Amph There's no place like it: All things Oz (TWOZ, Wicked, Oz the Great and Powerful, etc.)

Here’s my Wicked movie review from the other thread (thanks, @Ahsoka's Tano ).

The musical has a special place in my heart, since my late godmother got me to listen to the soundtrack, got my family to go actually catch it on tour, and then my musical teacher used For Good as the graduation theme for the seniors one year ahead of me in high school... so I am biased, okay?

Having admitted that, I’ll move on to what I think they did that was smart for adapting a colorful stage musical with well-known iconography to screen:

- Keeping the muscial’s bombast, but knowing when quieter, restrained subtlety is needed for cinema screens as well.
- Using creative set design, special effects, choreography and camera movement to get the level of spectacle for dance and song numbers that only movies can really do.
- Nailing pretty much all the casting, even for supporting characters, to maximize impact in a musical that is, admittedly, more like a collection of bangers with competent dialogue scenes connecting them; Peter Dinklage in particular nails his voice over role in a way that feels very natural for an inherently fantastical role, and Bowen Yang is clearly having the time of his life with a largely background role.

But the real treat is how well Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande rock their roles as Elphaba and Glinda - perfectly managing to make a unique cinematic chemistry that feels like an equal to Chenoweth and Mendzel’s chemistry.

Now, for some more detailed stuff...

...One of the best moments, both for the movie in general and for showing where a musical on film can better do things a stage production might struggle with was the dance party scene, and especially Elphaba’s heartbreaking defiant and lonely dance and Glinda’s need to help her, forming their friendship.

In the stage show, the scene is competent, but due to the need to act thing sort for audience members hundreds of feet away, it sort of has to be a bit broad.

In the movie, they can use closeups to allow the actors to “pull a Denzel” and ramp up quiet intensity to a different level, *and* can narrow the audience’s focus with camera angles... which means that you get a more-than-front row seat to Erivo and Grande expertly executing a heartbreaking scene that will make you wonder “Who’s slicing onions underneath my face?” and “Can my heart take any more of this?”

 

What Is This Feeling? (Which I believe has the scene being referred to) was actually released onto YouTube as a marketing feature.

Caught Wicked again this weekend - the speakers in my first viewing weren’t great, and again, I love this thing - and the main thing that struck me as different from the musical this time was how much the extra time they have gets used to flesh out Fiyero and emphasize that his “shallow himbo” persona is an act and probably a coping mechanism.

Jonathan Bailey is still an absolute master at hitting the shallow himbo part dead on, don’t get me wrong… but you notice the significant increase in snarky one liners and non-himbo asides he has on a rewatch, and Bailey also enjoys how the greater subtlety of cinema allows him to twitch his face into showings of cynical exasperation, give knowing looks, and have a more subdued and sincere reaction of shock and discomfort to Elphaba calling him out on it.

…But also, I’m just gleefully looking forward to my favorite song from the musical - Act II’s No Good Deed - getting adapted in the sequel, in that awesome-as-hell castle you see in the opening with the creepy-as-hell flying monkeys circling around her.

 

I’ll go into spoilers, because I *am* that guy, but behind spoiler tags, because I’m not *that* guy :

Spoiler

Back even before they announced they were splitting this musical up, I had been thinking that the time between “No Good Deed” and “The March of the Witch Hunters” could use expansion to embrace some cathartic/terrifying “You want the Wicked Witch of the West? You get the Wicked Witch of the West!” type of stuff for a movie… especially if you could abuse the rights to The Wizard of Oz Soundtrack and unleash “The March of the Winkies” over a montage of Elphaba getting their loyalty in memory of Fiyero and, say, destroying something valuable to the Wizard without directly showing casualties - which, given the movie’s expansion, could be something like the railroad or the other parts of the Yellow Brick Road.

The hard part would be how the timeline of the musical has Elphaba’s “angry moment” exist strictly within the confines of TWOO’s timeline, with Nessa being killed *before* No Good Deed… but could they maybe reorganize the timeline a little bit, and have Glinda and Elphaba’s cat fight be instigated by them both trying to deal with Nessa becoming a Wicked Witch of the East first, then having it out over Fiyero? Then have Nessa’s death afterwards?

 

It’s not even my favorite song - again, mine’s the angry solo from the alto - but it is legendary regardless of how romantic or platonic it is… and arguably should be held up as an example of how rare believable emotional intimacy (the type that made Aristotle say “A Friend is a single soul in two bodies”) is even in fiction.

Whether it’s your significant other or your do-or-die bestie, the type of emotional openness that Glinda and Elphaba has is exceedingly rare.

Hell, the existence of that type of closeness has *always* led to debates about the nature of the relationship outside of the emotional intimacy - and even in cultures with wildly different attitudes towards the romantic spectrum, since the Ancient Greeks were just as likely to dispute whether Achilles and Patroclus were together that way as Judie-Christians were to argue over David and Jonathan.