Nessarose is getting manhandled, Elphaba pushes her chair away. In the film, Elphaba sends Nessarose flying, overturning benches and cracking open walls. When Elphaba flies on the broom at the end of act one, it’s breathtaking because it is so much bigger than anything else she has been able to do. This effect is lost in the film. The excess present throughout the film dulls the moments that actually need to be big!
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times described the film as “unconscionably” long. There’s nothing wrong with long movies in general, but there is something very wrong with long movies that are only long because they are paced horribly. If you’ve already seen the Broadway show, you’ll be shocked that they somehow managed to make act one nearly an hour and a half longer than the stage production without really adding anything at all. What they did add, like drawn-out dialogue and extra scenes, failed to deepen or enhance the original story. It just made it longer — so much longer.
The triumph that is the stage production hinges on the serious tonal shift at the halfway mark, with act two diving into a battle between Elphaba and the uneducated masses as Glinda navigates her position in Oz’s fascistic machine. It turns from a story of bullying into a story of all-out war (and Dorothy is somewhere in the background too). To split it into two parts was a choice that raised many eyebrows, and those concerns have proven to be justified. Would you like to see the big shift that makes the musical a complete story? Pay fifteen more dollars in 2025!
I went into this as a big fan of Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey. Erivo was the shining star of this film and played a classic Elphaba, although some Broadway die-hards may not be a fan of her diversions from the score. Grande was fine but unmemorable. She nailed the singing, but many of the comedic moments were only okay, and that’s not just because Kristen Chenoweth is a once-in-a-lifetime talent — subsequent Glindas have done it just as well. There were no big laughs in my relatively full theater. For any Grande stans that may read this, I’m willing to blame it on the directing rather than her performance. Before “Dancing Through Life” began, I was absolutely confident that it would be a bright moment of the film. It was not. Bailey’s acting was strong and he’s a proven singer, but I did not enjoy his superfluous vocal runs and I was puzzled by the choreography which required him to slide around on books in a superhero-esque outfit (not his fault there). For anyone who cares, I really liked Ethan Slater as Boq. Bowen Yang was as funny as he is on Saturday Night Live.
This might be your seven-year-old sibling’s new favorite movie, and while that’s nice, it’s a drop in prestige from the Tony winning source material. There are a lot of glowing reviews coming out about this film, and I can understand why its themes about resisting fascism feel especially poignant right now, but a good message does not make a good movie. Do we have to revive Gene Kelly to get another great movie musical? We’ve fallen so far from their golden age.
Chloe Asack is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].