As Kermit the Frog and the Hulk discovered: it’s not easy being green. Now another verdant character is gleefully brought to the screen by lyricist-composer-producer Stephen Schwartz, screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, and director Jon M Chu in an adaptation of Schwartz’s Broadway musical, the first of two parts. It’s a sugar-rush fantasy with the overpowering star presence of Cynthia Erivo; it basically dunks you face-down in a hyperreal ball pit of M&Ms for two and three-quarter hours. I don’t have showtune-rapture in my DNA but this movie made a cleaner, sharper, cartoonier kind of sense to me than the stage show which I saw back in 2011.
This film is the prequel origin myth for Schwartz’s emerald supervillain-hero, stratospherically upping her status in retrospect: the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 movie classic The Wizard of Oz, based on L Frank Baum’s children’s tale. It was a character shriekingly played in the original by Margaret Hamilton, terrorising Judy Garland’s Dorothy, and now we are given a backstory for the pointy hat, the broom-transportation, the inky cloak (though shrouding the protagonist’s biological father in mystery). It pulls off the cheeky trick of making us interested in someone we know is destined for an ignominious death by water.
How did she get to be so mean? Could it be that what we interpret as meanness is a mythological distortion of strength and defiance? We see her early life as Elphaba, a green-skinned woman who shows up at the Shiz University for witches in Oz and has to share a room with a legally-blonde Insta princess, Galinda, who will grow up to be the Good Witch of the North. Both will have feelings for aristocratic classmate Prince Fiyero and both will meet their destiny on encountering the legendary, insidious Wizard of Oz himself.
The Wizard is played with his usual drolly syncopated line-readings by Jeff Goldblum; Michelle Yeoh is stately school principal Madame Morrible; Jonathan Bailey uncorks an outrageous scene-stealer as the heterocamp Fiyero, a performance to put alongside Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride; and Andy Nyman is winningly melancholy as Elphaba’s dad, the governor of Munchkinland. (The film rather fudges the identity-issue of the munchkins, making them hardly different in height from the rest of the cast, perhaps due to contemporary views of the offensiveness of the original film’s Munchkins.) Ariana Grande plays Galinda, an almost translucent figure of gauzy delicacy, appearing as if perched on top of an invisible Christmas tree and though not a natural comic like Reese Witherspoon or Alicia Silverstone, she gets the laughs like the smart player she is.
But the sledgehammer punch is delivered by Erivo as the wounded, angry, alienated Elphaba. In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond famously said that the movies once only needed faces – and Erivo’s face is the ground zero of this film’s blast of entertainment power. She is the film’s Rushmore: charismatic, haughty and vulnerable. Her face exerts a planetary pull on everything else on screen and an impossible thing to look away from. She carries the big songs like The Wizard and I, and she and Grande are great in the mysterious scene in which Elphaba arrives at a party, is humiliated in her outfit, goes into a series of mysterious dance moves which may or may not be an attempt to style out some failed revenge-spell-castings and Grande’s Galinda finally joins her on the dancefloor mirroring her moves, the unlikely beginning to their friendship.
It’s arguable if Wicked could ever be a meaningfully persuasive prequel for the characters in The Wizard of Oz as we actually see them in the 1939 film, as this would involve cancelling their powerfully timeless, mythological aura, and instead substituting the more banal idea of human development. But this is the joke, and this is the story, and what an enjoyable spectacle it is.