KD^3C^3 - 20241201 Dispose of the villainousness?
Why am I mad about Wicked?
I’ve been mad about this movie coming out for probably two or three years now. I’m not exactly a Wicked super fan, but also I’ve seen the show two or three times on tour, and own the soundtrack and have listened to it enough times that I could still knock out most of the lyrics to Popular without looking them up. I appreciate the show even as I can acknowledge its flaws. Flaws like a second act that isn’t nearly as strong as the first, or the fact that there are at least two just okay songs for each good one, or that (spoilers, I guess) they undercut the inherent tragedy of the character of Elphaba with a tacked on, and frankly unearned, happy ending.
But if you were to ask me on the street point blank if I like Wicked, my first instinct would be to say yes. I remember the kerfuffle when Wicked lost the Best New Musical Tony to Avenue Q. I’m not going to re-litigate the whole thing, other than to say Wicked has had a much longer shadow that Avenue Q, which might vindicate the people mad it didn’t win, but I would counter by saying I think Avenue Q much more accurately reflects the moment in which it was made. There’s not a more 2003 musical than Avenue Q.
A Wicked movie has been in development for literal decades, probably since before it lost the Tony. It was always going to happen, and it took less time to get to the screen than the film adaptation of Cats, so by one lens, only taking 20 years is downright speedy. Making a movie is always impossible, and making a movie musical in the 2020s is even harder. There’s such an aversion to musicals (in the minds of marketing at least) that there have been multiple musical films released in the last few years where nobody could be seen singing in the trailer. Off the top of my head, there was: Wonka, Joker Foil a Deux, Mean Girls (which was only remade because it was a musical now) and even Wicked didn’t show anyone singing in the trailers.
I’m usually trying to be Mr. Let People Enjoy Things. I like lots of movies and TV shows that pretty terrible most metrics. But for some reason I’ve been increasingly grumpy about how much praise the Wicked Movie has been getting. I’ve had multiple people recommend it to me, and I’ve even overheard people in restaurants talking about it, which sounds so made up it has to be true.
I don’t know that I ever expected the movie to flop, or be as disturbingly weird as (for example) Cats (2019) but I also didn’t expect to be as successful as it apparently has been. Almost everything I’ve seen about the movie (I haven’t seen the movie yet, which we’ll get to) has made me think it would be bad.
I’ll start with the good stuff: Casting. By all accounts Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are great choices to play Glinda and Elphaba. And the director, John M Chu has had success with movie musicals before, including In the Heights, which I quite enjoyed.
Ok now the bad stuff: Wicked, the Movie, is actually only Wicked Part One. The cut the stage show, which is two hours and forty five minutes long (including intermission) into two movies (part one and two, although none of the marketing hints that this is a bifurcated film) and the first movie is longer than the entire stage show. It’s like if you watched the first act at .5x speed on YouTube. And the justification given for cutting the movie in half, to make two movies, is that Defying Gravity is a “curtain number” which means the curtain should drop afterwards, and give the audience a chance to breathe. Which is true, and why it works so well on stage. But it turns out that film and theater are two different mediums and trying to replicate the experience of one in the other is a bad idea. This is also why there being so many broadway musicals based on movies lately is bad, but I digress.
But the real reason to split a movie in half is the same as it always is, too make your audience pay for two tickets. Wicked the stage show is already pretty long for a movie, but when the movie’s done it’ll be twice as long. But longer doesn’t mean better. There are absolutely people who will love the opportunity to spend that long in Oz (there’s a reason the books and adaptations have been popular for so long, and it’s not just that they are in the public domain. But stories aren’t theme parks, they should be as long as they need to be, rather than a place where you can spend a whole day just wandering around, looking at the sights. The sights which, from what I’ve seen in trailers and clips, are completely washed out. It feels like the saturation has been turned down across the board, proving that we have learned nothing from the Barbie Movie and still think movies, even fantasy musicals, should feel dark and gritty.
