Fans wonder: Has Wicked been changed for good? | Arts & Entertainment

When it comes to “Wicked,” I’m not green with envy. (Well, maybe for the green it’s going to bank.)

But I kind of pity those tasked with turning one of the most ferociously loved Broadway musicals in history into one of the most ferociously anticipated films in history.

When it comes to adapting a story that has grossed $6 billion on stages around the world since 2003, the people you have to fear most are not the film critics. It’s the 65 million fans who have very definite opinions about how – or even whether – “Wicked” should be morphed from 3D to IMAX in the first place.

Shorthand: Woe unto the “Wicked” – if you mess this thing up! 

“Wicked,” based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, is the prequel to the “Wizard of Oz” source book and film, going backward in time to imagine how its two iconic witches came to become the universal epitomes of good and evil.

Last week, I asked “Wicked” superfans to tell me their greatest hopes, fears and trepidations for the coming film. I got back plenty of all three.

There’s the impossibly optimistic set who simply cannot wait for the film’s Nov. 22 release. (We’ll call them the “Galindas.”) “Everyone deserves a chance to fly!” Trish Arguelles said, quoting the film’s marketing tagline in a message accented by several cheerful emojis. Then there’s the more practically hopeful, embodied by local actor and theater educator Trina Magness. “The storytelling of ‘Wicked’ brings me joy – and joy is in short supply nowadays,” she said. “I plan on seeing it and loving it.”

But the cheerful are a bit outnumbered by the flying monkeys among us who sense danger – and they are in no short supply of fears and trepidations. Mostly based on the fundamental belief that, no matter how big the screen or how fancy the CGI, no film can replicate the essential connection between a live audience and the live actors who are gathered in the same room and breathing the same air together. They are the ones who only want to see “Wicked” on a stage, where they believe it belongs.

“I’ve seen ‘Wicked’ onstage a dozen times, and I always find it electrifying,” responded Rich Hicks. “I can’t imagine the movie generating the same kind of energy the live performance achieves. With all the hype preceding the movie, I doubt I’ll even see it.”

Fellow fan Alexandra Radcliffe certainly will see the film, but she seems resolved going in: “I am not expecting the movie to be great,” she said.

These “Wicked” fans are wary of all kinds of things: Whether the lead casting of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo will work. Some are apprehensive over the use of AI – in this case, “Artificial Improvement.”

“Dear Lord, let them not be autotuned to the highest heaven,” said Emma Maxfield. “Please. My heart can’t take it.”

Kate McCrimmon saw the original cast of “Wicked” in New York  – we’re talking Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth – and she loved it. And yet, “I’m totally uninterested in seeing the movie,” she said. Why?

“I don’t love when Broadway music is ‘pop-ified,’ and I fear that for this movie,” she said. “The music is so good as it is. It does not need embellishment. But the little I’ve heard tells me that the vocal performers do not feel the same.”

In one regard, “Wicked” fans and foes seem to be in perfect alignment: They’re sick of the relentless marketing. The now ubiquitous first trailer that dropped on Super Bowl Sunday last February was immediately taken in by more than 200 million people around the world – and there have been at least two more “official trailers” since.

“The endless commercialization and marketing of the movie has been exhausting,” said local actor Lauren Bahlman. “Honestly, it bums me out – which is not the attitude I want to have walking into ‘Wicked.’”

The curious thing about that is – ”Wicked” is not a movie that should need a huge marketing push. But if Universal Studios truly believed that ‘Wicked’ would be a surefire hit, they wouldn’t be spending up to $100 million to market it, as has been reported by industry mags. (That’s on top of the $145 million it cost to actually make the film. And for what? Cracked editor Amanda Mannen calls the “Wicked” marketing campaign “an unmitigated disaster,” in part because of its relentless product tie-ins, including “Wicked” luggage, a “Wicked” Lexus mom-mobile, “and they’re selling some gross-sounding ‘Wicked’ drinks,” she said.

(Perhaps what’s fueling this intense push to gin up “Wicked” fervor is the not-so-distant reminder that the 2019 film adaptation of another Broadway behemoth – ”Cats” – lost $20 million. But I’m not too worried for Universal Studios. The analysts at boxofficetheory.com predict “Wicked” will eventually come in at around $365 million in the U.S. alone. And that’s just Part 1.)

But the marketing is incidental to our fixed notions about the movie itself. One thing that’s plain from the trailers is that director Jon M. Chu takes full advantage of all the moviemaking toys that are available to him – as you might think he should. But that’s a double-edged sword for some “Wicked” fans.

