It's half a movie, but 'Wicked' casts a mighty spell

Heads-up No. 1: In the now-accepted Hollywood fashion, “Wicked” turns out to be “Wicked Part 1.” Two hours and 40 minutes of movie gets you only to the end of the hit Broadway musical’s Act 1, and the intermission is scheduled to last until this time next year.

Heads-up No. 2: The flying monkeys are even more terrifying in CGI. This is not a movie for very young children.

Those caveats aside, the film version of the stage version of Gregory Maguire’s literary inversion of “The Wizard of Oz”— technically a prequel to the 1939 MGM classic — is about as good as musical adaptations get, and more lavish than most. “Wicked” looks like a bajillion dollars, with imaginatively overripe production design — that steampunk bullet train! — costumes that reach new heights of whimsical stitchery, colors that recall the gaudy hues of vintage Technicolor and digital backdrops that take us over the rainbow to a land of pixelated Hollywood confabulation. Throw in about 70 dancers dancing, 60 Munchkins munching, a studio orchestra in full roar and a juggernaut of an action climax capped by a showstopper anthem so inescapable it’s already in Target commercials, and you have a holiday extravaganza that — let’s just get it out of the way — is capable of defying gravity.

In the center of this madly spinning circus are two women, alpha and omega, green and blond, kind and shunned vs. self-absorbed and pop-u-lar. After a prologue showing how the young Elphaba (Karis Musongole) — the future Wicked Witch of the West — was ostracized by her father (Andy Nyman) for being the product of her mother’s affair with a nameless (so far) cad, Jon M. Chu’s movie whisks us ahead several years to the arrival of now-grown Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) at Shiz Academy, accompanying her wheelchair-using younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode).

An immediate rivalry with the school’s self-styled queen bee, Glinda Upland (Ariana Grande-Butera) — pronounced Ga-linda but destined to be better known as Glinda the Good — is sharpened when the two are forced to become roommates by sorcery instructor Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), who sees in Elphaba’s raw magical powers a potential to be tapped. There’s a handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey), of course, shallow enough for Glinda but secretly soulful enough for Elphaba, and a wise old goat of a professor who actually is a goat, one who comes with the rumbly voice of Peter Dinklage. The animals talk in this Oz, but some of the humans would like to put a stop to that.

Director Chu helmed the Step Up movies and “In the Heights” (2021), so he knows his way around a musical; he’s certainly an improvement over the hyperactive Rob Marshall school of dance-movie editing, where any shot over three seconds is two seconds too long. The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage. Stephen Schwartz’s songs are a mix of Sondheim-ian cleverness and Webber-ovian schmaltz. Theater kids of all ages will think they’ve died and gone to “Hamilton.”

The built-in problem with this property — and, after all these iterations, it is more property than story — is that Glinda the mean girl rival can steal the spotlight from the sweet, despised Elphaba. So it is here, at least in the first half of this half-musical. Grande-Butera (she’s credited in the end titles with both her parents’ surnames) comes into “Wicked” a pop mega-diva, and she’s a whirlwind of pink taffeta hypocrisy as Glinda, wide-eyed and backstabbing, prancing delicately to the tune of “Popular,” that declaration of insecure arrogance. The performance is delightful but more than a little scary — this Glinda’s a monstrous gamine — and the mid-movie change of heart toward her roommate never does make much sense.

By contrast, Erivo’s Elphaba gathers confidence and force over the course of “Wicked,” as she sees where the true enemies in Oz lie. The actress has a background in musicals (she won a Tony as Celie in Broadway’s “The Color Purple”) and drama (an Oscar nomination as Harriet Tubman in 2019’s “Harriet”), and she lets Elphaba’s regal bearing, pained eyes and beautiful greenness initially carry the performance. The first act of the play — i.e., this entire movie — leads to the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz (played by Jeff Goldblum, of all people), at which point Elphaba comes fully into her strength and an understanding that the right side is often — maybe even always — the least popular one. Erivo embodies that journey with a poise and power that make the other characters look two-dimensional.

Not to slight Idina Menzel, who originated the role on Broadway (and who turns up here with the original Glinda, Kristin Chenoweth, in an amusing bit of fourth wall breaking), but Erivo being Black changes things. The casting deepens Elphaba’s estrangement and brings out, almost too bluntly, the resonances beneath Maguire’s source novel — a darker, weirder and more complex work than the play or movie.

“Wicked” the musical always had a lot of ingredients in its pot: an academic setting popularized by the Harry Potter novels, Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” minus the mature doubts of that play’s Act 2, L. Frank Baum and Louis B. Mayer, “Heathers” and “Carrie.” The result was an overstuffed piece of Turkish delight, and the movie is even more so — modern studio confectionary at its tastiest and most loaded with carbs and preservatives. But Erivo’s Elphaba carries a hurt that comes from far beyond the screen, and that high F of anguished triumph as the movie’s curtain comes crashing down is a cry of liberation that could levitate a multiplex.

A final note: I don’t wish to spoil the fun of “Wicked” with anything so inconsequential as politics — notwithstanding that everything in pop culture is political, whether it knows it or not — but it’s truly ironic that millions will flock to this movie to cheer for a woman of color (albeit green) in her rebellion against a populist charlatan who has whipped up the excitable citizens of Munchkinland into a frenzy of hatred against a marginalized group of (wait for it) animals.

I guess some things only happen over the rainbow.

PG. At area theaters. Contains some scary action, thematic material and brief suggestive material. 160 minutes.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.