Only one musical number clip has been released officially online, the early-ish song, What Is This Feeling. I watched the clip in hopes that it would help me make sense of the disconnect between what I thought was happening in this movie, and what people were apparently experiencing. And I think I did, even if it doesn’t explain why I’m so mad about this whole thing still.
Some context: What is The Feeling is a song that takes place not long after our two leads meet for the first time at school. They both have a large emotional reaction to the experience, and because this is a musical, when someone has a large emotional reaction, it becomes a song. The opening lines (and even the name of the song) imply some ambiguity or even mystery about the feeling that Elphaba and Galinda are experiencing. The first lines ask “what is this feeling I’m having,” and follows their exploration in search of an answer. The answer comes in the form of a punchline and the chorus of the song: Loathing. Dramatugically, this is a punchline because the opening lines describe physical responses that the feeling engenders, pulse rushing, head reeling, face flushing, are ambiguous enough that it could be almost read as love at first sight, and that possibility is thoroughly crushed by the blunt answer that the feeling is actually the polar opposite.
It’s a good bit, it’s economical, and it does a lot of work for both the characters and the sense of humor the play has. But the film version makes it clear the characters aren’t confused or surprised by their emotions. As Erivo and Grande recite their lines, they’re already fighting and looking daggers at each other. There’s no twist, or confusion, because we already know where it’s headed. After that the song becomes a montage that segues into a big dance number as soon as possible, big dance numbers being John M Chu’s wheelhouse. But, the song is mostly a duet between our leads, with occasional support from the chorus. Shooting it like a big dance number, often with the leads not even on screen at the same time, or lost in a sea of dancers takes away the opportunity for the relationship between them to really build. Even when it’s just the two of them, we cut back and forth so quickly (and jump through time via montage) that neither one gets to show us who they are, the work is all being done by the song. To be clear, Chu can shoot a big dance number like nobody’s business, he’s a master at it, but it feels like he retreated to that skillset instead of asking what the scene really needs.
After pondering this for far too long, I realized that I think I understand why it works for so many people but not for me. The song is a note perfect replication of the broadway soundtrack version.
Kevin, of course it’s the same. It’s the same song. Are you getting confused?
What I mean is this: The majority of Wicked fans have probably experienced the show through the soundtrack more than any other way. They may have seen it on stage, they may not, but the soundtrack is right there waiting always exactly the same as the last time they listened to it. Broadway soundtracks are amazing, they allow people (like me!) who don’t get to see big broadway shows a chance to experience some of the magic of the stage. They bring the show to life in your living room (See: The Drowsy Chaperone for an example of this experience being made into a musical in itself.) But a soundtrack is a recording, it’s a moment in time captured in amber. It doesn’t show you what it feels like for a show to be a living breathing thing in front of you. The different Galinda’s I’ve seen on stage aren’t trying to be Kristen Chenowith, instead they’re trying to be Galinda, and what that looks like embodies through their choices feels different. It’s not wrong, it’s how theater works. A movie musical should be free to explore how the new medium makes the story feel different, explore how new actors make different choices with the same lines, it should be free to become its own thing.
But What is This Feeling in the movie sounds like a carbon copy of the version from the broadway soundtrack. When I close my eyes I can see the version of the show that has played in my head hundreds of times when I played the album. And i think, for at least some portion of the audience, hearing the song almost exactly as they remember it, allows them to overwrite parts of what is actually happening on screen with the version from inside their head. The audience is getting the version of Wicked they always imagined, and that’s even better than any choices that the creative team might have made.
To be clear, I don’t think this is 100% true or literal for absolutely everyone in the audience. Maybe it’s not true for most of the audience. Maybe the movie is just very good and I’ve written 1700 words (so far!) about this for nothing or nobody but myself.
Kevin, what do you know? You haven’t even seen the movie!
I haven’t. That’s the elephant in the room, splash of water on the witch, the gust of wind sending the whole house of cards tumbling down.
