The door Dorothy opened communicated not only with a Technicolor world, but also with the great classical period of Hollywood. It was 1939, a few months later it would be released Gone with the Windand it would not take more to seal the legend of the hills of Los Angeles, mecca of cinema and great entertainment of the 20th century. Until Judy Garland arrived in Oz, the images in Victor Fleming’s classic were black and white: her move to brilliant, unreal Technicolor would be capped with a handful of memorable songs that would expand on an earlier phenomenon, that of the original book . by L. Frank Baum, published 40 years earlier.
But of course, The Wizard of Oz It’s much more than Baum’s work. With its successful adaptation, it gave rise to a sort of founding myth for Hollywood and inspired several cultural ramifications. Half a century later, when the rights of The Wizard of Oz had fallen into the public domain, Gregory Maguire published his own version of the story, Wicked: Memoirs of a Wicked Witch. Several concerns crossed his mind as he wrote. He wondered why, of all the characters Baum had created, the Wicked Witch of the West had been the only one to be one-dimensional, with no traits other than her wickedness. He also recalled a recent tragedy that shook the British media, when a boy named James Bulger was murdered by two classmates.
The “Liverpool Killers” had become famous in 1993, and Maguire wondered whether the condition was congenital or could develop. Whether we were born evil or became evil. This is why he wanted to delve deeper into the possible motivations of this “bad” witch and invented a biography to review Baum’s work from start to finish. His effort was historic. Later popular culture began to express similar concerns, with George Lucas devoting an entire trilogy to Star Wars to explain who Darth Vader or Disney really were, while bordering on plagiarism to Wickedtelling an alternate story for the villain of Sleeping Beauty In Evil.
This whole earthquake was obviously made easier by the fact that Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman had converted Wicked in a musical in the late 90s, and that musical would have taken Broadway by storm. He Wicked He theatrically maintained Maguire’s vision in broad outline, magnifying it with an international triumph that today unabashedly rivals the influence of Baum’s own work. Or its film adaptation. The path that starts from The Wizard of Oz has Wicked It is then that of a profound cultural mutation, of a change of cycle, where the spectacular and monolithic images of the traditional Hollywood machinery turn around and show what is hidden behind them. Expressing, in this gesture, his awareness of a world that is gaining in complexity.
A consciousness that does not deactivate the spectacle: Wickedwith its great score and iconic performances by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, is the quintessential musical blockbusterat the height of cats either Hamilton. This is why it is so shocking that, when promoting the corresponding film, Universal wanted to hide in the trailers that it is a musical.
The (humble) return of the musical
The trick is not new. We have already seen it accompany the launch of other recent films such as Wonka, the musical version of bad girls either Joker: Folie à deux. Their trailers barely showed the numbers and made it seem like the majors They were ashamed of the genre the films belonged to, perhaps because they thought there was something else more useful to promote: intellectual property. Bad Girls, Joker, Wonka as a prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. These were all famous IPs who, when it came to positioning themselves in the conversation, preferred to hide their affiliation with the musical, in case some viewers found it ridiculous.
It is therefore easy for this trend to bring us back to Wicked. It’s not Wickedafter all, a spin-off of The Wizard of Oz? Is this not the updating of a classic in the history of cinema, well anchored in the collective memory and likely to also attract spectators by “hiding” its nature? Its genesis and history on Broadway show us that no: no one in their right mind would hide the film’s relationship to one of the most profitable musicals in Broadway history. Which Hollywood is definitely not in its right mind with, and perhaps that’s due to the trauma of the 2021 failure of West Side Historythe new version of Steven Spielberg.
Wickedthe film beyond the boring promotion, has a curious link with West Side History. Both works adapted milestones of musical theater, marked both by massive applause and by discursive notes that transcend escapism. The relationship of West Side History with racism and life in the poorest neighborhoods of New York, it is therefore linked to In a New York neighborhood (In the Heights)whose film adaptation was directed by Jon M. Chu: the same one that Universal chose to sign Wicked. In a neighborhood of New York It was released the same year as West Side History and it was also a failure, while seeking to maintain a similar greatness.
