WICKED: For Colored Girls…When the Rainbow Is Enuf

By Harlan Jacobson – December 6, 2024

Wicked, the Universal Studios film of the monster Broadway musical hit, has come roaring down the pike bigger than a Kansas twister and is finding all those Wicked fans who’ve been waiting for two decades for the film to be made. The new film at two hours and 40 minutes, which cuts into the number of screenings per day, is already heading toward the $300 million mark this week and set to swoosh past Dune 2 at number 5 on the US domestic box office list for 2024, released last March, and Beetle Juice 2 on Labor Day at number 4.

It took this Broadway musical about sisterhood that opened in the Fall of 2003 a couple decades to gross $1.7 billion, an astonishing number for Broadway. This great, big screen version could quadruple its $150 million negative cost domestically by New Years, after an army of crafts people did their magic. Jon Chu’s direction of the original music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman is more than a blowing out of the confines of the musical play into a cinematic landscape that summons and spiffs up the 1939 The Wizard of OZ. When that Dorothy crash landed, famously she and Toto knew they weren’t in black and white Kansas anymore, but somewhere deep inside MGM Technicolor.

The story in this first cinematic installment of Wicked is the back story before Dorothy plopped down in Oz and landed in the hotbed of local politics surrounding the elusive fuddy duddy of the Wizard. The original musical based on the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire flipped the script backwards from Dorothy to the teenage Elphaba, the girl with the green skin, rejected at birth by her father, the Mayor of Oz, with innate powers of sorcery that made her different than all the other girls. When all the clever story twists are done, Wicked is a story about school, Shiz University, where the major is Sorcery. It’s about sisterhood a little and a lot about difference throughout – in this case difference of color accompanied by and defended by talent, to wit the sorcerer’s ability to make things fly.

Elphaba in the early days in Part one is given to alternating currents of wounded doubt and ferocious power by Cynthia Erivo in the role originated on Broadway by Idina Menzel. And Ariana Grande summons the caprice of Galinda, the blonde roommate without Elphaba’s talent but with all the perks that normally accrue to homecoming queens that ultimately will be enough to grant her Witchhood as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Glinda out pinks last year’s Barbie in costume and aura, as Ariana Grande sings right past Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role on Broadway. (Both Menzel and Chenoweth have cameos in the film.)

Elphaba’s name is an acronym of sorts of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of OZ novel published in 1900 as the first of a series of 14 OZ adventure books written for children. The 1939 film with Judy Garland as Dorothy, had recognizably Depression-era markings: It was about what people didn’t have and the fears that they did.

At about the same time Walt Disney expanded his Mickey Mouse cartoon studio into an empire of full-length stories about outcasts: Snow White rescued by the 7 Dwarves, Pinocchio’s nose, Dumbo’s ears, Tramp’s working-class wanderlust, the now scarce Br’er Rabbit, who ran circles around Br’er Fox, and so on. Wicked comes from that same impulse that fueled the civil rights animations and stories of mid-Century America, a musical wrapped around a person of color – in this case green – denied her birthright and a path forward until the meritocracy – the head of the Sorcery School — recognizes her talent and knows she’s who the great and terrible Oz is looking for.

The Dean of Sorcery Studies at Wicked’s Shiz University—which I can’t imagine isn’t pronounced with a ‘tz’ by the students on the sly – Madame Morrible, played by Michelle Yeoh, catches a glimpse of Elphaba, dropping off her more favored sister to begin her first semester. The ordinarily animated Yeoh — previously in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Jon Chu’s breakout film as director, Crazy Rich Asians — alas here lacks the heft of Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, which Wicked‘s tongue-in-cheek tone parodies. School is always where gravity is up for grabs. The Sorcery Dean can see past Elphaba’s green in a school that is predictably pink with a streak of meanness. That triggers Elphaba into some fancy but out of control anti-gravity witchcraft that scares the bejesus out of the bratpack girls.

Taunt a green outcast into making stuff fly, and you get a scholarship to witch school. Working the levers behind the curtain and truly ready to retire, whether he knows it or not, as the Wizard, is Jeff Goldblum, whose character signature is always twitchy —the twitchy guy in a crazy place. Glinda and Elphaba have a railroad trip to see the Wizard on the most beautiful train ever. After their rocky start as freshmen roommates, Glinda, the In Girl, and Elphaba, the Out Girl, find their sisterhood on the way to meet their separate fates in Part 2, due out in November, 2025.

Wicked’s signature songs – “I’m Not That Girl,” “Popular” — that fans of the musical love – punctuate a score that’s less memorable than the dazzling visuals and choreography. Chu’s gift is frenetically staging entire villages of dancers as part of the magical backdrop brought to the screen by the real stars of Wicked, the cinematographer, Alice Brooks, from In the Heights, and production designer Nathan Crowley, who together orchestrate action and artifice in a way that is just brilliant. When that emerald green locomotive with the brass trim rolls across the screen to take Elphaba and Glinda to see the Wizard, I’d hop on in a heartbeat. All I need now is a brain and some courage. Hmm…