No one works harder than the Wicked Witch of the West. Since entering the public domain in 1956 with the rest of the characters from L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, popular culture has seen several renditions of John Waters’ favorite fictional villain on screen, on stage, and in print. Margaret Hamilton is likely best known to most for playing the Wicked Witch in the Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), despite being a slice of MGM’s intellectual property rather than the public domain, but handfuls of Baum’s chosen antagonist have followed since. Mabel King was terrifying as the Wicked Witch in The Wiz (1978), while Idina Menzel originated the role of “Elphaba” in the stage production of Wicked. Even Miss Piggy took a crack at the iconic role in The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005). Now, in 2024, Cynthia Erivo has entered the witchy arena in Jon M. Chu’s juggernaut Wicked: Part One.
Like almost every other rendition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chu’s film is a link in an ever-expanding chain. It’s a stacked adaptation of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s stage musical, which is itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is based on the characters from Baum’s original work. Tonally, Maguire’s novel is noticeably darker than its musical descendants, despite sharing similar plot structure and beats. For example, in the book, Elphaba has green skin and fangs rather than green skin and a snatched waist. Her mother is date-raped by a potion seller, a point which is turned into a silly “cheating wife” rendezvous in the musical. There are talking animals in both adaptations, but in the novel, they have sex with humans. Adult themes and material aside, however, at their core, both the novel and musical seek to detail how Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West. The difference, then, is that the novel is about Elphaba’s radicalization and her fight against fascism in Oz, while the musical is about complicated friendship dynamics, alienation, and the eventual achievement of self-love.
Part One is essentially told from the perspective of Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande). In the opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” Glinda descends upon a crowd of Munchkins in her famous pink orb after the supposed death of Elphaba. Known for folding personal tragedy into an R&B sound in her pop music, Grande here sings in an operatic register, going for the tone and style Kristin Chenoweth originated on Broadway. Sticking to this difficult vocal range both proves that Grande has clearly put in the work to realize the difficult musical role, and also suggests that things are not what they seem in the Merry Old Land of Oz. While angry Munchkins express their joy at the Wicked Witch’s death, Glinda meets each verse with pained micro-expressions that go unnoticed to the untrained eye. Eventually, Glinda carefully poses a question to her ecstatic disciples: “Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” The film then retreats into the past.
Enter Elphaba, the film’s case study. Green and stoic, she arrives at Shiz University, where she meets Glinda and her cohort of loyal followers. Told primarily through flashbacks, the two women are quickly established as rivals in songs like “What is this Feeling?” Glinda, by design, is the flashier, more appealing character, Grande opting for an earnest brattiness and displaying exceptional comedic timing that is at once evocative of Lucille Ball’s physical humor and Liza Minnelli’s wide-eyed charm. Elphaba, by contrast, is dry and reserved — she never really gives any pizzazz like her blonde adversary. Of course, this is a defense mechanism. She is and has been bullied for her green skin and defiant nature, and as a result, we see she nurtures sympathy toward the talking animals of Oz, who we learn are increasingly being persecuted off-screen. But while these attributes and narrative arcs are meant to highlight Elphaba’s “otherness” in the musical adaptations of Wicked, this aggression reads more like high school bullying than the grander threats of the adult world as seen in Maguire’s novel, leaving it all to feel a bit rushed and perfunctory.
Elphaba eventually gets her flowers during “The Wizard and I.” Erivo, like Grande, rose to fame thanks to a very specific set of technical skills. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, the Tony Award-winning actress is known for her ability to “belt” and emotionally embed feeling into her vocal register. Judy Garland, who will always be remembered as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, was also known for these skills, and instead of relying solely on lyrics and storytelling, she brought both strength and vulnerability to her roles through vocal inflections that exposed her interiority. It’s no mistake that Erivo evokes a sentiment in this vein during the film’s first solo, where Elphaba prophesies that her magical abilities could set her free, and this later allows “The Wizard and I” to function as a form of wish fulfillment, with Elphaba finding a moment of well-deserved peace away from her classmates. She skips around Shiz as if it were a farm in Kansas, singing to no one and everyone at the same time, her voice vibrating with hope for the first time. It’s in these pockets of pure musical expression that the film is at its best.
But while Erivo and Grande pull their weight as performers, both vocally and otherwise, Chu fails to match their energy. Too often, he here opts for maximalism, which is rarely a bad thing in terms of musical theater, but in execution, his choices frequently fall flat. The film’s visual character seem constructed well enough from afar, but up close Chu’s style more closely resembles that of a video game — or worse, the set of a Ryan Murphy production. During ensemble numbers like “What is this Feeling?” or “Dancing through Life,” the director fails to use the camera productively; rather than focusing on the crowd at large with a dolly shot, for instance, Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks consistently choose eye-level, medium-wide tracking shots. If either had paid attention to their film history classes at USC, they would understand the benefit of throwing in some kaleidoscope formations from above, with a few narrow hallway scenes to add some friction — Shiz is a school, after all. Such angles would help add variety to the film’s visual character and imbue some razzle to match the clear efforts to dazzle, as well as pay homage to the golden age of musicals. Instead, we’re left to trudge through a style so gauche that it makes even the artifice feel somehow artificial.
Clocking in at 160 minutes, it’s evident that one goal of Wicked: Part One was to do some necessary world-building for Part Two, and it does indeed accomplish that — to the degree that it most engenders impatience to arrive there. The requisite boxes are checked: Elphaba and Glinda eventually settle their differences and become friends, and their values, both shared and contrasting, are explored in over-the-top, fan-favorite numbers “Popular” and “Defying Gravity.” And characters necessary to the plot, including Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), Boq (Ethan Slater), and Nessarose (Marissa Bode), are introduced, though without any real weight or clear purpose here other than establishing a messy love… pentagon. But in Part One, the Wicked Witch of the West’s presence still feels quite limited, despite what certain musical numbers declare, making only one brief appearance at the end of the film wherein hat, cape, and broom are at last in tow. Hopefully, Chu will find time to deliver her side of the story in the next three-hour installment.
DIRECTOR: Jon M. Chu; CAST: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 22; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 40 min.
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