Musical
Wicked (PG)
Review: Cloaked in wistful nostalgia for the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz including a faux-vintage Universal Pictures logo and on-screen typography, the first part of Wicked’s swankified stage-to-screen transformation is the most visually dazzling, sonically spellbinding and viscerally thrilling film musical since The Greatest Showman. Director Jon M Chu builds on his gravity-defying brio behind the camera of In The Heights to rejoicify this grandiose gallivant from Munchkinland to Oz with enough kinetic energy to power Emerald City for decades.
The running time of Part I exceeds the entire stage musical (without an interval). Effusive expansions of screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox still honour the music and lyrics of Stephen Schwartz but deepen character backstories and allows us to stare into the glistening eyes of mismatched roommates Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) on their haphazard journeys to becoming the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North. A rousing full cast performance of One Short Day has been lovingly embellished with show-stopping cameos that pass batons from the 2003 stage incarnation of Wicked, which kickstarted the phenomenon, to its thrillifying screen counterpart.
The stage production’s standout numbers, Popular and Defying Gravity, deliver the same rhapsodic highs through Chu’s lens, the latter anthem bringing down a curtain on Part I with a pulse-quickening battle cry and an on-screen title card that publicly avows To Be Continued… However, the standout sequence of Wicked is a strengthening of sisterly bonds in the Ozdust Ballroom, where a cruel act borne of jealousy is ultimately redeemed. Erivo’s heartrending performance in these emotionally devastating minutes, when my muffled sobs joined a wave of communal lamentation rippling around the cinema, could win her the Oscar.
In the past 50 years, only two leading performances in a film musical have won the Academy Award: Lisa Minnelli for Cabaret and Emma Stone for La La Land. Erivo has Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards on her mantlepiece. A golden statuette in March next year would usher her into the exalted company like Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis as the youngest member of the EGOT club. She is magical in Wicked and her barnstorming portrayal of defiant, unapologetic otherness feels especially relevant in the current, volatile climate of sustained assaults on LGBTQ rights.
Grande-Butera must be a medium because she channels the whoop-inducing spirit of Kristin Chenoweth’s Broadway incarnation of Glinda and infuses the role with Mean Girls vigour and high-kicking sass. She pickpockets belly laughs with gusto. Jonathan Bailey is a thoroughly scandalacious and swoonsome prince with the emphasis on charming, who somersaults with hip-swivelling swagger through his solo Dancing Through Life as if his very existence depended upon it.
Chu stages the sequence as a Cirque Du Soleil-esque spectacle of acrobatic excellence in a circular library of interconnected spinning hamster wheels. At the beginning of Wicked Part I (as its billed on screen), Shiz University’s venerated Dean of Sorcery Studies, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), welcomes students with a disparaging quip: “We have nothing but the highest hopes, for some of you.” My impossibly high hopes for Chu’s film have been met.
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