Wicked: Part One review: 'Ariana Grande demonstrates her comedy chops'

It’s one of the stranger aspects of Wicked’s blanket marketing campaign that its trailer hides the fact that it’s a musical. Such bait-and-switch tactics backfired with the recent Mean Girls remake and Joker: Folie à Deux, but even leaving aside that it’s an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, one of the most beloved movie musicals of all time, does anyone really not know that Wicked is an adaptation of one of the most successful stage musicals of the last 20 years?

The good news ― at least for fans of Wicked ― is that there’s no getting round the fact that Wicked: Part One is very definitely a musical. There are songs in almost every scene and several big showstoppers too, all of them bumping the running time up to a hefty 160 minutes without getting us more than half-way through this Wicked Witch of the West origins story (Wicked: Part Two will be released this time next year).

The other good news is that it casts singers who can act in the leads, not auto-tuned movie stars willing to "give it a go". As the emerald-skinned Elphaba, Cynthia Erivo has the vocal range to convey the wild emotional rollercoaster that makes the future witch such a misunderstood figure (at least in this telling). And she’s nicely complimented by pop superstar Ariana Grande, who demonstrates her comedy chops in fine style as Glinda the Good Witch, Elphaba’s one-time frenemy and something of a Mean Girl herself.

We’re first introduced to the latter as the film opens. Dorothy has just dumped a bucket of water over the Wicked Witch and before you can say “ding-dong, the witch is dead”, Glinda arrives to answer any questions the various resident of Oz may have about said departed menace, most tellingly: weren’t they once, like, friends?

Thenceforth the film rewinds to sketch out the Wicked Witch’s origins story as an outcast called Elphaba. Disowned by her father at birth on account of the green hue to her skin, ostracised by her peers for the same superficial reasons, and demonised as dangerous on account of some magical abilities she’s not yet learned to control, she’s taken under the wing of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), a professor of sorcery at the same university where Elphaba’s disabled sister (Marissa Bode) has gone to study. It’s also where Glinda ― who initially goes by the name Galinda ― swans around in a bubble of wealthy white privilege and promptly, and condescendingly, decides to take the socially maladroit Elphaba on as a pet project in order to ingratiate herself into Morrible’s good books.

Wicked certainly doesn’t make any effort to bury its status as a blunt racial allegory here. It’s right there on the surface and the movie reinforces it with several songs and explicit and throwaway lines of coded dialogue. A subplot involving the eradication of talking animals from Oz, meanwhile, provides yet more heavy-handed commentary on discrimination and the need for tolerance, all of which is very well-meaning, but can feel a little didactic.

But director Jon M Chu, who did Crazy Rich Asians and the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical adaptation In the Heights, hits his stride when mining the weirdness of Oz for inspiration. A scene depicting the origins of the flying monkeys is genuinely strange and disturbing, and there’s a dreamy sequence involving floating poppies that foreshadows a famous moment from The Wizard of Oz, but here takes on a more romantic quality as Elpheba starts to fall for Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey’s charismatic ne’er-do-well prince Fiyero.

Oz itself, though, is an amalgam of fantastical movie worlds we’ve kind of seen elsewhere ― in places it feels a little bit Avatar, a little bit Lord of the Rings, a little bit Harry Potter; it’s never quite as wonderfully odd as Victor Fleming’s 1939 version. The film also feels a little too content to stick to the fan-servicing mantra of Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard. “Give the people what they want,” he announces at one point, simultaneously upping the film’s razzle-dazzle quotient with an elaborate tap-dancing routine (Goldblum is well cast in the role, playing him as twinkly and offbeat and a little bit untrustworthy).

But do we actually really want or need the origins of the Yellow Brick Road or the Wicked Witch’s hat or her penchant for stuffing cute four-legged animals in her bike basket? It’s one thing to go all out to satisfy the musical’s vast fanbase by having cameos from the stage show’s original stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, but it’s quite another to explain away all the mystery that’s kept audiences returning to the Wizard of Oz over the last 85 years (and the books for even longer). As a musical Wicked is fun and diverting and much better than expected. But it never quite feels essential.

Wicked is in cinemas from 22 November