The second installment of the movie musical, Wicked: For Good, is out now. The new movie’s reviews are pretty dire, but below is my cheerful review from last year in Taki’s Magazine of the better first act.
In 2024, I politely skipped over discussing Wicked’s promotional tour, during which the two leading ladies appeared to be experiencing co-dependent mental illnesses, with anorexia among the least of their troubles. But now the gruesome twosome are back, looking as demented as ever, so they don’t seem to have gotten the help they clearly need.
Your opinion of the hit movie Wicked: Part 1, a 160-minute extrapolation of the 90-minute opening act of the Broadway musical Wicked, depends upon your answer to the question: When it comes to Wicked, can there be too much of a good thing?
Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the freshman year in sorcery school of the rivals Glinda, the Good Witch, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, has made approaching $1.7 billion just in Times Square since opening in 2003. Evidently, a lot of people really like it, the more of it the better, and they can’t wait for the film of the second act next Thanksgiving.
Then again, a lot of people (many of them straight men) think a little Wicked goes a long way.
On the third hand, if you aren’t very familiar with the current platinum age of Broadway, seeing the movie version of Wicked can be a cheap way to familiarize yourself with a representative 21st-century musical.
Broadway was very near the center of American popular culture for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. But then Broadway musicals declined, along with Times Square, then roared back into unimagined prosperity in this century.
Wicked is now the second-highest-grossing (behind only The Lion King) and fourth-longest-running Broadway play at 8,168 performances, triple what My Fair Lady could manage from 1956 to 1962 during Broadway’s golden age.
There are good reasons people pay three digits to see shows on Broadway. (Wicked’s average ticket price is $159.) The amount of high-priced effort put into entertaining you in person is probably greater on Broadway than anywhere else in the world other than, say, the Salzburg opera festival. Wicked, for instance, costs about $100,000 per performance to put on (but it has lately been averaging over $300,000 in ticket revenue). Of course, union stagehands in Manhattan’s Local-1 can make more than a half million per year, but they do quite the job flying the Wicked Witch around the stage on her broom while she belts out “Defying Gravity.”
Interestingly, Wicked is representative of a trend toward mass-market Broadway shows aiming for distinctive demographic niches: in this case, girls and gays. Big-budget cultural products used to work to keep both sexes entertained. But now we tend to see more specialization, such as the current Wicked vs. Gladiator II or last year’s Barbie vs. Oppenheimer.
The original Wizard of Oz, for instance, was essentially a girl’s movie with Judy Garland as Dorothy. But it also featured three famous male comic-relief characters—the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion—so little boys, who tend to be deplorably sexist, stayed interested.
Later, over the decades, gay men culturally appropriated The Wizard of Oz, calling themselves “friends of Dorothy.” The Stonewall Riot that conventionally marks the beginning of the Gay Lib era was just hours after Judy Garland’s funeral, when emotions were running high. Some say that the gay pride rainbow flag was adopted as a tribute to the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
And yet, as far as I can tell, The Wizard of Oz probably had no more gay subtext than the average film of its time and much less than some (e.g., Laura).
Class trips to New York for eighth and twelfth graders are both a big market in themselves for musicals, and an important mechanism for making fans for life. So, many shows, such as Wicked, are aimed at adolescents. (Thus, this film about going off to college is rated a mild PG, and is suitable for children old enough to not be terrified of witches.)
In turn, this has led to the creation of boy musicals like the South Park guys’ Book of Mormon and Hamilton, the fourth- and fifth-highest-grossers ever. My guess is that Hamilton started out as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s well-intentioned attempt to create the perfect musical for class trips, one that history teacher chaperones would endorse and boys would enjoy. (The girls and gay boys could be expected to be thrilled by any Broadway musical, even one about founding fathers debating economic policy.) It’s not Miranda’s fault that rich grown-up Obama voters then went embarrassingly nuts over Hamilton.
In contrast to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked has two female leads and little in the way of a comic-relief character, male or female. It has a romantic interest for the girls to fight over, a prince who is likable and cool, but he’s more witty than funny.
Jeff Goldblum is low-key amusing as the Wizard of Oz, but he got me thinking that with AI the movie now could have made happen the original 1939 conception of casting the great W.C. Fields as the Wizard. These days, younger people seem to have barely heard of Fields, but if he’d come on at the end of Oz, his fame would be immortal.
The basic idea of Wicked, derived from gay Catholic children’s author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel about the origin of evil, is that one frenemy (Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz) is born blonde and thus privileged like Billie Burke, while the other (Elphaba, based on L. Frank Baum’s three initials) is born green and thus is oppressed by society for not being the pretty one. So who can blame Elphaba for becoming Margaret Hamilton’s socially constructed Wicked Witch of the West?
The original 2003 Broadway musical cast blonde cutie-pie Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and the tall, Jewish, pretty actress Idina Menzel as green Elphaba.
In contrast, in 2021, at the peak of the George Floyd racial reckoning, the movie producers thought it a timely idea to cast Cynthia Erivo, an aging plain-Jane Nigerian-Briton with a face made for viewing from the cheap seats, as the green girl. But by 2024, this brainstorm (green and black!) has turned out a little too on the nose in the ethnic aggrievement department. (Italian-American pop star Ariana Grande plays the amusing Glinda in the manner of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde.)
