Wicked: Study in Good versus Bad

Karren Alenier

Considering our new political reality, the Steiny Road Poet is hanging her shingle as analyst studying good and bad. Steiny's case studies include Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, Atticus Finch, Holden Caulfield, Achilles, Jeanne D'Arc, and Harry Potter just to name a few. Hollywood is providing  Steiny's first characters for study in their part I release of Wicked.

Directed by Jon M. Chu, Wicked is a musical fantasy film, a perfect escape from today's political turmoil. Wait! Steiny takes that back. Written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox with songs by Stephen Schwartz, Wicked (dubbed Wicked Part I in the credits) is a two-hour-forty-minute extravaganza that only tells the first half of the story. The producers expect you to see the rest of it in a second film at the end of 2025. It's like what we are experiencing with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. We saw his Part I performance from 2017 to 2021, and we expect to see his Part II starting January 2025.

Wicked involves two witches vying for the attention of a supreme leader. The producers are banking on audience knowledge of the beloved story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. the  novel published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum on which the well-known 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, is based. This groundbreaking musical drama, where black and white bursts into Technicolor, features captivating songs and a star-studded cast, including the young Judy Garland as Dorothy, the girl from Kansas who was delivered to the fantastic land of Oz by a tornado. 1995 saw the publication of Wicked, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a novel by Gregory Maguire based on Baum's original book. In 2003, Wicked, the musical by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz with book by Winnie Holzman, premiered in San Francisco. The 2024 movie Wicked is a film adaptation of Act I of the musical.

In Part I of Wicked, the film, Dorothy, the main character of the original novel and film is not seen. Instead, the 2024 film opens with a celebration in Oz that the Wicked Witch of the West is
dead. As, the so called good witch Glinda (Ariana Grande) presides over the festivities, someone in the crowd asks her if she, Glinda, was friends with Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo). What follows is one long flashback of the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, starting with their time as roommates at Shiz University.

Because Steiny knows, Dear Reader, you are going to ask, the names of these two witches need clearing up. Novelist Gregory Maguire invented the name Elphaba from L. Frank Baum's initials: LFB. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, was the only witch named in Baum's novel. Baum's other witches were known only from their directional quadrant: North and South were good witches and East and West were bad witches. Maguire in his novel originally called Glinda Galinda, a name the goat professor could not pronounce. Professor Dillamond (Peter Dinklage) called her Glinda. So, in support of Elphaba's outrage that the animal faculty at the school were being silenced and banned from teaching, Galinda magnanimously renames herself Glinda.

The expressive acting and agile singing by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande engaged and pleased Steiny. The scenic color is delightful and restorative. The music and dancing work but are often overshadowed by an overabundance of fast-changing
visuals. Wicked's tunes and choreography don't meet the standards set by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's (MGM) The Wizard of Oz or Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story film productions. What kept Steiny engaged with this overly long film was trying to decide if the Wicked Witch of the West with her green skin was like orange man Donald Trump? After all, does green or orange skin make a character sinister or just different? Is Galinda-Glinda with her acute narcissism on equal footing with our incoming Dear Leader? Or perhaps, the blond hair-tosser Glinda was just one of the Trumpian bimbos? Hmm?

And then there is the Great Oz who is all show and no action, who  wanted Elphaba to do all his dirty work for him. Is the puppet master more evil than the puppet whose strings are pulled? Well, Elphaba with her concern about the mistreatment of animals and her uncontrolled ability to create magic mishaps seems the good soul in this work called Wicked. Steiny isn't ready to make a pronouncement and will keep studying the good versus the bad.