I’ve built up this elaborate explanation of my emotional response to a movie I haven’t even seen. I’m reacting not to the movie itself, but to
The stories being told about and around the movie. And I’m telling my own version of that story too. I should see the movie. I should go in with an open mind, and I should see the movie with the goal of enjoying it. Wats the point of seeing a movie if you don’t want to like it? Sure I watch movies all the time that are bad, by most metrics, but I don’t go into them hoping to have a bad time. I watch bad movies because every bad movie is bad in new and interesting ways and I love to see passion on screen from creative teams with more passion than anything like talent or money or basic understanding of story structure. Wicked the movie (from what I’ve read, and seen) doesn’t feel like a passion project. It feels like the next piece of corporate output by a media machine that really misses the days of the Studio System, where actors, directors, writers and everyone else, where all hired by the movie studios for long exclusive contracts to make dozens of pictures a year, churning them out like cattle feed, trading them like commodities. That metaphor got away from me.
Wicked the movie feels corporate. Corporate down in its bones. Corporate like they need this movie to do well, not because they want to make art, but because they need to make the Q4 projections for the next earnings call. Corporations can make great art, they’ve done it before. Some of the absolute best films of all time came out of the studio system. But great art is a byproduct of the machine. A masterpiece making no profit is so much worse than Grown Ups 2 making 150 million in profit.
I like Wicked, the stage show. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. And it feels like the last gasp of a creative period that’s largely gone from the broadway stage. More and more the boards are filled with jukebox musicals or adaptations of increasingly obscure movies, any exploitable IP that can be mined for the stage, hoping even the barest of name recognition will push the stage show into profitability.
I think I’m mad about Wicked because it has become what it always threatened to be: just an other piece of corporate content for the machine. It could be good, or even great, lots of people have loved it, and I’m glad it brought them joy in a time where that can be hard to come by. But it will always be that movie they cut in half because they thought they could get a second ticket out of audiences. They could have solved the “curtain song” problem any of a dozen ways that better adapted it to the screen, but the choice they picked in the name of “fidelity” also happened to be the one that let them potentially double the next box office. That was a corporate decision, not one made for art.
I’ve been mad about this movie coming out for probably two or three years now. I’m not exactly a Wicked super fan, but also I’ve seen the show two or three times on tour, and own the soundtrack and have listened to it enough times that I could still knock out most of the lyrics to Popular without looking them up. I appreciate the show even as I can acknowledge its flaws. Flaws like a second act that isn’t nearly as strong as the first, or the fact that there are at least two just okay songs for each good one, or that (spoilers, I guess) they undercut the inherent tragedy of the character of Elphaba with a tacked on, and frankly unearned, happy ending.
But if you were to ask me on the street point blank if I like Wicked, my first instinct would be to say yes. I remember the kerfuffle when Wicked lost the Best New Musical Tony to Avenue Q. I’m not going to re-litigate the whole thing, other than to say Wicked has had a much longer shadow that Avenue Q, which might vindicate the people mad it didn’t win, but I would counter by saying I think Avenue Q much more accurately reflects the moment in which it was made. There’s not a more 2003 musical than Avenue Q.
A Wicked movie has been in development for literal decades, probably since before it lost the Tony. It was always going to happen, and it took less time to get to the screen than the film adaptation of Cats, so by one lens, only taking 20 years is downright speedy. Making a movie is always impossible, and making a movie musical in the 2020s is even harder. There’s such an aversion to musicals (in the minds of marketing at least) that there have been multiple musical films released in the last few years where nobody could be seen singing in the trailer. Off the top of my head, there was: Wonka, Joker Foil a Deux, Mean Girls (which was only remade because it was a musical now) and even Wicked didn’t show anyone singing in the trailers.
I’m usually trying to be Mr. Let People Enjoy Things. I like lots of movies and TV shows that pretty terrible most metrics. But for some reason I’ve been increasingly grumpy about how much praise the Wicked Movie has been getting. I’ve had multiple people recommend it to me, and I’ve even overheard people in restaurants talking about it, which sounds so made up it has to be true.
