‘Wicked’ Review: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande Make a Strong Case for Hiring Legit Musical Theater Talents in Captivating Screen Adaptation

One of the signature songs of Wicked is “Popular” — a word that’s also an epic understatement when applied to the 2003 stage musical. Seen by upwards of 65 million people, the show’s themes of female friendship, empowerment and discrimination clearly struck a chord, fueling almost $1.7 billion in Broadway grosses and around $6 billion worldwide. Producers have been in no rush to bring the goldmine property to the screen, and their patience now pays off handsomely in Jon M. Chu’s eye-popping movie version, which enriches the source material while saluting the Golden Age of Technicolor MGM musicals, chief among them The Wizard of Oz.

Universal can count on a gigantic built-in audience from two decades’ worth of superfans who have claimed collective nicknames like “The Ozians” or “Wickhards.” It’s easy to imagine them leaping to their feet and cheering after beloved songs when the release hits the multiplex — singalong screenings seem inevitable — and a couple of extended cameos late in the action will make heads explode. The filmmakers know exactly what their core audience wants and they deliver, big time.

If you found Wicked on stage too girly or frothy for your taste, or too emphatic in its messaging about otherness being a convenient target for rising fascism, you will likely feel the same about the movie.

One criticism leveled at the show when it first appeared was that its overstuffed narrative suffered from bloat. When it was announced that the movie would be a two-part event (Part 2 is scheduled for December 2025), the reaction of many was “Why?” With Part 1 running two hours and 40 minutes, it can’t be accused of defying brevity. (Sorry.) But the screen expansion gives the material more breathing room, yielding rewards especially in terms of intimate character access and poignancy.

Chu might not be Vincente Minnelli, his busy production numbers occasionally threatening to spin into chaos, but he nails what matters most. That would be the shifting affections between two young witches. One is a bubbly blonde princess, vain and entitled and yet to discover her tender heart, and the other a defensive outsider, regarded as a freak because she was born with bright green skin but possessed of formidable powers.

The respective casting of those roles — Ariana Grande as the minimally gifted sorcery student who will go on to become Glinda, Good Witch of the North, and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West — is the movie’s winning hand. Their vocals are clear and strong and supple to a degree many of us have learned not to expect after too many movie musicals that cast merely adequate singers and then Auto-Tune them to death.

Grande and Erivo give Stephen Schwartz’s songs — comedy numbers, introspective ballads, power anthems — effortless spontaneity. They help us buy into the intrinsic musical conceit that these characters are bursting into song to express feelings too large for spoken words, not just mouthing lyrics and trilling melodies that someone spent weeks cleaning up in a studio. The decision to record the songs live on set whenever possible is a major plus.

Both actors have deep roots in musical theater, making them skilled at keeping the transitions between dialogue scenes and songs fluid. They fully integrate one part into the other, with none of those awkward moments in which some stars seem to pause and gather themselves, all but announcing, “I’m going to sing for you now.”

While suspension of disbelief can be hard to achieve in contemporary movie musicals, Grande and, especially, Erivo (who does her best screen work to date, making Elphaba the bruised, beating heart of the film with a performance of breathtaking raw vulnerability and emotional shading) draw us into the story and the characters’ experiences to a degree that lets us forget the genre’s inherent artificiality.

Chu’s vibrant world-building is a significant part of that. He works with the ace team of cinematographer Alice Brooks, production designer Nathan Crowley and costume designer Paul Tazewell to create a fully dimensional, immersive fantasy environment.

Visual effects are employed throughout, but unlike with so many films groaning under the weight of CG eyesores, digital technology is used less as a shortcut than as enhancer, or for specific purposes like dropping in talking animal characters and stitching together composite shots. Crowley has worked wonders conjuring the magical world of Oz with large-scale constructions on soundstages and backlots, and the cast’s performances benefit from being in tangible settings rather than stuck in front of green-screen backdrops.

Places like Shiz University, where Galinda, as she’s originally named, and Elphaba are first-year students, or the surrounding woodlands, or Emerald City, where they go to meet “The Great and Powerful Oz” (Jeff Goldblum, relishing the role’s gloriously hammy showmanship) are rendered with charm and imagination.

The most enchanting creation is arguably Munchkinland, a village of oddly shaped, thatched-roof houses nestled among rolling fields neatly striped with rows of tulips in dazzling shades. So many movies lately look like they were shot through mud-smeared lenses, which makes the luminous color and light of Wicked pleasurable in itself.

Adapting the material from Winnie Holzman’s book and Schwartz’s songs for the musical, which in turn was based on Gregory Maguire’s homonymous novel, screenwriters Holzman and Dana Fox (Cruella) stick close to the show’s template while fleshing out the story and characters in rewarding ways. Chu also keeps the pace brisk so there’s no sense of narrative padding.

The revisionist backstory to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s novel from 1900, begins as it does on stage, with the Oz citizenry celebrating the alleged death of the Wicked Witch of the West — more about which will be revealed in Part 2.

The news is confirmed by Glinda, floating into Munchkinland in a bubble (“It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”), wearing a pink tulle ballgown that’s like a sparkly parfait. It’s the first of many heavenly creations in that shade by Tazewell; there hasn’t been this much pink on a protagonist since Legally Blonde.

One Munchkin asks if it’s true that Glinda and Elphaba were once friends, prompting a jump back to the beginning of the story to ponder its defining question of whether a person is born wicked or has wickedness thrust upon them.

