The title on the screen reads “Wicked Part 1″, but that telltale qualifier is nowhere to be seen on the poster or promotional material. Few leaving the cinema – if at all disposed to contemporary musicals – are likely to feel cheated, however. The insurgent, cloud-scraping Defying Gravity is to Stephen Schwartz’s source stage show as Don’t Rain on My Parade was to Funny Girl. (”Don’t tell me not fly, I just got to,” Barbra Streisand sang, too coincidentally for words.) It is the number that closes the first act with a wallop and ensures the audience returns for the second. In this case, the interval will be a year rather than 15 minutes, but, though the adaptation is distended and the visuals glutinous, Jon M Chu’s film does enough to justify that closing (or pausing) “to be continued”.
As you won’t need to be told, the colossally successful stage show, adapted from Gregory Maguire’s novel, acts as origin story for the witches featured most prominently in the 1939 film adaptation of Frank L Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here Cynthia Erivo, versatile south London multitalent, is Elphaba Thropp, the lonely green girl who will become the Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande, flute-voiced pop star, is Galinda Upland, a popular pal destined to become the insufferable Good Witch of the North.
In truth, the show’s metaphorical treatment of the outsider plight was never the most subtle. A million goths have, like Elphaba, taken to wearing black when abandoned by the mean girls. Her congenital greenness is too clunky a signifier for difference in race, sexuality, gender identity or mere attitude. A parallel layer of jarring political relevancy – unintentional unless aimed at the second George Bush on the show’s premiere 20 years ago – emerges as we realise that the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum, hooray!), an empty mountebank riding on waves of bluster, is casually imposing totalitarian homogeneity across Oz. I can’t imagine whom he will be compared to over the coming weeks.
Never mind that. Erivo and Grande are so satisfactorily wired in that it proves easy to shake off the outside world and soar along beside them. We begin, as the 1939 film ended, with the Land of Oz celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch. Glinda (formerly Galinda), asked if it is true they were once friends, sets out to talk the nation through their early flintiness, uneasy comradeship at college and division following an encounter with the Wizard. Along the way we meet Jonathan Bailey as the dull romantic lead and a surprisingly – one might almost say unprecedentedly – lacklustre Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrell, head of the university.
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There was a lot of rocking back in dismay at the blaringly ugly CGI visuals in the first few trailers, and, sure enough, the finished film looks like a nightmare in digital wax. The sub-Vivienne Westwood costumes by Paul Tazewell will do well enough, but the gloopy virtual sets push us too deep into video-game insipidness. It matters that, there being no Kansas here, there is no relief from that unreality.
The two leads keep it aloft. Early objections to the casting seem absurd when you clock what a perfect complement they make. Erivo is all surly introspection and frustrated intelligence. Grande eschews the irony that has recently seasoned her persona and embraces the pink perk on which she was initially sold. Neither has an Ethel Merman voice, but their gifts suit the characters nicely: a soulful rumble; a sweet four-octave trill.
Unfortunately, the presumably financially fruitful decision to expand into two parts – the current film is about the same length as one whole stage production of Wicked – has led to unmistakable stretching and dilution between the standout numbers. An inevitable double cameo adds nothing bar the opportunity for fans to boast that they spotted it. The rest is just tinkering. And yet. It is hard to gripe at a movie that sends one out in such buoyant mood. Job just about achieved.
In cinemas from Friday, November 22nd
