RETURN TO Oz

WITCHES AND WIZARDS AND SEQUELS, OH MY! THE FIRST FILM SHOOK UP THE BOX OFFICE LIKE A CYCLONE — AND WICKED: FOR GOOD AIMS TO GO DEEPER AND DARKER. GET READY TO FLY, MY PRETTIES…

WORDS HELEN O’HARA

Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo);

“Oh. My. God,” Wicked director Jon M. Chu shakes his head. “I have so many pictures of yellow bricks. Different hues. How warm or cool or textured; how the bricks are lined up. Are they staggered? How big are the bricks? Are the bricks indented? What’s the grout? Is the grout yellow? Is it a different yellow? How much dirt can you get on the yellow brick road? If it was a real road, there would be dirt, but you don’t want the yellow brick road to have dirt on it. Does it have an edge? Does it have a curve? We debated every single question for many, many weeks. It was a daunting task.”

Everything about his adaptation of the musical Wicked has been similarly involved. The prequel to The Wizard Of Oz tells the story of its principal witches — Cynthia Erivo’s green-skinned Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s none-more-blonde Glinda — and spans years. Early on, Chu made the decision to split it in two, almost doubling the stage-show’s length. “When it was one movie, we were cutting songs and cutting plot points, and you’re just like, ‘This isn’t Wicked anymore,’” he remembers. “The moment we broke it, we could do the work to make sure that each one had the guts and the meat and the intention to justify it. It was going back to the basics, following the characters and understanding where they shift.”

With two films, they could lavish time on a cast full of triple threats and develop characters who are perhaps underserved on stage. Both films were shot together, but if the first weren’t a hit, they’d have sunk a vast production budget and enormous effort on sets and shooting into a sequel that no-one wanted and that would be, to put it in Ozian terms, hideoteous.

Happily, Wicked Part One was a runaway success late last year, following one of those press tours that not only raises awareness of the film but becomes part of the culture.

Director Jon M. Chu with Ariana Grande and Erivo;

Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) gets horrible;

The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum);

Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey).

Online there was no escaping Wicked, or Erivo and Grande. Their fashion, friendship and high emotion were everywhere; the phrase “holding space” entered the zeitgeist thanks to a question in one interview about the effect of the film’s musical finale, ‘Defying Gravity’, on the queer community. “It felt special to me, and I hoped people would feel the way I feel when they saw it, but I don’t think I could have prepared myself for just how insane it became,” says Erivo, speaking to Empire from her home in London, where a tattoo artist is waiting to add some new ink when we’re done. “It took its own form in the world. It was like being in the middle of a whirlwind.” Or, given the subject matter, perhaps a tornado.

“Very grateful to have been there for that,” beams Grande later. “[The tour] was just such a carbonating experience. There was so much appreciation and love for Wicked, it was keeping us afloat.”

This time, however, the sky-high expectations that met the last film have now been elevated to a whole other dimension. For all the (hard-earned) confidence of its team, can For Good live up to them?