By Alex Kawaguchi
I am the prime demographic for a Wicked movie adaptation. I watched it for the first time when I was 9 and kept a piece of confetti from that show in my keepsakes for over 10 years, and I could argue it was the beginning of my love for musical theater. However, when the new movie was announced, the first thing I felt was a queasy twist in my stomach.
Any musical theater fan will tell you that our movie adaptations have historical precedent for being anywhere from disappointing to absolutely horrific (Cats 2019, Les Misérables 2012, Into The Woods 2014, just to name a few). Aside from that, a star-studded cast for a musical movie will never get me excited, especially when one of the leads is Ariana Grande, whose regular roulette wheel of cultural appropriation has always rubbed me wrong. My fears only got worse when I started hearing some of the music, especially Popular, which was impossible to escape on social media for a while. Everyone on the internet seemed insistent that it was better in the film, so I withheld my judgement until I got a chance to sit down and see it. Honestly, I found much of the film pleasantly surprising- from costumes to set to cameos, it was clear that much of the crew was comprised of talented craftspeople and big fans of the original show. Unfortunately, it was still a deeply flawed portrayal of my childhood favorite, mainly because of the music, and I’m going to dig into some of the big songs to explain what I liked, and what hurt me to my core.
No One Mourns the Wicked- this song is the opening of the film, and it was also the end of my hope that the music would be at all comprehensible without captions. Not to rag on Ariana, who isn’t trained in theatrical singing, but the big reason theatrical singing is Like That is to make the lyrics intelligible to a huge theater full of people so they can follow the plot. I have seen a lot of stuff about how hard Ariana worked to transform her voice for this role, how it was her dream, and while I totally appreciate that, and the work she did is noticeable and really does expand her range in cool ways, there are so many people who have specifically trained their voices for decades for these kinds of roles. I find it hard to believe that there was not someone better poised for this role than her, someone who also dreamed of being Glinda from a young age, but didn’t happen to be a pop star (can you tell I don’t like celebrity castings?). But it also wasn’t just her, the mix itself was muddy, and it makes me think they must have run out of time or budget to get it done right, because it seems like they put a lot of effort into recording it just for the final recording to turn out so flat.
Dancing Through Life- is it weird that this has always been my favorite song from this musical? Maybe. But even weirder is the fact that they managed to make an already quite queer musical even gayer. I never even considered bisexual Fiyero, and yet now it feels automatic and natural (thank you for your service, Jonathan Bailey). I know this is an album review, but sidetrack for the movie aspects here. I have watched every video interview with the choreographer, Christopher Scott, and almost all of them were on this song, because the whimsical set combined with the fluid choreo make this section of the movie criminally fun. This song contains rare moments where I feel like it is possibly even better than the original show because they utilize filmic elements impossible on stage with the set and camera work. Kudos to everyone who worked on it. The music itself is… fine? Nothing to write home about (sorry, Jonathan Bailey).
Popular- oh god, where to start. Ariana, girl, you make some fun acting choices here, but what on Earth happened in the editing studio? I believe you can make these notes without assistance, and even if you couldn’t, you were already training your voice, and even if that couldn’t work, were they out of money by the time they got to final edits and just went with unabashed autotune chops? It doesn’t feel super “authentic” and “live” with the clumsy way they manipulated your voice in post. Oh- it is worth noting here that Wicked did something rare in the movie musical world. Most will pre-record songs in a studio months ahead of filming on set, and then lip sync to those tracks when they film the scenes for camera. Instead, Wicked chose to do live singing, where actors sing music as they film the scenes, which many people applaud as being more organic, and, they argue, doing so blends speaking and singing sections better. Most people know this technique primarily because of Les Mis, which is generally hated on for how awful the actors sound in it, and how weird the pacing was because the actors were focusing on character choices rather than keeping in time with music, and the orchestra was left to keep up. All that to say, it is not a universally better method, and though it works at moments in this film, there are a far greater number where it seems to fail them.
Defying Gravity- this song has great vocals! Unfortunately, it is also a compilation of all of the different problems throughout the movie back-to-back. They just keep pausing the damn thing, and though the original song is almost 6 minutes, the movie version is nearly 8, and that isn’t including the years-long pauses for cape-gifting and hero posing and falling with childhood flashbacks and flying and being chased by monkeys and Michelle Yeoh voice overs. The whole song with all the breaks must be at least 15 minutes if not longer, which is just too long to hold any song, let alone the promise of the premise song that everyone loves. A love letter to a show I can understand, but you can get in your own way when you add every bell and whistle possible. And the speaking to singing transitions… I dare anyone to say that the “it’s me” section was made smoother by doing it live.
Again, these are just my thoughts relistening to the album, and I really did enjoy the movie as a whole, and will almost certainly be watching it again. It is a love letter to the show, with amazing details that can only be achieved with blockbuster money, and I think it is significantly closer to what I want as a fan than almost any other movie translation I have seen yet. But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep improving, and I believe we will. Our future is unlimited.
Any albums you want to spotlight? Email cooperpointjournal@gmail.com to make me listen to albums you love.
