Wicked, which just had the biggest ever opening weekend for a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical ($160 million + globally), is faithful to the stage musical in several ways, and significantly different in one major way.
What I find more interesting than every little change that director Jon Chu made (or didn’t make) is how they affect our overall reaction to the story. Is someone more or less likely to appreciate the film if they have attended (and liked) the musical, which is still running?
What’s most notable about the adaptation for theatergoers is that no songs were cut and no new songs added, although some of the songs are slightly longer, such as Popular.
The most obvious change is that the movie is split in two — Part 1 has just opened; Part 2 is scheduled for a year from now — making the movie in effect twice as long as the stage musical. This allows for greater elaboration, such as Elphaba’s childhood.
Two other changes struck me:
The look of the film drops the steampunk aesthetic of the stage musical, and displays sly nods to the 1939 Judy Garland movie The Wizard of Oz, some of it the work of costume designer Paul Tazewell (who’s on a roll: He works wonders costuming the new Broadway musical Death Becomes Her.)
The animals now are..animals, and there are more of them. On stage, Professor Dillimond is a human actor in a goat costume. In the movie, Professor Dillimond still talks (Peter Dinklage supplies the voice), but he is now undeniably a goat, thanks to the computer generated imagery, albeit wearing clothing and pince-nez glasses. And he now has a secret meeting with a range of other animals whose rights are under attack; their convincing animal looks and moves, perhaps paradoxically, make their plight more memorable.
There are many minor changes to the story.Here are some rundowns:
10 Changes the Wicked Movie Made to the Broadway Musical (Playbill)
The Biggest Changes Wicked Made from the Broadway Musical (The Independent)
‘Wicked’ Breakdown: 65 Easter Eggs, Changes and References Explained (Variety)
I suspect most of these changes to the story will be of interest only to rabid fans of the show — or at least to theatergoers with better or more recent memories of the stage musical than I have.
The degree of familiarity with the musical may be a key to how a theatergoer will react. I wondered about this while watching the film adaptation of “The Piano Lesson,” I just recently saw a production of August Wilson’s play on Broadway, and felt the film didn’t do the play justice.
By contrast, my immediate reaction to “Wicked Part 1” was more tentative. I thought: I really have to see the stage musical again, because the movie makes me wonder why I liked it so much on Broadway. As Elphaba, Cynthia Erivo has an astonishing voice, and a mesmerizing stare, and there are fun moments with Ariana Grande as Glinda and some of the other characters. But the film as a whole felt busy and dizzy, overlong and overdone. When Elphaba and Glinda enter the Emerald City, the Wizard says to them apologetically: “I know it’s a bit much, but folks expect this sort of thing” — and I wondered whether this was also director Jon Chu’s apology to moviegoers who reacted the way I did.
Would I feel differently had I seen the stage musical more recently? Perhaps so, if one theater critic’s reaction is a guide. Nuveen Kumar, theater critic for the Washington Post, wrote Here’s Why The Wicked Movie is Better Than the Stage Musical, arguing that the longer running time allows for a deeper engagement. “…the most intoxicating element of “Wicked” — the affection between the good and green witches of Oz — has already been magnified tenfold by the first installment, which is essentially “Mean Girls” meets Harry Potter with an abrupt swerve into political espionage that will be better served by the sequel….Revisiting the Broadway production recently made me realize that I had been spoiled by the privilege of spending so much screen time with the frenemies, whose relationship onstage seemed to be rendered in shorthand.”
My resistance to the film is apparently an outlier opinion, which is ironic, because my positive critical response to the Broadway musical was also an outlier opinion, in the opposite direction: “Wicked does not, alas, speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical,” Ben Brantley, then chief theater critic of the New York Times, concluded his review in 2003. The tepid reviews clearly didn’t stop “Wicked” from becoming the third longest-running musical currently on Broadway, having drawn in at least ten million people, and twice that number on tour.
Critical reaction to the film is much more positive: Film reviewers are “generally favorable.” But Bilge Ebiri, the film critic for New York Magazine, whose review, entitled Wicked is as Enchanting As It Is Exhausting, includes this paragraph comparing theater to film in general, and applying it to Wicked: “The grandiosity of theatrical spectacle relies on a sense of wonder very different from the awe generated by the moving image. Being in the same room as the smoke and the cherry pickers and the performers belting out the tunes has a ritualistic fervor that is nothing like the experience of watching something unfold in two dimensions. “Wicked” the movie’s images are big, to be sure, but they’re also often shallow; they don’t draw our attention further into the image, nor do they inspire curiosity about this world. They impress in scale but not in depth. And the film keeps hammering home themes it’s established, sometimes to its detriment.”
Update: I recently saw the stage musical again. My Wicked Broadway review.
I also just saw a screening of “Wicked: For Good.” (There was a panel discussion after the screening with Jon Chu + 8 members of the film crew.)
The best thing I can say about the two Wicked movies is that they will encourage people to see the stage musical. (I did like the opening scene in “Wicked: For Good” of Elphaba as a one-woman Resistance swooping down to free from their yolks the mammoth-like beasts being driven to work on the construction of the yellow brick road — a scene that was completely invented for the movie.)
I must be an outlier as well because you describe my reaction to the film perfectly. I could not put my finger on why I was not swept away but had more of a meh reaction. Thank you for description! I also felt the emotional impact of Defying Gravity was lost… with the ending. Again, thank you!
Thank you! I guess I’m a fellow “outlier”. The cinematography and story were great in the beginning, but the last third of the movie was literally a yawn. I’m not claiming that it was, I’m just saying that musical score FEELS as if it could have been written by AI. No soul whatsoever. Nothing catchy about the music or the lyrics. All of the songs sound the same. Worst of all the lyrics are far too complicated- nothing that is applicable to anything outside of the film. For example, “Tomorrow”, from Annie is a song of hope that anyone can relate to, and it could be sung with meaningful intention for decades to come, without regard to the film. Not so the lyrics of “Wicked”, which are basically repetitive dialogue delivered by singing. I saw the stage musical on Broadway 20 years ago and loved it- now I am wondering why.
More outliers here. We loved the play and the movie left us wondering why. Overlong ($$$), overblown, and less than thrilling. I think that rather than expand the story so we get all those back stories and hit over the head with the moral, the producers faced the challenge of turning a two-and-a-half hour broadway show into a a six hour movie. In this case, less is more.