I love the Wicked songs. I sing them to myself often. The original Broadway cast is amazing. I’ve seen clips of the show and the production is very good. And the story, based on the book Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, if taken purely as its own thing, is… alright. You can enjoy the play, for one viewing anyway.
But when the movie version of was announced, I had no interest in seeing it.
For one thing, I can’t stand the two leads. Insanely abrasive personalities aside, neither can sing that well. Ariana Grande sings like the autotuned popstar that she is, and Cynthia Erivo’s voice is in the same vein as Mariah Cary, Demi Levato, Adam Lambert, etc.; big, belting, and awful sounding. I’ll admit Grande does a good job acting (in the clips I’ve seen), but that role has been developed over twenty years by scores of actresses. She is simply stepping into their pink shoes.
As for Erivo, she seems to play Elphaba with the perpetually martyred look of a theater-kid TikTok activist. Listen to her version of “No Good Deed“. She whines and moans and stretches out the notes like it’s a pop song. Now, compare that to the raw anger of Idina Menzel’s original version. There is no comparison.
But even before the film’s cast was announced, I had no desire to see it.
Wicked was the original that started it all for this trope of rehabilitating female villains, and after twenty years of Maleficent, Cruella, and countless others later, it’s just not innovative anymore. It’s fairly puerile and shallow, serious themes intermingled with barbie-humor and mean girl catfights. While the 1995 book it is based on (and with which it shares a title, a few character names, and pretty much nothing else), does create one of the best-written, complex female characters of modern literature in Elphaba Thropp, the Broadway musical reduced her to little more than a hapless victim. And in the hands of these Hollywood weirdos, that aspect was always going to be dialed up to eleven.
Remember this incident?
The themes of Wicked are universal – standing up authoritarianism, tolerance, self-acceptance – but without any strong moral thread to guide them, these indisputable virtues have become little more than catchphrases for Hollywood, face masks they wear to conceal the fact that they are what they claim to fight against. The last thing I want to see is a bunch of spoiled, easily triggered, morons extolling virtues they do and never have possessed, and drawing ridiculous parallels between real world situations that they do not understand in a morally inverted fanfic.
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English (US) · 