‘Wicked’ and other travellers on the yellow brick road
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. During the afternoon show of John M. Chu’s Wicked I attended, there were no audience members singing along.
Or there weren’t any until the film’s ;-'Defying Gravity' song, picturized on the film’s two witchy leads, the green-skinned, misunderstood Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and the kind-hearted Galinda (Ariana Grande), the two apprentice-witches are destined to become ‘the Wicked Witch of the East’ and ‘Glinda the Good’, respectively, from Frank L. Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. During ‘Defying Gravity’ a gaggle of young women near me broke into a not-particularly-synchronized version of Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel’s song from the 2003 Broadway musical Wicked.
I didn’t mind because the visuals onscreen were so uninspired—the original number’s remarkable stagecraft (a dozen extras holding Elphaba aloft atop a platform, the train of her flowing dress covering up the modus operandi) reduced to a VFX-heavy, superhero-style ‘climactic fight’. Generally speaking, this is the problem with Wicked: it’s very good when Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are mostly left to their own devices, singing their hearts out. But whenever a scene calls for visual daring, unconventional staging and actual lighting, Chu opts for two-dimensional ‘music video direction’ instead.
Down the years there has been a steady stream of Oz adaptations across film, TV, radio, comics and so on. In part, this is because of the universality of the basic storyline—a young girl named Dorothy ends up in the magical land of Oz after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their home by a cyclone. A classic ‘quest narrative’ ensues wherein she finds unlikely allies (the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion) and a
. Read more on livemint.com
