Wicked review: a stunning film adaptation that avoids all the usual pitfalls of moving musicals from the stage to the screen

Universal Pictures by Julian Woolford, University of Surrey The journey from successful stage musical to big-screen adaptation is rarely truly successful. From director Joshua Logan’s use of colored filters in the 1950s adaptation of South Pacific (which looks as if something is wrong) to Tom Hooper’s recent mega-mess movie of Cats, there are so many pitfalls to avoid. The suspension of disbelief we willingly embrace in live performance is disrupted by the naturalism of cinema so that the aggressive ballet of the West Side Story gangs looks prissy and tame when filmed on the realistically gritty streets of New York. Similarly, Nathan Lane’s Max Bailystock was hilarious onstage in The Producers, but translates to the film as monstrous over-acting. Like these musicals, Wicked has proven a remarkable success onstage and is the second highest-grossing musical in the history of New York’s Broadway (after The Lion King). Now it arrives on-screen in two parts; the first released this year and the second in 2025. Eyebrows have been raised at the 2 hour 40 minute running time for a movie that covers act one of the musical, which is 90 minutes onstage. Inspired by figures like Saddam Hussein, Wicked began life in...