At the close of Wicked, the first film in this two-part musical story, Cynthia Erivo, as the newly dubbed Wicked Witch of the West, sent even sceptics buzzing from the cinema with her rousing rendition of Defying Gravity. Those attending the original stage production were, after a swift gin and tonic, still aloft as they returned from the interval.
Jon M Chu and team have set themselves a greater challenge in restarting the story a whole year after Erivo crested the clouds. It doesn’t help that the story’s second act is famously weaker than the first: messier, shorter on momentum, less abundant in big tunes.
Wicked: For Good will, most likely, satisfy those wedded to the show as others are wedded to religion. Erivo and Ariana Grande, playing misunderstood goth and insufferable prom queen, remain a well-cast complementary partnership. If you bought the first film’s brash visual aesthetic – the result of a giant toddler vomiting candyfloss all over Walt Disney World – then you will be relieved to discover it has got no less stomach-unsettling.
There is, however, no escaping the sound of air hissing from the film’s tyres. Set a few years after the events of part one, with Grande’s Glinda now a propaganda stooge for Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard, Wicked: For Good is certainly working hard to be about something. No Place Like Home, a new song, has Erivo warbling that “Oz is more than just a place. It’s a promise, an idea.”
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Charles Krauthammer, the late conservative pundit, once opined that the United States “is the only country ever founded on an idea”. So we can safely assume that the troubled Oz in For Good – with restrictions placed on immigration, and with anthropomorphised animals locked in cages – is an allegory for what the US is or what it might become. (It is worth recalling that the film was shot before the American presidential election of 2024.)
All well and good. But there is little insight into how nations give in to totalitarianism. The argument that the Wizard’s regime needs “somebody to be wicked” so Glinda “can be good” is the closest we get to a worthwhile observation on the mechanics of populist misinformation.
The new film spends more time toying with invented origins for the characters from the famous 1939 film of L Frank Baum’s Oz stories. That exercise flags greatly through this less disciplined second act. In truth, Margaret Hamilton’s unapologetically evil Wicked Witch was more fun than the increasingly sincere activist the character has become. She now seems as likely to enjoy distributing political tracts outside train stations as visiting cruelty on blameless Kansan vacationers.
On which subject, do we really need backstories for the monoadjectival state of Dorothy’s companions? The heroine of The Wizard of Oz, seen only fleetingly from behind and in shadow, appears alongside thick scarecrow, unfeeling robot and spineless lion. Does it help us in any way to learn the Tin Man’s motivations? No more than it would to learn why the iceberg acted so malevolently in Titanic.
All of which unfair griping is by way of obliquely acknowledging that the musical numbers are not strong enough and the narrative not sufficiently robust to distract us from these peripheral concerns. The great Michelle Yeoh’s bafflingly flat turn as the evil Madame Morrible is even more exposed than it was a year ago. What on earth went on there?
Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they’ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.
If the film-makers had released the project as one film, then Wicked might truly have proved a musical for the ages. Mind you, it would have made less money. So what was that idea the United States was founded on again?
