I’ll cop to the fact that I had my doubts when I first heard that ‘Wicked’ was coming to the screen and being cut into two separate films. And I’d so those with doubts had good reason to hold onto them, at two hours and forty minutes ‘Wicked’ exceeds the actual run time of the Broadway production while only being the first half of the show. John M. Chu found success with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ but his musical debut ‘In the Heights’ had similar bloat issues and occasionally was incomprehensibly cut together in a way that made the dances sequences hard to follow.

And there are technical issues with ‘Wicked’ the lighting in Oz for some reason always seems to be either dawn or dusk, leaving the brightly colored sets in shadows. And while Cynthia Erivo and Arian Grande are both more than excellent in the two lead roles, Jeff Goldblum feels like he just rolled onto set and was handed a script. The first half of the film sags, not having the song list that the back half (of the first half) of the show contains. And I still have a few nits to pick with how Chu and his cinematographer go about shooting the large dance sequences. Constant cutting makes it feel less exciting when you get a full screen of movement.

But at the end of the day ‘Wicked’ has what every movie musical has, unearned confidence in spades. You need buy in from the audience to get a musical off the ground, and you can only come around to that if you are brimming with a certain theater kid self assuredness. There’s an eagerness to ‘Wicked’ that makes everything land like a high school production of ‘Guys and Doll’, albeit with the incredibly talented Ariana and Cynthia in the driver’s chairs. Each doing a different maneuver with the source material, Arian sticking so closely to Kristin Chenoweth’s Galinda it’s truly remarkable. Meanwhile Cynthia has a more damaged, shut in version of Elphaba, and yet with the vocal chords to match Idina even if I disagreed with the take (I don’t) that much would shut me right up.

Honestly I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. While I was horrified to learn that the first half of a two hour and thiry minute Broadway show was being stretched to two movies, I forgot that this is an absolute boon for ‘Wicked (Part 1)’ and a terrifying curse for ‘Wicked (Part 2)’. They will almost certainly have to add some songs to the back half of the show, and they won’t have the magic of the closing number to wrap everything up. It’s a little harrowing, but I understand the decision. If you have an opportunity to end a film on Defying Gravity? You absolutely take it.

4/5