WICKED ENDEARING DREAMSCAPE

BLOCKBUSTER MUSICAL MAKES FOR ON SCREEN ENTERTAINMENT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

A time before the Wizard of OZ was a happier time, if one can believe the existence of betterness than Judy Garland, The Tin Man, The Lion and the Scarecrow endlessly singing whimsically down and around the yellow brick road.

Director Jon M. Chu merges the best of a Broadway musical with the best of Tinseltown imaging for the prequel to Dorothy getting swept up by a tornado in Kansas and winding up in the Land of Oz.

The magical singing of leading costars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, sets the tone and provides the atmosphere, and gradually pulls the audience into the 3D dreamscape enhanced with AVX theater technology.

Cynthia Erivo plays Elphaba Throp, a young women born with a green skin and spontaneous uncontrolled magical powers. Elphaba is the prequel to the prequel of how the Wicked Witch of the West comes to be wicked. The short answer is that she gets teased a lot growing up and this teasing only becomes more sophisticated when she enters Shiz University.

Ariana Grande plays Galinda Upland, a young woman who wants to learn sorcery. But Galinda’s perky narcissistic tendencies put her in direct competition with Elphaba. Galinda is the prequel to Glinda the Good, who must become a bit nicer before wearing the title.

This one main narrative of how the witches in Oz came to be is filled with song and dance. The storyline is made a bit more complicated than Dorothy’s was in the Wizard of Oz (1939).

Chu intermittently runs background narratives through the main narrative, like the twisting winds of a tornado. One narrative involves an authoritarian plot to remove all the magical animal professors from teaching at the university. Galinda actually joins her classmates in bullying the professors before they are permanently removed from their teaching positions.

Another narrative involves the developing romance between Galinda and a prince from Winkie, played by Jonathan Bailey.

The Wizard of Oz narrative runs blindly in the background until Elphaba gets a special invitation to meet him at Oz. Michelle Yeoh, plays Madame Morrible, a professor of sorcery who has mentored Elphaba in the background. Madame Morrible knows that Oz has room for a particularly talented student, if she can find one for him.

The relationships of the students grow as would typically happen in a competitive academic environment. But no one could guess that Elphaba and Galinda would begin to work together.

Wicked has that majestic sweep of a blockbuster, and also the bursting talent of a long running Broadway musical.

Erivo matches her acting talent with her accomplished singing. And Grande is able to dance and sing in parallel, often in the whimsical spirit of her character being in binary opposition. Galinda is popular but obnoxious at the same time, while Elphaba is unpopular, which compels her through a bit of a challenging rollercoaster of emotions.

Wicked is a fun filled night of entertainment with a 2 h 40 minute runtime, that is well worth the effort.

And then just when enough happiness has occurred, and the realization sets in that time has gone by, Chu introduces the interestingly quirky character, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, played by Jeff Goldbloom. Goldbloom adapts his supporting screen character well for the role as, similar to the Wizard of Oz (1939), the storms slow down enough to allow time for some explaining about what is going on in Tornado Alley and other magical stories from Kansas.