I realized between visiting family for the holidays I haven’t been active on this blog much. So I thought I’d share my thoughts on the movie Wicked my wife and I saw on a date night yesterday.

To be frank, I walked into the theater ready to hate the movie. This is largely because of two reasons:

First, the play came out while I was in high school and while I was in show choir (yes, I was in show choir). Despite never having seen the play or listened to the music I could recite all the lyrics from memory due to the sheer number of girls wandering the halls singing the songs. Popular, Loathing, and Defying Gravity were seared into my brain for months. I vowed then and there to never watch the play and I never have.

Two, what I knew about the story retroactively twisted the Wizard of Oz (original movie) in strange ways. In the movie, Dorothy is knocked unconscious during the twister and in her delirious state finds herself in the magical kingdom of Oz. The characters there, like the Wicked Witch, Cowardly Lion, etc. are manifestations of how she perceives real-life individuals in her life. The Witch is her grouchy neighbor who hates her dog, the Cowardly Lion is one of the farmhands that saves her from the hogs, and so on. Wicked takes the concept and flips it on its head saying these characters have always existed and are not in fact manifestations of her mind which twists the lessons and implications of that movie.

I can say that while the movie isn’t my cup of tea, I did enjoy it.

The casting was well done, particularly Ariana Grande as Galinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (Wicked Witch). There were good jokes and I enjoyed listening to my wife giggle over the glasses scene prior to the Popular song. The set pieces were put together well, the music was grand, and I’ll admit Defying Gravity is a good song with a really interesting message.

Here are my mixed feelings about it:

The Wizard has been twisted into something more evil and vile in this story. Originally my view of this character was a man who was transported to a magical world realizes he can use his knowledge and trickery to get what he wants only to find himself taking on more than he can handle. How do you contend with beings who possess actual magical power when all you have is sleight of hand and deceit? To be clear, this original depiction is still scummy as he’s hoodwinking the populace, but he’s doing so out of self-preservation.

This movie tweaks that to show him actively suppressing and dehumanizing the animal population to obtain power and create unification among the people. Instead of a snake oil salesman trying to survive and obtain a life of luxury, he’s now a megalomaniac intent on consolidating power and creating a grand utopia. To further his goals and retain his power he needed to throw Elphaba under the bus and turn her into the villain everyone could rally against.

It seems like there is an extraordinary effort to make the Witch the good person all along and literally every other citizen of Oz the villain. It’s a neat premise in theory but requires a gargantuan number of changes and severe retconning to make it happen. It also leaves some very large questions up in the air.

What happens post Wicked now that everyone knows the Wizard was evil and the Witch was good? What happened for the Witch to become genuinely evil in The Wizard of Oz? Do the Wizard and other characters change their ways and experience some form of redemptive story arc before The Wizard of Oz?

Granted there are some gaps to my knowledge and my prior understanding of this story:

• I have not seen Wicked Part 2 yet which will likely answer a lot of this.
• The Wizard of Oz movie is an adaptation or interpretation of a book series, so it likely changed quite a few things from the source material.
• Wicked may be more in line with the original book series than the Wizard Of Oz movie was.

If I turn off my writer brain I enjoyed the movie and look forward to seeing part 2. With my writer brain active I have a lot of questions and am curious to see how they bridge the gap in part 2.

In general, I’m a fan of villains just being villains. To me the original Wicked Witch didn’t need any justifications for the way she was. I like the idea that sometimes people are just bad and there wasn’t anything that caused it or could change it. Let me put it this way. There are people who are good people in spite of what the world has thrown at them. They had bad parents, terrible childhoods, or horrible life experiences that could have made them turn bad and they chose to be good people. Why can’t it be the other way? Why can’t someone have great parents, a terrific childhood, and many positive life experiences but choose to be bad?

Sometimes a villain can just be a villain and there’s no rhyme or reason behind it.

I enjoyed the movie, but to me Elphaba, The Wizard, and Glinda are entirely different characters from those in the original Wizard of Oz. A what-if version of the characters that exist in another universe.

We’ll see if Part 2 changes that for me.

Let me know what you thought of the movie or the play and if I’m just completely off my rocker with this take on it.