“I’ll never forget the impression the stage performance left on me the first time I saw ‘Wicked,’” Bahlman said. “This is a show that embodies the magic of theater, and live effects that can be accomplished largely by practical means. I’m not sure I’m in the mood for all the CGI.”

This is all cumulative angst two decades in the making. Plenty of fans have been clamoring for a “Wicked” film since as far back as 2003. When the film project was finally announced, fans were promised a theatrical release date of ​​Dec. 20, 2019. That, of course, was a pandemic and a director ago (Stephen Daldry of “Billy Elliot.”)

Now, here we are, with a movie – five years later. For the record: Five years is not a delay. It’s a remake of a film that never got made in the first place.

The buzz amped up again when shooting finally began in 2021. (Think about that: It’s been three years since filming started!) Then came word that Chu is splitting the story in half, with Part 2 set to follow in late 2025.

Think of that as the longest intermission in stage history.

“I am so disappointed that it will be in two parts,” said Kim Fanelli, who happens to have been my director at Regis High School back when L. Frank Baum’s book was published in 1900 (or thereabouts). “The first act is clearly the weaker of the two,” she said, “so I am not sure it will sustain (the wait for Part 2).”

The fact that the story has been split into two movies “is a red flag,” Jeremy Osborne agrees. “If anything, they could have cut some to make it fit conventional time standards,” he said. “Instead, I fear, unnecessary things from the book will be added. We don’t need a five-minute sequence of Elphaba’s mother’s affair with the Wizard at the top of the movie.”

Wait. Not adding things from the book? Those are fighting words to yet another subset of “Wicked” fans – those who feel the Broadway musical wasn’t faithful enough to Maguire’s dense, allegorical and unapologetically political source novel. The movie is said to be dipping more deeply into all of that. Bad news for Jeremy, but good news for Amelia Morse, who is hoping the expanded movie “draws more details from the original book that aren’t shared in the stage musical,” she said.

Amanda Sisco hasn’t seen the stage musical, but “I have read the book more times than I’m comfortable admitting,” she said. And she will carry her great affection for that book with her into the cinema.

“I grew up loving Gregory Maguire because he made a weird kid like me feel like I fit in,” she said. “I’m just hoping this film stays true to the spirit of the book and the magical world Mr. Maguire built for us all.”

One often overlooked community that is keeping a close eye on this movie are the disability-affirmative. Simply put, they feel the musical got it all wrong with Elphaba’s wheelchair-using sister, Nessarose. While Elphaba ultimately comes to embrace the thing that makes her different – her green skin – Nessa uses magic to “cure” herself of her disability. Or, in the words of author Kevin Schaefer, who has a neuromuscular disorder: “Nessarose chooses to erase her abnormality.” Beth Newsom, a once avid runner who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 20, asks: “Can the movie do better than that? I hope so.” 

Another thing that troubles Newsom is the stage version’s use of magical slippers that enable walking to just happen. “I’ve learned to walk over 12 years, going from wheelchair to walker to walking sticks to no assistance, due to miracle medicine and never-ending work,” she said. “There is so much involved with learning to walk that the simplification of it in the story makes me roll my eyes while everyone else is cheering that moment when, ‘Poof! She can walk.’ I am hopeful that the movie does something different.”

It should be noted that the film has the potential to be seen by millions who have never seen “Wicked” live, and will be experiencing the story for the first time. People like award-winning local actor Anne Oberbroeckling, who is open for anything. “I have never seen the play, so I look forward to it,” she said.

Me? As an uncle who has taken two generations of young women in my family to see “Wicked” every time it visits the Denver Center, I’m less concerned with how the movie got made than I am for whether it continues to convey its central humanist and political messages.

That it shows how hard it is to be a teenage girl and to have to choose between the right thing and the popular thing. That it shows the larger consequences when the world decides to call one side good and the other side wicked. That it shows how two rival women can go through so much conflict and yet manage to come out of it as friends to the end.

And, yes, that the makers aren’t scared off from showing how a brilliant, rebellious Goat Professor who speaks out against the Wiz is punished by being slowly transformed into a braying, nonverbal animal – the ultimate symbol of a silenced voice of dissent.

“The Wizard of Oz” is an unsettling story in any format – book, stage or film. It starts with a tornado that’s capable of uprooting a family’s entire house – any kid’s foundation. It takes us to a land overshadowed by a wicked witch who wasn’t born evil – nasty people made her that way. A land where Main Street is a yellow-brick road that promises hope but leads nowhere but to the realization that no one is in charge.

Talk about a scary place. Can you even imagine?