Bad
London’s Royal Festival Hall must have seen some sights in its seventy-plus years, but perhaps none quite like Monday night’s European premiere of Wicked, where the lucky members of the audience were those not seated behind the drag queens , dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch of the South.
There were a lot of them, and they all looked at least six feet tall, not to mention the beehive hairstyles.
The stage musical Wicked, the imaginary prequel to The Wizard Of Oz, by all accounts has a huge gay following and Jon M Chu’s long-awaited film adaptation, which is conspicuously at least partly aimed at the same target group, is a riot of camp.
When it finally came to an end on Monday evening, a rapturous standing ovation nearly raised the roof.
It took a long time to build. Chu’s lavish film lasts two hours and forty minutes and leaves the story only half-finished.
Wicked Part Two is scheduled for release next year.
I saw the musical on Broadway not long after it first opened (my wife and I extravagantly took our three children, which, as I recall, cost about the same as a medium-sized family salon).
From what I remember of the original, the film follows closely from that – not surprising, since one of the screenwriters is Winnie Holzman, who wrote the stage version.
But Chu also makes the most of all the cinematic bells and whistles available. It’s a fantastic spectacle 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 terrifying Wicked Witch of the West.
But then an insolent citizen comes forward with a rumor that she and Elphaba were once friends. It’s true, she confirms. And so we are taken back to their respective origin stories, and to how they first bonded.
As anyone who has seen the musical will know, Wicked cleverly 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 just a variation on Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow in search of a brain in the unforgettable 1939 photo, 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 student population.
There, the only person who recognizes the decency and talent in Elphaba and Glinda’s inner cunning is university director Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).
Although the absurdly handsome Prince Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey) initially seems to fall for the seductively enigmatic Elphaba, soon, like almost everyone else, his head is turned by the dazzlingly beautiful, popular Glinda.
Chu and the writers have a ton of fun with it and are excellently served by the cast: Erivo and Grande are both perfect and downright sensational.
I must confess that I find Wicked’s songs a bit repetitive, but it’s hard to imagine anyone could deliver them better than these two, while Grande has the right comedic flair, which she brings out every time Glinda plays her throws luscious locks.
Yeoh, Bailey and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard provide great support.
There will no doubt be suggestions that it’s all a bit derivative, and Hogwarts certainly got there first as a school of wizardry; inevitably there are countless parallels.
But it’s done with such spirit, and the sets and costumes are so glorious, ridiculous, over-the-top, that I almost forgave the insanely long running time and didn’t even object when a drag queen built forward like a prop, wearing a pink was wearing a taffeta dress, he jumped up at the end so excitedly that he elbowed me in the eye.