You can call me a wimp or a sell-out but I was quite “impressed” by the enormity of John M. Chu and Marc Platt‘s Wicked (Universal, 11.22). I felt completely flooded, walloped, steamrolled, avalanche’d by it. That’s not quite the same thing, needless to say, as being intimately touched or tickled or deeply moved.

Directed by Chu with the same vigor that made In The Heights work as well as it did, Wicked is quite an eyeful, quite the visual deluge, quite the immaculate pageant, quite the overwhelming beat-down, quite the wealth-porn extravaganza.

Every frame of it looks super-costly, I mean. It exudes so much of a flush fantasy vibe by way of super-lavish sets, eye-bath production design, immaculate costumes, spot-on makeup and CG magnificence that it almost leaves you gasping for breath.

Wicked keeps pushing harder with that old Chu pizazz. Every shot is intended to be processed as a wowser knockout moment. It quiets down in one delicate dancing scene, and I for one could’ve done with more of this, but mostly Chu opts for splendorific dazzle.

What is this Wizard of Oz origin story actually about? What’s going on inside Wicked?

The stage musical, of course, is/was about the plight of the disliked, suspiciously regarded Elphaba…the nascent sorceress who hums to her own music and marches to a different drummer (Idina Menzel in the original B’way show, Cynthia Erivo in the film) and how the disdain, derision and cruelty thrown at poor Elphy during her time at Shiz University eventually leads her to become the Wicked Witch of the West.


Elphy is easily the kindest, wisest, most soulful, most perceptive and least egoistic Shiz student, and so OF COURSE all the elite, cool kid go-alongers despise and ostracize her.

Elphaba’s green skin is a metaphor for magical, insightful being and vision…for outside-the-box thinking…for sensitivity, artistry, inwardness and standing against the tide, of course, but with Erivo in the role the green skin is an obvious allusion to blackness or, if you will, even queerness.

A friend tells me I’m off on my own eccentric broomstick, but Chu’s Wicked is clearly a racial parable — a grandiose super-musical fantasy about smug, haughty, entitled whites treating an unusual woman of color like shit and thereby goading her to fulfill her Wizard of Oz destiny as a mythical broomstick witch.

I can’t see how Erivo’s Elphy could possibly morph into Margaret Hamilton‘s enemy-of-Dorothy. I really don’t see it. Hell, nobody will.

Ariana Grande’s Glynda, the young version of the good witch of the north played by Billie Burke in the 1939 original, is re-imagined and played to the absolute hilt as a gentle-mannered, glamour-gowned lass in the most superficial sense imaginable…an empty, priveleged, super-entitled debutante type.

But boy, does she look great! Pure dessert! Every single gesture, every line, every strand of golden hair and every shot of Grande proclaims unequivocally that she’s a glowing movie-star specimen…exquisite, porcelain, princess-like, to-die-for.

Glynda is clearly lacking in terms of depth and introspection but she’s perfectly poised and lighted and a seriously luscious pixie girl.

Do you want a truly affecting parable about otherness…a sad but affecting human-scaled tale about a young green person bullied and ostracized for being different? Watch Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair (1948). Idina Menzel and Cynthia Erivo? Meet the 12 year-old Dean Stockwell.

Friendo: “Wicked was never a racial parable. The fact that the Idina Menzel character is now played by a Black actress does not make it such.

“Sure, you can now read that overtone into certain stray moments, but there’s a big difference between an overtone and the essential MEANING of the material, as scripted and acted and directed. It is an allegory of outsider-ness, about someone who feels SINGULAR and UNIQUE in her outsider status.”

There’s a third-act line when Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard (played by Frank Morgan in the ‘39 original) regards the flamboyantly designed sets and the general sound-stage lavishness and quips “I think it’s a bit much.” I laughed out loud — the only time I did so during Wicked’s entire 160-minute length.