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Over the weekend, I stumbled on a hilarious put up from ol’ social media influencer titled “Before Wicked vs After Wicked,” displaying him doubting all of the preliminary reward for the new movie – with folks telling him, “It’s going to win best picture!” and him exclaiming, “Can we all just calm down please?” – solely to search out him in tears within the theater on the movie’s finish, shocked and even irritated by how a lot he loved it.
Well, that made me really feel stupendiferously seen, because it fully mirrored my trajectory over the previous few weeks – many in my world, together with a prescient and very clued-in member of my workforce at work, repeatedly informed me how vital and marvelous this film was going to be, and I resisted.
I felt I had good cause to, although – my mom advisable the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” to me sooner or later within the late ’90s, and I appreciated it effectively sufficient, however when I obtained round to seeing the ensuing Broadway musical within the mid-aughts (within the entrance row, after successful the ticket lottery), I bear in mind feeling just like the story was shoehorned in and largely sacrificed in service of the massive theatrical musical numbers, solely one among which I totally loved (sure, that will be “Defying Gravity” on the finish of Act I).
Fast ahead some 20 years to a “Wicked” screening final week, the place I discovered myself stunned by how moved I was, how quick the 2-hour-and-40-minute runtime went by, and how splendid the musical numbers I as soon as wrote off felt.
No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.
How did I get right here? I questioned. There are a number of apparent causes for the Jon M. Chu-directed movie’s success: sure, Cynthia Erivo’s emerald inexperienced face is like an open guide of emotion from the primary body to the final, and sure, all of the completely different currents of chemistry between Erivo and the 2 different predominant gamers – a pleasant Ariana Grande and dashing Jonathan Bailey – collectively and individually fly off the display screen. And that’s to not point out the showstopping units, hovering rating and recreation supporting forged together with Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum and Bowen Yang.
‘Wicked’ was initially, and all the time, meant to be a film
But there’s another excuse that feels simply as apparent. Even although I am woefully unschooled within the space of Broadway lore, I did bear in mind the story of the “Wicked” musical’s inception, and how Maguire initially wrote the guide with movie stars in thoughts (together with Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas). He all the time meant for the guide to be developed into a movie, and wrote in The Guardian in 2021 that certain sufficient, “the calls from Hollywood came within a week of publication.”
Universal started creating it as a non-musical movie, however Maguire recalled that they “weren’t getting satisfactory scripts” and that “the studio was scared about paying $100m to make a fantasy movie with no big male roles.”
To contextualize, this was within the mid-’90s, earlier than the “return of the movie musical” and “Chicago’s” successful of the most effective image Oscar in 2003. Enter Oscar-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who informed Grammy.com in an interview printed final week that he labored his manner “up the Universal food chain to get to Mark Platt, who was running Universal Pictures at the time, and persuaded him not to do it as a movie – at least not right away.”
Schwartz’s arguments for as an alternative making it right into a theatrical musical manufacturing had been spot-on for Universal – it might take significantly much less of an funding to bankroll a Broadway manufacturing versus a big-budget tentpole movie, and, as Maguire wrote, a non-musical “straight film is not going to hit the heart like a musical does.” Quite plainly, songs would permit the right alternative for the central duo of witches, Elphaba and Glinda, to deliver audiences into their inside worlds.
Clearly, the Tony-winning Broadway present’s and now film’s success is a testomony to the truth that he had the appropriate intuition. And it took all this time – together with time for the glacial-like developments to shift, permitting musicals (and even simply musical moments) to look virtually all over the place – to set the stage because it had been for this musical film to enter the chat in such a momentous (and viral!) manner.
Potkay says we like the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland as a result of it makes use of the usual, medieval romance kind: “You look for something in the outer world, and realize it was inside you all along. And what’s outside doesn’t matter so much.” ” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”1200″ width=”1645″ loading=’lazy’/>But what’s additionally clear is that the weather that the “Wicked” property is working with are unmistakably cinematic.
While the unique 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” was itself, in flip, primarily based on a guide (L. Frank Baum’s 1900 work “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” to be precise), the film was a watershed second in cinema – among the many first main movement photos to make use of Technicolor – and has remained a cornerstone of tradition in terms of family-friendly fare.
But it was much more than that, because the whimsical opening of the brand new “Wicked” movie demonstrates – minor spoilers forward.
The opening frames of the brand new film decide up simply the place 1939’s “Oz” left off – displaying the enduring pointy black hat sitting on the ground, in the midst of a puddle of water. As anybody acquainted with the story of “Wicked” is aware of, it examines the lifetime of the Wicked Witch of the West from a special perspective, together with a take a look at what occurred earlier than the well-known occasions proven in “The Wizard of Oz,” to point out what made her “wicked” within the first place. So from that first, dovetailing picture, it occurred to me that the brand new film is celebrating – even venerating – the singular iconography of that basic character in a manner that the musical merely may by no means do.
Of course that’s to not say that musical manufacturing fell in need of celebrating and elevating Elphaba in any manner, it’s merely about zeroing on a really particular, small and intimate element, the best way a movie digital camera can do, which invitations viewers on an altogether completely different journey. It was from this second I suspected I was in for one thing completely different and finally very thrilling, and it seems I was proper.