It’s been 20 years since Wicked premiered San Francisco’s Curran Theatre, but you can’t keep a good witch down. Not even the celluloid disaster that was Cats can keep the event musical and its green-tinged heroine from the screen, even if you rather suspect it should have taken somewhat less than two decades to cobble together an adaptation, musicals being roughly the same age as film sound. But we digress.
Indeed, Wicked is becoming not one film, but two, with Wicked: Part One slated for a global release on November 27, 2024, and Part Two hitting on November 26, 2025.
In case you’re not familiar, Wicked the movie is an adaptation of Wicked the stage musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, itself based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is a riff on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was, of course, most famously filmed as The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Hope you can keep that straight.
Wicked inverts and re-examines The Wizard of Oz, being told from the point of view of Elphaba Thropp, aka the Wicked Witch of the West, reframing the famous American fairy tale as something much more morally ambiguous. Essentially, Elphaba is stitched up by the despotic Wizard, who needs a villain for the people of Oz to rally against, and who better than a green-skinned hag like Elphaba? Maguire’s hugely popular revisionist take begat that weird little literary trend that gave us the likes Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Shakespearean adaptations of Star Wars, but don’t hold that against it. It’s a good time, as well as a meditation on the nature of evil.
The film version comes to us courtesy of In the Heights director Jon M. Chu, who has wrangled an impressive cast for the project, including Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, Ariana Grande as Galinda the Good Witch (for a certain value of “good”), Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard (is this his first musical since Earth Girls Are Easy?), plus Michelle Yeoh and Bowen Yang in support.
All signs point to Wicked being a rousing success but, let’s face it, they said the same thing about Cats… still, mark your calendars, Munchkins.
