‘Wicked’ review: hit musical makes gravity-defying leap to the big screen

Wicked is a stage juggernaut that’s played on Broadway for 21 years, in the West End for 18, and spawned productions all over the world from Seoul to Stuttgart. Its signature song, the soaring power ballad ‘Defying Gravity’, is a drag show staple that’s defeated countless karaoke singers – frankly, 99 per cent of the population just don’t have the range. But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is also a musical theatre phenomenon with a time-honoured ballad (‘Memory’) and look what happened when they tried to turn that into a movie.

Worry not – this all-singing, all-dancing adaptation from director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) is a dizzying delight that should please both the faithful and those who are green – pun intended – to the world of frenemy witches. It’s also very long – a bum-numbing two hours and 40 minutes – and this film only covers act one of the stage musical. A sequel based on the second act, Wicked Part Two, will follow in November 2025.

The story, loosely adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West, is essentially a prequel to 1939’s Technicolor classic The Wizard Of Oz. It cleverly imagines how The Good Witch Of The North and The Wicked Witch Of The West (“I’ll get you my pretty!”) gained their contrasting reputations by taking us back to their school days. Stephen Schwartz’s songs are pithy even when they have big theatre kid energy: one is called ‘Popular’ and another pivots on the phrase “loathing, unadulterated loathing!” There’s also minimal schmaltz in the screenplay co-credited to Winnie Holtzman, creator of seminal teen series My So-Called Life, who also wrote the stage musical.

Chu’s film begins with prickly but gifted Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and luminous but less talented Glinda (Ariana Grande) arriving at Shiz University. Looking a bit like a campier Hogwarts, it’s a magical place where the history professor is a talking goat voiced by Game Of Thrones‘ Peter Dinklage. Elphaba is cruelly othered by her classmates because she is green – something sort-of-explained in a flashback – but her spell-casting potential is immediately spotted by gimlet-eyed headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).

As well as being ostracised, Elphaba is haunted by guilt because she considers herself responsible for the fact her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) will never walk. Elphaba and Glinda initially repel one another but when Grande’s queen bee inadvertently bestows a kindness on Nessarose, a friendship begins to bloom. Soon after, the first hint of a fracture appears when Elphaba develops feelings for Glinda’s boyfriend Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), a Winkie prince (yes, really) who isn’t quite as vacuous as he seems.

Wicked flags a little in the middle, but not enough to dampen a dramatic climax in which Elphaba and Glinda travel to Oz to meet the fabled Wonderful Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). He and Yeoh sell their brief musical numbers on twinkly charisma, but Erivo and Grande are both vocally extraordinary. Crucially, they also have crackling chemistry punctuated by Erivo’s bursts of intensity and Grande’s slick comic timing. By the end, you won’t quite be levitating off your seat but you’ll definitely be enchanted enough to stream the soundtrack on the way home. Funny, colourful and full of empathy for outsiders, this film really is the Shiz.