After 20 years, the beloved musical “Wicked” has made it to the big screen.
For so long, fans were seeing the musical on the stage in seats far from the actors, which makes it harder to capture the actors’ expressions. In the movie, they get to see more in depth of the story as well, with more insight of the characters and places.
The actors Cynthia Erivo, who played Elphaba, and Ariana Grande, who played Glinda, did a great job portraying the characters’ emotions. It gave a better understanding to the audience of what they are feeling. There’s more of a connection between the audience and the actors when watching on screen.
Grande is a big pop star. She has such a branded image that the director of the movie, Jon M. Chu, did not think Grande would be able to play Glinda until she proved herself.
Watching her in this movie, she portrayed the character well with her comedic personality and quirkiness that the fans know and love as Glinda.
Grande was committed to this role and it showed in this movie as she completely disappeared into Glinda.
Erivo took a more emotional approach to the character Elphaba. In this movie, she showcased Elphaba’s emotional side, which gave an understanding of what she felt internally.
Erivo sings with so much emotion that it has brought tears to the audience. She made Elphaba relatable and sensitive, which touched the hearts of people. The chemistry between Erivo and Grande bleeds well into their characters’ close friendship in the film. Their emotional scenes clearly capture their deep friendship off screen.
Nowadays, computer-generated imagery is popular in films. The audience had concerns of how much of the movie would be CGI.
Although this film could have been chosen to do in CGI with how advanced technology is, Chu wanted everything to feel as immersive as it possibly could.
They built the Emerald City, Munchkinland, the train and much more to make it feel real not only to the audience but to the actors as well.
“It’s wonderful to be able to touch the space, and create the world in a way we’ve never seen it before,” Erivo said.
Production designer Nathan Crowley said he wanted to add a field of tulips, which was shown beautifully in the film.
“I proposed that we grew 9 million tulips in Eastern England,” Crowley said. Along with the help of a farmer called Mark and our location manager, Adam, we planted 9 million tulips.”
The effort and time put into the visuals with few green screens used is impressive.
Compared to the Broadway version, the sets on stage are limited in ways that the sets are smaller to fit on stage. As for film, sets are created bigger therefore the film helped fill the picture of the audience’s imagination.
The musical numbers and songs are a huge part of the musical that tells the story. The song “Defying Gravity” that is best known in this musical left the audience in tears. The raw and emotional performances gave the audience a strong connection to te characters.
Erivo and Grande decided that they wanted to sing live in this movie. Adding the live recordings of them singing while filming made the songs feel more sentimental and true to feeling.
The only difference between this film and on stage is the addition of flashbacks and backstories of the characters in the film, which helped to understand the backstory of the characters.
Even without having the chance to watch “Wicked” live on Broadway, this movie still keeps the story the same with minor changes in the dialogue.
Although the movie is nearly three hours long, it goes by quickly without wanting to miss a second. The movie was well-produced and will leave the audience feeling emotional and satisfied, giving the thought to watch it again.
An announcement came out about splitting “Wicked” into two parts. The film splits into two acts like the original broadway version. Having already filmed the second part, it will be released a year later, on Nov. 21, 2025.