I don’t know that I ever expected the movie to flop, or be as disturbingly weird as (for example) Cats (2019) but I also didn’t expect to be as successful as it apparently has been. Almost everything I’ve seen about the movie (I haven’t seen the movie yet, which we’ll get to) has made me think it would be bad.
I’ll start with the good stuff: Casting. By all accounts Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are great choices to play Glinda and Elphaba. And the director, John M Chu has had success with movie musicals before, including In the Heights, which I quite enjoyed.
Ok now the bad stuff: Wicked, the Movie, is actually only Wicked Part One. The cut the stage show, which is two hours and forty five minutes long (including intermission) into two movies (part one and two, although none of the marketing hints that this is a bifurcated film) and the first movie is longer than the entire stage show. It’s like if you watched the first act at .5x speed on YouTube. And the justification given for cutting the movie in half, to make two movies, is that Defying Gravity is a “curtain number” which means the curtain should drop afterwards, and give the audience a chance to breathe. Which is true, and why it works so well on stage. But it turns out that film and theater are two different mediums and trying to replicate the experience of one in the other is a bad idea. This is also why there being so many broadway musicals based on movies lately is bad, but I digress.
But the real reason to split a movie in half is the same as it always is, too make your audience pay for two tickets. Wicked the stage show is already pretty long for a movie, but when the movie’s done it’ll be twice as long. But longer doesn’t mean better. There are absolutely people who will love the opportunity to spend that long in Oz (there’s a reason the books and adaptations have been popular for so long, and it’s not just that they are in the public domain. But stories aren’t theme parks, they should be as long as they need to be, rather than a place where you can spend a whole day just wandering around, looking at the sights. The sights which, from what I’ve seen in trailers and clips, are completely washed out. It feels like the saturation has been turned down across the board, proving that we have learned nothing from the Barbie Movie and still think movies, even fantasy musicals, should feel dark and gritty.
Only one musical number clip has been released officially online, the early-ish song, What Is This Feeling. I watched the clip in hopes that it would help me make sense of the disconnect between what I thought was happening in this movie, and what people were apparently experiencing. And I think I did, even if it doesn’t explain why I’m so mad about this whole thing still.
Some context: What is The Feeling is a song that takes place not long after our two leads meet for the first time at school. They both have a large emotional reaction to the experience, and because this is a musical, when someone has a large emotional reaction, it becomes a song. The opening lines (and even the name of the song) imply some ambiguity or even mystery about the feeling that Elphaba and Galinda are experiencing. The first lines ask “what is this feeling I’m having,” and follows their exploration in search of an answer. The answer comes in the form of a punchline and the chorus of the song: Loathing. Dramatugically, this is a punchline because the opening lines describe physical responses that the feeling engenders, pulse rushing, head reeling, face flushing, are ambiguous enough that it could be almost read as love at first sight, and that possibility is thoroughly crushed by the blunt answer that the feeling is actually the polar opposite.
It’s a good bit, it’s economical, and it does a lot of work for both the characters and the sense of humor the play has. But the film version makes it clear the characters aren’t confused or surprised by their emotions. As Erivo and Grande recite their lines, they’re already fighting and looking daggers at each other. There’s no twist, or confusion, because we already know where it’s headed. After that the song becomes a montage that segues into a big dance number as soon as possible, big dance numbers being John M Chu’s wheelhouse. But, the song is mostly a duet between our leads, with occasional support from the chorus. Shooting it like a big dance number, often with the leads not even on screen at the same time, or lost in a sea of dancers takes away the opportunity for the relationship between them to really build. Even when it’s just the two of them, we cut back and forth so quickly (and jump through time via montage) that neither one gets to show us who they are, the work is all being done by the song. To be clear, Chu can shoot a big dance number like nobody’s business, he’s a master at it, but it feels like he retreated to that skillset instead of asking what the scene really needs.
After pondering this for far too long, I realized that I think I understand why it works for so many people but not for me. The song is a note perfect replication of the broadway soundtrack version.