This greatness is what emanates from a conviction: the Broadway musical is important. Tradition is important. With this in mind, the scene can (or should) accommodate much larger than life stories and, of course, those IPs who only seek to save studio furniture. Wicked It can only be big and important, and the first consequence of this belief lies in the fact that the adaptation has been divided into two halves. Villain: Part 1which is available now, and Villain: Part 2 (arriving in November next year). Nothing like this has ever happened in a Hollywood musical. Wicked is he Dune musical comedies.
In fact, the folks at Universal made the same argument that Denis Villeneuve made about the Frank Herbert adaptation: if they want to respect the full depth of Maguire’s novel and the resulting musical, they need more time. Two films which effectively seek to reconvert the Hollywood musical into an artistic avant-garde. Who wants to bring him back to this era precisely inaugurated by The Wizard of Ozbetween the 1940s and 1960s, when musical blockbusters had a similar preponderance that superhero cinema has had in recent times, but is ceasing to have. The goals are laudable. Hollywood might be ready for regression.
Defy gravity
But the reality is more unpleasant, and this Hollywood is not the same as the one Dorothy discovered on the threshold. Where there was Technicolor, Wicked everything is prematurely weighed down by Alice Brooks’ bad photographs. The invoice for Wicked It is hygienic and flat, typical of streamingwhich is particularly serious when we’re talking about a fantasy world where the chromatic range – the green of Elphaba’s skin and the Emerald City, the yellow brick road – is vital. These grayish tones strip Baum’s world of texture, paired with a theme park aesthetic that Disney productions are starting to accustom us to.
Since the CGI of the talking animals isn’t anything special either, Wicked He resigns himself to the appearance of television and to recognizing the inability of the Oz imagination to dazzle us with its own flavor. This is all the more serious since Chu is a director who has good ideas when it comes to musicals, he has already demonstrated this with In a neighborhood of New York– and it often seems that the packaging of Wicked It is weighed down to the point of eclipsing its staging. The first hesitant minutes of the film confirm this, while the style figures I’m not that girl either A short day -paradoxically dedicated to celebrating the color of the Emerald City- appear ugly and dull, pale in comparison to the inventiveness of the tables.
These apparent defects – almost inevitable in an industrial context where the boundaries between cinema and television are blurred in “content” – are fortunately not attributable to the integrity of the proposal. In other areas, Chu’s inventiveness knows how to overcome shortcomings in photography or production design, finding truly beautiful solutions —What is this feeling? And Dancing through life knowing how to play respectively with editing and decor – and in most cases with a certain coherence when it comes to restoring the virtues of the original show.
On several occasions it seems that Wicked This is a solvent film only because the source material is beautiful. The spectacular number with which it ends Act 1 (the famous Defy gravity) would be the defining test, but it shouldn’t detract from the film’s other achievements. Although the script is limited to sticking to Maguire’s thought-provoking concepts at best – creating a real mess when it comes to balancing subplots – there are times when Wicked It could not prosper without the work of its leading actresses and the emotion that they manage to gather around them. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are great as Elphaba and Glinda, sharing great chemistry between the former’s provocative charisma and the latter’s antics.
And that alone is enough Wicked ultimately rises above its inadequacies, admirably channeling the underlying reason why Maguire’s novel and subsequent musical became forever established in popular culture. If we are so enthusiastic (and for so long) when rereading a classic like The Wizard of Oz, This could simply be due to the friendship of these two witches, temporarily described as “good” and “bad”. This is what Chu and his team maintain, knowing how to expand this friendship through socio-political repercussions –Wicked Above all, it is a parable about populism and the need for scapegoats – and about synthesizing it into a heart that can move the audience.
It is therefore significant that the best scene of Wicked lack of music. It is the one that seals the friendship of Elphaba and Glinda, through a silent dance where Chu’s camera allows itself to capture the bodies and faces of his actresses. These bodies and faces, linked in an intimate dance with the power to question the stories written by the winners – as Maguire wanted – finally manage to establish direct communication with what made us love the Hollywood musical. A musical comedy of which for the moment only fragments or outdated expressions remain, like West Side History by Spielberg, but a musical that knows neither death nor dying. He’s already lost the Technicolor, so he just needs to look for other colors.
