So, where were we? Having unwittingly helped the powers that be further their flying-monkey spying program, Elphaba — powerful, misunderstood, knows how to rock a pointy hat — has stolen the spell book known as the Grimmerie and declared war on the con artist known as Wizard. She’s now an enemy of the state. Her friend Glinda — twinkling, bubbly, popular — bids her farewell before helping her escape. Prince Fiyero was last seen fleeing on horseback. The governor of Oz suffered a heart attack. Gravity had been successfully defied.
Now the witch is back, and Wicked: For Good picks up right where the first part of Jon M. Chu’s 2024 adaptation of the Broadway hit left off, i.e. intermission. In honor of the bifurcated source material, every multiplex should flash its lights as moviegoers enter the auditorium and take their seats. Having ended not just on a cliffhanger but the show’s undisputed musical highlight, which proves that Cynthia Erivo is God when it comes to turning “Defying Gravity” into a genuine megaton anthem, this continuation is now tasked with bringing the second half to the screen.
Maybe “burdened” is a better verb here, given that Wicked‘s peaks come early, and this cinematic sibling is mostly left to tie up loose ends. There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down. Fans will embrace it nonetheless, because of course they will. They’re fans. Those who were only mildly impressed by Wicked will find this less fun than a barrel full of screeching flying monkeys. Overall? You wouldn’t exactly call it Oz-some.
It’s been roughly “12 tides turned” since Elphaba (Erivo) split, though that has not stopped this fugitive from becoming a one-witch animal liberation front and disrupting plans to build a yellow-bricked road. The Wicked Witch of the West is given an icon’s entrance, first as a silhouette in the sky — behold, an avenging angel, perched on broomstick! — and then with the camera swooping in behind her, as she turns to meet us face-on. Credit Chu for knowing how to hit the antihero-worship buttons deftly and early. Meanwhile, back in the Emerald City, an anti-witch fervor is being whipped up by Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, campy). Nothing brings people together more than an enemy, as the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) once said. And few in the greater Oz area are better at stirring up the populace, stoking their fears and angers, mongering their hate on behalf of a tyrant, better than Morrible. You can imagine Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi taking notes.
As for Glinda (Ariana Grande)? She’s good, thanks for asking. The primary witch representing the south just announced her engagement to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), which is quite a surprise to the prospective groom. The administration has gifted her a state-of-the-art bubble transport. Glinda is basking in the pageantry surrounding her, completely high on her own supply of fame. To her credit, Grande tones down the herky-jerky physical comedy that characterized her turn in the first Wicked — never has someone milked so much mileage out of jerking their head backward while stepping forward — and settles into the narcissistic groove that makes Glinda a second-act villain until she glides back to the good side. The performance is still brimming with Big Theater-Kid Energy, however. It’s not until Grande hits that high note at the end of “Thank Goodness/ I Couldn’t Be Happier” that you remember this is a role that’s sung as much as acted, and her pipes make up for a lot here.
Both Grande and Erivo get their moments to musically flex, with the former making the most of “Happier” and the latter sustaining the last note of “No Good Deed” for so long that you could leave for popcorn, extra-buttered, and return before she’s finished. Erivo and Bailey do nicely by their big love song, “As Long as You’re Mine”; two new songs, “The Girl in the Bubble” and “No Place Like Home,” fill in a few narrative gaps yet still feel like the equivalent of B-sides or bonus tracks. Again, with no Act Two aces in the hole like “Popular” or “Defying Gravity,” there’s a bit of a letdown, bangers-wise. The closest we get is the climactic “For Good” duet, which pairs the leads well enough to make you wish it were longer, but not well enough to have you leaving their theater humming it in a state of bliss.
The one Wicked For Good tune that sticks out more than others here might be “Wonderful,” and for reasons that only partially have to do with the watered-down wizardry happening onscreen. It’s now a three-person singalong, and Internet sleuths and Wicked die-hards have duly noted that a pronoun change in the chorus makes the subject’s self-centeredness seem more pronounced. But its lyrics about a grifter taking advantage of people’s gullibility — “Have I lied to them?” asks Goldblum’s wizard. “Only verbally” — and the way that constituents can be perpetually conned because the people don’t want to jettison beliefs once they’ve committed to them (“facts and logic won’t enchoke them”) play a little differently at the moment. This aspect has always been part of the musical, of course. Yet there’s the feeling of being nudged a little more in the ribs with it now. Eventually, the man behind the curtain, the one we’d been told not to pay attention to, is forced to atone for his mass manipulation and leave town in a state of shame. Were such things not consigned to the realm of movie musicals.
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Once Elphaba gifts her sister Nellarose (Marissa Bode), now governor and enabling the federal persecution of animals and Munchkins alike, with a pair of spellcast slippers — yes, they are ruby — the friends of Dorothy, the girl from Kansas, and her little dog, too, are not far behind. A resentful Boq Woodsman (Ethan Slater) will become truly heartless, though it’s worth mentioning that Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have. A straw man is trotted out, as is a leonine coward; why you’d enlist Colman Domingo to voice the resident scaredy cat and barely give him any lines is a question not even the great and powerful you-know-who could answer.
It’s not a spoiler (we hope?) to say that Wicked: For Good concludes the way the play does, with both an act of self-sacrifice and a happily-ever-after coda that rapidly undoes it. Doing anything else would be sacrilege to the faithful, as well as false to the friendship that exists at the center of this Broadway behemoth. Yet the sensation of a work that, in translation from one medium to another, no longer defies gravity but sort of roughly plummets back down to terra firma can’t easily be shaken off. The witches go on to meet their destinies, adding several more backstories to the story of Dorothy and Co. setting off to see the Wizard. So why does this second half just feel off?
From Rolling Stone US
