‘Wicked: For Good’ Review: A Stretched-Out Second Act

Glinda (Ariana Grande) could also be Oz’s Good Witch, however she harbors a secret from her adoring residents: She will be able to’t do magic. Not less than the conniving Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) has custom-designed a “Vehicular Spherical Globule”—a bubble—that can make Glinda seem like she’s producing her personal magical flight, very similar to her estranged bestie Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the Depraved Witch of the West, who defies gravity on her broomstick. “This invention will disguise your deficiency,” Madame Morrible tells Glinda.

And far the identical might be mentioned of the myriad innovations—visible, musical, dramaturgical—that function extra time to disguise the central deficiency of John M. Chu’s Depraved: For Good, an almost two-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the musical Depraved’s 60-minute second act. On stage, the second act hurtles alongside, the present’s tone sharply darkening and the plot spiraling by too rapidly for audiences to pay attention to its holes. However like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the ocean, that momentum can’t probably be sustained when the story’s crusing off on detours that delay the motion with out basically reimagining it.

Early on, the screenplay—by Dana Fox and the present’s bookwriter Winnie Holzman—neatly provides definition to the political forces at play after Elphaba first flies. Having uncovered a scheme by the fraudulent Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) to scapegoat and silence Oz’s speaking animals, Elphaba now zips by way of the skies, spreading the phrase concerning the conspiracy and ambushing building of the Yellow Brick Street, which is powered by animal labor.

Simply as attention-getting is Madame Morrible’s anti-green-girl propaganda marketing campaign. When Elphaba interrupts Glinda’s public engagement to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) to sky-write “Your Wizard Lies,” Morrible primarily casts a deepfake spell, remodeling the phrases to learn the threatening “Oz Dies” as an alternative. It’s mighty arduous to parse what’s true anymore in Munchkinland, however this a lot is obvious: the heightened modern allegory of that second is shrewdly refined.

However as soon as that exposition is squared away, what to do at some stage in the movie? Although he amusingly interpolates some transient reprises of the primary movie’s hits with new verses in an expanded opening medley, composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz additionally tosses in some pointless new songs. One is a consciousness-raising anthem, with uplifting harmonies paying homage to songs from his musical Pippin, provided by Elphaba to the fleeing animals. One other is a ballad wherein Glinda ponders with typical Schwartzian idiomatic wordplay, “For the favored lady excessive within the bubble, isn’t it excessive time for the bubble to pop?” (Schwartz additionally over-tinkers present materials: Depraved stans could search justice for the dismantled verse of the Wizard’s “Great” and the once-gripping transition from “I’m Not That Woman: Reprise” into “As Lengthy As You’re Mine.”)

However there’s blame to share right here. Because the grimness of the present’s second act can’t maintain its personal towards the wants of a PG-rated vacation launch, Fox and Holzman shoehorn a whole lot of kid-friendly comedy into the script that comes on the expense of what needs to be high-stakes momentum. Yeoh, by no means convincingly sinister, faceplants into a marriage cake throughout an animal stampede, a la Glenn Shut in 101 Dalmations, too forcefully foolish to be camp. Goldblum, goofily asserting the Wizard’s supposed magic powers, looks like he stepped out of an Austin Powers movie. And For Good doesn’t appear to know what to do with the newly expanded roles for Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James as Glinda’s hangers-on, given how rapidly they disappear from the story.

And simply to clear the air, Erivo and Grande’s excessive factors stay robust, and “No Good Deed,” Elphaba’s epic 11-o’-clock crashout is a cinematic sensation. As Elphaba casts a spell to avoid wasting Fiyero, For Good pays homage to the colour schemes of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, intercutting black-and-white pictures of Fiyero’s torture in a cornfield. Reflecting on how issues have gone so dangerous, Elphaba wanders into the scene of her arrival at Shiz College, the characters frozen in place the place they stood within the first movie as she ruefully reconsiders them. Simply as she did together with her solos in that movie, Erivo triumphantly reimagines the riffs right here, the melted butter of her voice solidifying into icy metal as Elphaba offers up on doing good.

Grande will get to unleash slightly extra pop belt for Glinda, suggesting a lady rising up and discovering her actual voice. She and Erivo each lean efficiently into the political implications of their friendship: It’s clear right here, in a manner that it’s not on stage, that Elphaba, having failed to achieve traction as a rabble-rousing radical, intentionally sacrifices herself with the intention to empower Glinda to make change from throughout the system. When the finale returns to the primary movie’s shot of Glinda burning a Depraved Witch statue in effigy, Elphaba’s story has now shifted to that of a would-be hero recognizing that she must assume the function of the villain with the intention to save the day.

Intellectually, that’s a formidable screenwriting feat. However for as sharp as it might generally be, For Good is stretched out, breathless, and by no means actually emotionally affecting, even on the extent of nostalgia. (Nevertheless bloated, the primary movie, to cite one in all Glinda’s malapropisms, is thrillifying.) It could transport audiences, particularly youthful ones, to the colourful Oz for the majority of a day, however it additionally serves as a reminder that solely in its tauter, wrenching stage type can Depraved, like a handprint in your coronary heart, actually go away you modified for good.