Wicked, the great show that we no longer expected [critique]

An exhilarating and invigorating adaptation of one of the most famous Broadway musicals, carried by the brilliant duo Ariana Grande/Cynthia Erivo.

What is a Hollywood film? The answer to this question varies depending on the year you ask it. In 2024, we could say that Wicked is the best answer to this question – even if the film was shot in England, in London's Elstree Studios, by an American director born to Chinese parents. We will say that it is not a question of place, but rather of mixture: as the American experience is seen as a great melting pot, the film Wicked himself is the image of this great crucible where everything accumulates on the screen in a big spectacle worth 300 million dollars. A 2003 Broadway musical adapted from a 1995 book (we tell you everything about the background of the film here with its director), filmed twenty years later as if a Harry Potter film were an episode of the Marvel Cinematic Universe… The film, which lasts 2h40 (and it's only Act I) clearly plays this stacking card. We are before the events of The Wizard of Oz, when Elphaba, a young woman with green skin, arrives at a magical university where the teachers are talking animals. She will befriend her antithesis, a young blonde, pink and popular woman, while from the depths of the citadel of Emerald City, a political conspiracy rears its head. And all articulated with the help of crazy songs, long since part of the classic Broadway repertoire – and therefore in the Hollywood melting pot.

Everything you need to know about Wicked and the legacy of The Wizard of Oz

Elphaba's initiation is paralleled with a very dark political drama: the bringing to heel of the talking animals of the world of Oz, victims of a veritable hate campaign, kicked out of the university and guilty of teaching a vision of the world that does not fit with government doxa. Does this remind you of anything? Well yes, it seems that the war culture of Wicked cinema version resonates exactly with our times. But this is not a way of meaning that the Wicked from 2003 (or the 1995 novel) was visionary, but rather that times have changed less than that in twenty years (or thirty).

Anyway, as a good Hollywood film sui generis, Wicked first intends to entertain you in the most innocent and effective way possible: there, nothing to say, the contract is fulfilled and Wicked takes us into a swirling fantasy world that really wants to give you bang for your buck. Thanks to the duo composed by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (who composes her Glinda like a mean girl lap dance dancer, magical cousin of Anora Mikheeva), absolutely impeccable musical alchemy… and with the ultra generous moneyed energy that carries it all, of course.

We may regret that Jeff Goldbum as Magician is really too much of a lazy Jeff Goldblum, floating gait and cliché choppy diction galore, or that those allergic to green and pink backgrounds would do better to refrain from all eye contact; what matters is that Chu succeeded as for In the Heights (his musical precedent adapted by Lin-Manuel Miranda) to make the Broadway experience the definitive synonym for the Hollywood experience. You will rightly tell us that Broadway was founded before Hollywood. Of course, but that's another story that we keep for ourselves. Wicked – Act IIfor November 2025.