A lot happens before the main title appears, most importantly a recap of Elphaba’s birth. Attended to by her ursine nanny Dulcibear and a goat obstetrician, Elphaba’s entry into the world is greeted with shock. When her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), sees the baby’s pea green skin he shrieks, “Take it away!” In a clever moment right out of Carrie, Elphaba demonstrates her instinctual powers even as a newborn when surgical instruments go flying up to the ceiling.

The governor’s rejection of his daughter is compounded when younger sister Nessarose (played as a teenager by Marissa Bode) comes along. We later learn that herbal precautions administered during pregnancy to her mother (Courtney Mae-Briggs) to ensure Nessarose was not green led to her being born with paraplegia, the source of Elphaba’s misplaced guilt.

It is Nessarose, not Elphaba, who is enrolled at Shiz. But the protective big sister accompanies her on move-in day, and when she perceives a threat to her younger sibling, she involuntarily unleashes a display of menacing witchcraft. Elphaba’s power is observed by Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), famed Dean of Sorcery Studies, who insists on enrolling her at Shiz and giving her private tuition.

There’s a distinct Hogwarts vibe to this introductory scene, in which the eccentric cuts of Tazewell’s gender-fluid uniforms look like a lost Thom Browne collection. Glinda’s naturally assumed supremacy is apparent from her attention-grabbing arrival along the waterways in a gondola loaded with pink luggage. She immediately attracts a pair of gossiping sycophants in Pfannee (Bowen Yang) and ShenShen (Bronwyn James), as well as the instant adoration of sweet-natured Munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater, the discovery of Broadway’s SpongeBob SquarePants musical), whose affections Glinda will knowingly manipulate.

At the same time, Elphaba is established as a cruelly mocked outcast, her relationship with Glinda starting on a mutually resentful note when they are obliged to share a room. In the fun duet “What Is This Feeling?” the two leads sing of their “unadulterated loathing,” showing screen chemistry that will evolve and deepen as the characters’ bond changes.

Outsider recognizing outsider, Elphaba feels solidarity when she learns that kindly history professor Dr. Dillamond (a learned goat voiced by Peter Dinklage) is one of the last animals permitted to teach. She later eavesdrops on a meeting at Dillamond’s quarters with other fauna. They discuss the systematic marginalization of nonhumans across Oz, foreseeing a near future in which animals will be entirely removed from positions of influence, deprived of the right to speak and possibly imprisoned.

While this discrimination subplot is baked into the material, the example of a minority being demonized, silenced and effectively neutralized from society acquires what no doubt was unanticipated relevance in light of the recent election cycle and the hot-button issue of immigration. Americans on both ends of the political spectrum will likely interpret it in their own way — if they see a parallel at all.

Meanwhile, under Mme. Morrible’s seemingly benevolent guidance, Elphaba for the first time starts to think of her “weird quirk” as a talent, not a liability, and begins learning to control her powers. She becomes the underdog in the early stages of a romantic triangle with Glinda — their initial hostility by this time has softened into friendship — and dreamboat student prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who shares his pleasure-seeking credo in “Dancing Through Life.” That exuberant number is performed in the Shiz library, one of Crowley’s many design marvels, with its rotating cylindrical shelving and movable ladders. But Fiyero might not be as shallow and self-absorbed as he seems.

As Morrible plants the idea that Elphaba’s powers could one day become her ticket to Emerald City, Erivo gets the first of her handful of showstoppers, “The Wizard and I” — a song title that has driven grammar nerds mad for 20-plus years. It begins as a thoughtful “I want” song from a girl who has never dared to want anything, building to a rousing statement of self-affirmation in the big-belt finale. Chu deftly times the crescendo to place the exultant Elphaba on a spectacular clifftop, an image that evokes both fairy tales and vintage movie musicals.

When Elphaba is summoned to meet the Wizard, she insists on Glinda coming with her aboard a gleaming clockwork-powered Emerald City express train, another Crowley stunner. But their experience there, while intensifying Elphaba’s powers, brings crashing disillusionment and prompts decisive action, amplified in Erivo’s knockout delivery of “Defying Gravity.” That signature song closed Act I on stage and occupies the same soaring position in the two-part film.

Holzman and Fox’s screenplay mines plenty of humor from Ozian linguistic peculiarities (“hideousity,” “scandalicious,” “moodified,” etc.) and especially from Glinda’s conceited condescension. Grande, lovely in her biggest movie role to date, enacts that quality with a liberal sprinkling of sugar and appealing comedy instincts. Her dizzy rendition of “Popular” while attempting to give Elphaba a makeover is a delight. But the script also heightens dramatic themes of injustice, persecution and the concept of evil as a useful scapegoating tool.

Playing a more toothless version of antagonistic duos like Flotsam and Jetsam from The Little Mermaid, Yang and James are mildly amusing but underused, ultimately serving little purpose. Bailey, Slater and Bode are more effective, laying the groundwork for significant developments with their characters in Part 2 (at least in the stage musical narrative), while Yeoh and Goldblum reveal by degrees the darker intentions hidden under the cloak of authority.

But Wicked belongs to Erivo. Elphaba was always the meatier part — in the faceoff for best actress in a musical at the 2004 Tonys, original Elphaba Idina Menzel prevailed over Kristin Chenoweth’s Glinda — and the character’s arc carries even more weight in this adaptation.

Or maybe that’s just because Erivo brings such moving personal investment to her performance, a quality that recalls the Tony-winning role that put her on the map, in the 2015 Broadway revival of The Color Purple. Her eyes are an expressive window into the character’s lifetime of hurt and exclusion or defiant pride and anger, sometimes spanning that range and more within one scene or song or single line reading. Her Elphaba is an outcast hero worth rooting for.