After an unfathomable amount of vocal warm-ups, eight-year-old me was ready to officially start my voice lesson. I was waiting for what felt like an eternity when my teacher finally brought out my song, Popular from Wicked. I had heard the song a few times so I was excited to learn it. Through the weeks I started to become more obsessed with this song and this show.
Thus my Wicked addiction began.
Unless you have been living under a rock you know about the movie Wicked starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. This story is based on the book which was adapted into a stage play and now is a movie. Wicked tells the story of Glinda and Elphaba before they became Glinda the Good Witch and The Wicked Witch of The West.
I am obsessed with this story.
To give a brief overview, Glinda and Elphaba are both students at Shiz University and they end up being roommates. At first, they despised each other, but through their time at Shiz they began to grow an incredibly strong friendship, there is a lot more but this is a movie review not a movie summary.
When I heard they announced a movie and more importantly when I heard miss whistle notes Ariana Grande was playing Glinda I was a little concerned. After the peculiar music changes (which sounded bad) in the Mean Girls The Musical movie I was scared that the beautiful music of this show would be turned into more modern/pop music. Thankfully they kept the score the same.
This iconic score was done justice due to this movie being cast so phenomenally. And although I had my doubts about Grande, she was phenomenal. I knew she got her start in musical theater in 13 The Musical on Broadway but I didn’t realize that her musical theater training had held up so well. I also didn’t realize how funny she is! Grande had amazing comedic timing and brought such a light to the character.
Her co-star Cynthia Erivo was even more of a show-stopper for me. Every time she sang my mouth was gaped open in shock. She sang one of the hardest songs in musical theater as if it were nothing.
The rest of the casting was also done well, Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero was so charming and was so easy to fall in love with. SpongeBob, oops I meant Ethan Slater and Marissa Bode were great as Boq and Nessarose. I found both of their characters INSUFFERABLE, which shows how strong actors they are.
I only have one complaint, and it’s not that Ariana Grande sings too high – a girl actually said this in my class and I can see where she is coming from but also huh? – It’s that I HATE HATE HATE people who go into the theater and leave because they didn’t realize it is a musical. I am not mad they don’t like musicals, I just don’t like how stupid they are. If they watched one trailer they would realize it’s a musical, they didn’t try to hide it. But that’s a topic for another day!
Anyway, my only complaint is the lighting. Someone brought up how the lighting was so blah and I couldn’t agree more. In the musical, it looks like a rainbow threw up on the set but a lot of the sets in the movie were very beige. Wicked is such a spectacle of a musical due to the technological aspects, so I wish that we could have seen that in the film.
I have seen so many non musical theater fans love this movie which makes me so happy. For whatever reason musical theater gets so much hate and I understand that theater kids can be annoying –as a theater kid I am proud to say that I am extremely annoying– but I find the craft so beautiful and I am so happy more people are realizing that!
Overall I loved this movie and I would love to go see it multiple more times. When part two comes out you know I will be in that theater opening night.
