Wicked
London’s Royal Festival Hall must have seen a few sights in its 70-plus years, but possibly nothing like the European premiere of Wicked on Monday night, where the lucky audience members were those not sitting behind of drag queens dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch of the South.
There were a lot of them, and they all seemed to be at least 6 feet tall, not even taking into account the beehive hairstyles.
The stage musical Wicked, a hypothetical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, has, by all indications, a large gay following, and Jon M Chu’s long-awaited film adaptation, notoriously aimed at least in part at the same demographic, is a camp riot
When it finally came to a close Monday night, a rousing standing ovation nearly raised the roof.
It had taken a long time to build. Chu’s lush film runs two hours and 40 minutes and leaves the story half finished.
Wicked Part Two is scheduled to be released next year.
I saw the musical on Broadway shortly after it opened (my wife and I extravagantly took our three children, which, as I recall, cost about the same as a medium-sized family room).
From what I remember of the original, the film sticks very closely to it, as you would expect, since one of the screenwriters is Winnie Holzman, who wrote the stage version.
But Chu also makes the most of every available cinematic detail. It’s a fabulous show, one that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
It begins at the end, with Glinda (Ariana Grande) announcing to the long-suffering people of Oz the death of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), better known as the fearsome Wicked Witch of the West.
But then an impertinent citizen raises a rumor that she and Elphaba were once friends. It’s true, confirm. And so we return to their respective origin stories and how they first came together.
As anyone who has seen the stage musical will know, Wicked deftly evokes The Wizard of Oz by exploring how the kind but misunderstood Elphaba discovers her dark side and how the manipulative Glinda finds her inner goodness.
It’s simply a variation on Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow in search of a brain in the unforgettable 1939 film, and Jack Haley’s Tin Man in search of a heart.
To the outside world, unfortunately, and even to her own parents, Elphaba is defined by the fact that she was born green.
Her father, the governor of Munchkinland, can barely bear to look at her, and it is actually by accident that she gets a place at Shiz University, where Glinda belongs to the same group of students.
There, the only person who recognizes Elphaba’s decency and talent, and Glinda’s inner cunning, is the college principal, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).
The absurdly handsome Prince Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey), although at first appearing to fall in love with the enigmatic and seductive Elphaba, soon becomes crazy, like almost everyone else, for the dazzlingly beautiful and popular Glinda.
Chu and the writers have enormous fun with all of this and are magnificently served by the cast: Erivo and Grande are perfect and absolutely sensational.
I confess I find Wicked’s songs a little repetitive, but it’s hard to imagine anyone better than those two, while Grande has a suitably comedic style, which she uses every time Glinda shakes her lush locks.
Yeoh, Bailey and Jeff Goldblum as Wizard offer splendid support.
There will no doubt be suggestions that it’s all a bit derivative, and certainly Hogwarts got there first as a school of wizardry; Inevitably, there are numerous parallels.
But it’s done with such tremendous dynamism, and the sets and costumes are so glorious and absurd and over-the-top, that I almost forgave the incredibly long running time and didn’t even object when a drag queen stood like a prop, in a pink taffeta dress. , in the end he jumped up so excited that he elbowed me in the eye.