Wicked: utterly exhausting and hopelessly miscast

Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba
Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba - Universal Pictures

Considering its signature number is called Defying Gravity, it’s unfortunate that Wicked has all the buoyancy of a grand piano being heaved off the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral. But mind your heads, folks, because here it comes, whistling down towards the pavement, and landing in the pre-Christmas cinema schedules with a tooth-splintering crash.

Or at least, the first half of it. Because Universal’s take on the billion-dollar-grossing Wizard of Oz prequel musical, about the Wicked Witch of the West’s turbulent student days, comes split in two – and after two hours and 40 minutes of screen time, the film only reaches the stage show’s interval, with act two to follow as a separate feature in November next year.

To be clear: there is no conceivable artistic argument for this. We’re not talking about a faithful replication of a 900-page Frank Herbert novel, but a spry, postmodern L Frank Baum homage that Broadway and the West End managed to bring in at two hours and 45 minutes total, including a 15-minute interval.

No, this smacks of bloat for bloat’s sake, reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s mindlessly overextended Hobbit trilogy, full of scenes in which almost nothing happens with maximum fuss. Amazingly, after an hour, the film is still working through the songs which introduce the main characters, by which point I was idly hoping some dwarves might appear to wash some dishes and liven things up.

Would it have been more enjoyable at half the length? Maybe. But even discounting the padding, Jon M Chu’s adaptation is still built on a series of baffling calls.

Even the casting of the leads feels off. Cynthia Erivo, as the green-skinned future Oz villainess Elphaba, certainly has the pipes required, but she plays the character with a wet-eyed severity that lends a grim medicinal quality to the film’s more emotional passages

Then there’s Ariana Grande as Glinda, Elphaba’s sugar-and-spice counterpart, who becomes the Good Witch of the North: again, the voice fits, and she gamely throws herself at the vain hair-tosses and other recurring bits of comic business. But she also lacks the manic stage-school brittleness the role demands, and the sense you’re primarily watching a pop star having fun while broadening her CV never dissipates.

Perhaps more ruinous still is the decision in the Emerald City arrival sequence to feature an extended, all-singing cameo from the two parts’ Broadway originators, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, during which viewers may feel like contestants at the end of an episode of Bullseye, as Jim Bowen taunts them with the speedboat that they could have won. Doubly weirdly, Menzel’s song even features her iconic vocal flourish from the end of Defying Gravity – pre-empting and deflating Erivo’s own take on that moment when it finally arrives.

Jeff Goldblum as The Wizard of Oz and Michelle Yeoh as Madam Morrible
Jeff Goldblum as The Wizard of Oz and Michelle Yeoh as Madam Morrible - Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

That Menzel and Chenoweth make such an impression in less than five minutes speaks to the flatness of the supporting performances, with only Michelle Yeoh as the witches’ scheming tutor making much of an impression. (Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard is just…Jeff Goldblum.) But if the acting feels washed-out, it may simply be taking its cue from the film’s visual palette, which has scenes frequently shrouded in a beige or grey pall.

Why you’d do this in a Wizard of Oz film is anyone’s guess, especially as we are treated to fleeting moments of old-school Technicolor beauty. I loved the dramatic lighting as Elphaba reads from the Wizard’s forbidden spell book, and the way the whole world flushes puce during the final bars of Grande’s performance of Popular – which, along with Defying Gravity, is one of only two songs here (of 11) that feel truly uncuttable.

The question prospective ticket-buyers should ask themselves is: in order to hear them, what are you prepared to sit through? For me, regrettably, the answer was: not this.

In cinemas from Nov 22