Speaking of noses, the filmmakers didn’t dare mess with Erivo’s standard short, wide Nigerian nose, so she doesn’t look at all like a European conception of a pointy-nosed witch.
Beyond the nose, the essence of witchiness is a face that looks attractive when young but isn’t likely to age well: Think of Sarah Jessica Parker in 1991’s L.A. Story or Madonna in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan. Madonna looked plenty sexy then, but you also couldn’t help noticing that without pervasive plastic surgery there would come a time when the only role she’d be suitable for is fattening up Hansel for dinner.
Similarly, Menzel looked nice in 2003. But in her cameo in this movie, her strong jaw now stands out alarmingly, confirming the appropriateness of her casting back then.
Erivo, in contrast, has that black-don’t-crack look where it’s hard to tell whether she is 30 or 60. (I was pleased to see that black jazz genius Miles Davis vindicated my observation in his autobiography that it’s hard to tell how old black people are.) Trying to play a college freshman, the 37-year-old Erivo looks like your standard chip-on-her-shoulder black middle manageress. I kept expecting another student to try to touch her hair and then for her to file a complaint with the campus DEI department.
While some groups must be represented (for example, even the disabled are represented in Wicked by wheelchair-bound actress Marissa Bode as Elphaba’s sister, the witch who will get crushed by Dorothy’s falling house), others (such as the dwarves and midgets who played the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz) are never to be shown in our brave new world of representation for some but not for others.
The entertainment industry used to employ a lot of little people—a half century ago, I was at a San Fernando Valley park when about 100 dwarves and midgets showed up for what was evidently a big softball game on their social calendar. But now, huge-budget movies like Disney’s recent live-action Snow White and Wicked consider it politically inappropriate to depict little people. (Albinos are another group that you might think would qualify for diversity privileges; but they don’t either.)
To head off criticism, Wicked gave the leading dwarf in the acting business, Peter Dinklage, an offscreen role as the voice of a politically persecuted talking goat. (Don’t ask about this subplot.)
Instead, while we are assured by director John M. Chu that Munchkins now come in all sizes and colors, they seem to be portrayed as slightly shorter on average, like Asian-Americans. The main Munchkin character, fellow student Boq, is carefully depicted to be three or four inches shorter than the WASPy Prince, his rival for the hand of the tiny popular blonde Glinda. I suspect Chu, who is remarkably heterosexual for being the director of Wicked (he has a wife and five kids), is projecting upon the Munchkins his own high school days in Palo Alto, Calif., which Steven Spielberg found oppressive, as he pointed out at length in The Fabelmans sixty years later, due to having to compete for girls with tall gentile boys.
The score was composed by Stephen Schwartz, who previously had a couple of Broadway hits in the early-1970s hippie era with Godspell and Pippin. Wicked’s musical style is generic post-rock Broadway orchestral music. Even though Wicked has been a money machine for 21 years, I didn’t recognize any of the melodies. Back in Broadway’s 1950s golden age, hit musicals’ catchiest numbers were quickly hustled onto the radio, so that by the time a typical audience member got around to seeing the show a year into its run, he’d been hearing songs from it for months; hence, he was inclined to leave the theater humming some of the better-known tunes. But the last song I can recall making it past rock radio’s anti-Broadway barrier was Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” a half century ago.
Readers pointed out to me that “One Night in Bangkok” from the musical Chess by Tim Rice and the two guys from ABBA was a hit in 1984.
So now it’s quite feasible for somebody like me who doesn’t go out of my way to sample new show tunes to be utterly oblivious to the Wicked soundtrack even after two decades.
Ergo, that’s a long way round of saying that the music appeared to be fine, but that’s all I got out of it.
Wicked is an extreme example of what theater kids have obsessed over during the past couple of decades. Ultimately, however, despite their tendency toward current ideologies’ neuroses, I’m on the side of the theater kids and their life-affirming Let’s Put On a Show urge rather than Cancel Culture and their animus against life.
No paywall for this rather low-effort (but timely) post, my third post of Friday, November 21.
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This seems like the role that Ariana Grande was born to play. Hard to describe why. The sense of unreality, mental illness, helplessness, deep pain, shifting identity, earnestness, wish to believe, eagerness to please. It's heroic in a weird way. You're watching someone fighting a very difficult battle. Losing, perhaps, but keeping her chin up. The black lady seems to have protective instincts - a trait I've often noticed in admirable black women. So the two women fit together well.
Is being a midget completely curable with human growth hormone nowadays but dwarfism isn't?
This seems like the role that Ariana Grande was born to play. Hard to describe why. The sense of unreality, mental illness, helplessness, deep pain, shifting identity, earnestness, wish to believe, eagerness to please. It's heroic in a weird way. You're watching someone fighting a very difficult battle. Losing, perhaps, but keeping her chin up. The black lady seems to have protective instincts - a trait I've often noticed in admirable black women. So the two women fit together well.