Kevin, of course it’s the same. It’s the same song. Are you getting confused?
What I mean is this: The majority of Wicked fans have probably experienced the show through the soundtrack more than any other way. They may have seen it on stage, they may not, but the soundtrack is right there waiting always exactly the same as the last time they listened to it. Broadway soundtracks are amazing, they allow people (like me!) who don’t get to see big broadway shows a chance to experience some of the magic of the stage. They bring the show to life in your living room (See: The Drowsy Chaperone for an example of this experience being made into a musical in itself.) But a soundtrack is a recording, it’s a moment in time captured in amber. It doesn’t show you what it feels like for a show to be a living breathing thing in front of you. The different Galinda’s I’ve seen on stage aren’t trying to be Kristen Chenowith, instead they’re trying to be Galinda, and what that looks like embodies through their choices feels different. It’s not wrong, it’s how theater works. A movie musical should be free to explore how the new medium makes the story feel different, explore how new actors make different choices with the same lines, it should be free to become its own thing.
But What is This Feeling in the movie sounds like a carbon copy of the version from the broadway soundtrack. When I close my eyes I can see the version of the show that has played in my head hundreds of times when I played the album. And i think, for at least some portion of the audience, hearing the song almost exactly as they remember it, allows them to overwrite parts of what is actually happening on screen with the version from inside their head. The audience is getting the version of Wicked they always imagined, and that’s even better than any choices that the creative team might have made.
To be clear, I don’t think this is 100% true or literal for absolutely everyone in the audience. Maybe it’s not true for most of the audience. Maybe the movie is just very good and I’ve written 1700 words (so far!) about this for nothing or nobody but myself.
Kevin, what do you know? You haven’t even seen the movie!
I haven’t. That’s the elephant in the room, splash of water on the witch, the gust of wind sending the whole house of cards tumbling down.
I’ve built up this elaborate explanation of my emotional response to a movie I haven’t even seen. I’m reacting not to the movie itself, but to
The stories being told about and around the movie. And I’m telling my own version of that story too. I should see the movie. I should go in with an open mind, and I should see the movie with the goal of enjoying it. Wats the point of seeing a movie if you don’t want to like it? Sure I watch movies all the time that are bad, by most metrics, but I don’t go into them hoping to have a bad time. I watch bad movies because every bad movie is bad in new and interesting ways and I love to see passion on screen from creative teams with more passion than anything like talent or money or basic understanding of story structure. Wicked the movie (from what I’ve read, and seen) doesn’t feel like a passion project. It feels like the next piece of corporate output by a media machine that really misses the days of the Studio System, where actors, directors, writers and everyone else, where all hired by the movie studios for long exclusive contracts to make dozens of pictures a year, churning them out like cattle feed, trading them like commodities. That metaphor got away from me.
Wicked the movie feels corporate. Corporate down in its bones. Corporate like they need this movie to do well, not because they want to make art, but because they need to make the Q4 projections for the next earnings call. Corporations can make great art, they’ve done it before. Some of the absolute best films of all time came out of the studio system. But great art is a byproduct of the machine. A masterpiece making no profit is so much worse than Grown Ups 2 making 150 million in profit.
I like Wicked, the stage show. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. And it feels like the last gasp of a creative period that’s largely gone from the broadway stage. More and more the boards are filled with jukebox musicals or adaptations of increasingly obscure movies, any exploitable IP that can be mined for the stage, hoping even the barest of name recognition will push the stage show into profitability.
I think I’m mad about Wicked because it has become what it always threatened to be: just an other piece of corporate content for the machine. It could be good, or even great, lots of people have loved it, and I’m glad it brought them joy in a time where that can be hard to come by. But it will always be that movie they cut in half because they thought they could get a second ticket out of audiences. They could have solved the “curtain song” problem any of a dozen ways that better adapted it to the screen, but the choice they picked in the name of “fidelity” also happened to be the one that let them potentially double the next box office. That was a corporate decision, not one made for art.