With a title that should promise whiplash-inducing emerald spectacle—witches crooning, spellbooks ablaze, and enough glitter to bankrupt a drag parade—I traipsed into Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” salivating for a good bewitching. Stacked with a director who once spun “Crazy Rich Asians” into a fuchsia daydream and fronted by the goddess-voiced Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and pop pixie Ariana Grande (Glinda), this screen adaptation had every excuse to split the difference between “The Wizard of Oz” and a Manhattan karaoke bar at four a.m. But you know the old line: Don’t judge a broomstick by its bristles. Within minutes, I could tell this wasn’t the yellow brick road—just a treadmill in Technicolor.
Yes, Chu’s “Wicked” delivers a knock-out drag of opulent visuals, a kind of magpie fever dream where every feather, sequin, and puff of fog is calculated to within an inch of its life. The Land of Oz has never looked so immaculately sanitized, so nervously overdesigned—a Pinterest board come to life, lorded over by costume elves with bottomless budgets. But soon enough the shock and awe starts to feel like window-dressing for a hollowed-out house. The plot, which on stage tangles with dark reversals and sticky moral ambiguities, here tiptoes from pageant to pageant, with the soul of the original balled up and left behind in the orchestra pit. Political intrigue? Reduced to paint-by-numbers. Friendship? Rushed through with all the emotional delicacy of a corporate PowerPoint. The movie is desperately, almost pathetically, trying to convince us there’s meat on these bones, but you can almost hear the sets buckling under the emptiness.
Still, there’s a lonely star twinkling somewhere above this artificial Oz, and it’s Cynthia Erivo. Her Elphaba grabs every ballad by the throat and doesn’t let go. In a movie sodden with empty grandstanding, Erivo actually performs—her voice soars, bruises, cajoles, never a note wasted, capable of salvaging genuine ache from dialogue written in glitter glue. She’s a tornado in a room full of leaf blowers. Across from her, Ariana Grande’s Glinda is... well, less good witch, more cotton candy spun by a malfunctioning machine. Grande can giggle and sparkle, but let’s face it: we’re talking a frosting bomb without the cake. She radiates a surface-level charm so determined to please that it curves perilously into parody. The world’s most expensive karaoke contest? The queen bee at a magical prom, minus any bite.
Now about that fabled friendship: the on-screen chemistry between Erivo and Grande is like two socks unearthed from the dryer—technically a pair, but try telling that to your toes. There’s an attempted intimacy, a reaching for sisterly arc, that ends in flailing. You can sense the script rooting for them to ignite, to bloom into a full-throated, stage-sized connection. Instead, each time their relationship should cruise into emotional overdrive, we sputter in neutral and melt back into the wallpaper. The big “defy gravity” moment is nowhere to be found—call it a duet with no juice in the amp.
It’s almost tragic when you compare Chu’s work here to his earlier, raucously alive “Crazy Rich Asians”—that film thumped with real-life cultural brio and comic rhythm. “Wicked,” by contrast, is so hand-wringingly undecided between Broadway fidelity and cinematic invention that it does neither; you’re left clutching set-pieces that wink at you to remember the original, or else wishing you could forget what’s been lost in translation. The magic of transformation—so crucial in musicals—dies under the cold, bluish fluorescence of adaptation. Whatever irony lurked in the original is sanded down and served up for mass consumption: sugar, fat, and nothing that sticks to your ribs.
When the lights came up, I was caught between a round of applause for the sheer, idiotic beauty of Chu’s world-building and a low-grade sorrow at what was missing. “Wicked” is a gossamer toy meant to tremble and shine in the footlights, not ossify on celluloid. The things this show does best—immediacy, electricity, the slow burn of a lived-in bond—get flattened on the screen until the only thing left is longing. A musical, after all, is an act of public yearning; here, that yearning is staged, rehearsed, and shrink-wrapped before it gets the chance to reach you.
Some stories can’t survive out from under the proscenium arch, and “Wicked”—for all its budget, beauty, and those lungs of Cynthia Erivo—lands with an expensive thud. This is what disappointment looks like inside a $100-million snow globe: the colors swirl, the music swells, but the heart is locked outside, pounding on the glass.
