Wicked: Part One

Becky O’Brien’s review on Cinelix gave high praise for the film version: “Having seen the film, I can’t imagine any of the songs not being there, everything feels integral to the story, and that can be attributed to the film’s phenomenal cast. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in particular knocked it out of the park as Elphaba and Glinda respectively.”

Yesterday (November 27) John and I joined all of our “grand” daughters (Courtney, Christina and Rachel) to see the film before Stacey and Doug and Jackson and Brad and Adam joined us for dinner out celebrating John’s 76th birthday. At the movies we ate our weight in popcorn sitting back in theater seats that reclined, still leaving sufficient room for someone to walk by. It was amazing….

Rachel sent a text mid-morning:

Happy wicked day! And Gampie’s bday!!!

A few fun facts from your fellow Ozain before the show.

Wicked is originally a novel published in 1995, followed by the Broadway adaptation debuted in 2004. Two decades later we have a film adaptation.

The Broadway play has two acts and this movie is act one. Intermission is one year long.

The movie set was built in the UK with minimal CGI. Almost everything you see on screen is real. They planted over 9 million tulips for munchkin land and built a 16 ton train for the emerald city and all the rest of the set is physical!! So cool!!

Elphba and Glinda do all of their own stunts and sing live for EVERY musical number. Talent!!!


It took makeup 4-6 hours to paint Cynthia green everyday on set.

MGM still owns the rights to the ruby red slippers, which is why we will see nessa rose with silver slippers. (Just like the book.)

The last musical number defying gravity is arguably one of the hardest songs to sing in the theater. And Cynthia kills it while physically being suspended 40 ft in the air.

Stephan Schwartz is the composer and lyricist of Wicked. He read the book and 4 years later he had the whole musical scored and composed and all the lyrics written. Holy cow!!!

Although Dorothy is not relevant in act one, we do meet the scarecrow, the tin man and the lion in their original form. There are Easter eggs throughout the film to point you in the right direction to identify them.

I have 100 more. But I will bore you later. So excited today!!!!

I am already looking forward to part 2.

As it turned out, Stacey (who had not really wanted to go) would not have been able to join us because she watched Jackson so Courtney could go. It was pretty unanimous we thought Stacey would not have been wild about it. This morning Stacey asked me why I thought she would not have liked it.

That opened up a conversation about the power of myth, handed down from generation to generation via oral traditions and rituals. Myths were the way humans taught universal and eternal truths about life before the invention of writing. While themes reappear time and again in different culture, it is important to realize a myth is bound to the society and time in which it occurs. Thus, the details of a specific myth cannot be divorced from this culture and environment. (For example, a dying-and-rising god as first proposed in comparative mythology by James Frazer’s seminal The Golden Bough (1890). Frazer associated the motif with fertility rites surrounding the yearly cycle of vegetation and cited the examples of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Zagreus, Dionysus, and Jesus.)

Seeing Wicked: Part One was soothing to my soul.

Myth speaks so much more clearly when not shrunk into a literal view.

As we were leaving the theater, I said to Rachel, “You may not know that my blog is titled Yellow Brick Road. I named it that because I saw in the Wizard of Oz the metaphor of the colors of the chakras: ruby red slippers (root chakra); yellow brick road (solar plexus); Emerald City (heart chakra).”

This is a myth I relate to.

I love that it is not set in any actual time or in any actual location.

Fortunately, you do not have to believe it is real to understand the power of friendship as it actually transforms the way our birth and upbringing and culture informs both our pain and power.

Just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, it is true that we are not in Kansas any more. We are in a world where it is possible (and perhaps vital) for us to imagine a world without wars fueled by opinion.

O’Brien writes, “In conclusion, I thought it was really smart of the filmmakers to end the film right at the end of Act One of the musical, with plenty of hooks left dangling for what’s to come in the second half of the story. As big as Wicked: Part One is turning out to be, I confidently predict that Wicked: Part Two will be that much bigger. We only have to wait a year to find out!”