"I can't believe Jeff Goldblum isn't gay"
And other WICKED moments.
I’ve seen Jon M. Chu’s first installment of Wicked twice. I hope to refresh before the second installment drops this Christmas. It’s both an unmistakably 2024-5 experience and intangibly gratifying to the heart of the twelve-year-old who fell in love with Stephen Schwartz’s stage musical.
That twelve-year-old has found it strange indeed to witness the online discourse around the musical and the movie and the oeuvre that has imprinted on two decades of culture in a way Broadway rarely does anymore. The last time the show loomed so large in my life that I was talking about it, forging connections with it, the social networks that have since gained ascendency weren’t sophisticated enough to accommodate masses of people obsessing over it. Except maybe fanfiction.net. Or, at the very least, I wasn’t part of those networks. Except maybe fanfiction.net (which, even then, I didn’t join until age fourteen).
In fact, I first became aware of Wicked as something everyone else was talking about. Or, rather, singing about, in person, in front of my face. As a nine-year-old at summer theatre camp for the first time, during an unscheduled spell one morning, I witnessed some kids—mostly older, a couple my age—perform what looked to me like a fully choreographed sing-along of the number I later learned was called “What is This Feeling?” I knew of the show, but nothing concrete, and yet I inferred that this was part of it. I know I inferred because I would never have asked and betrayed my ignorance.
Despite my growing up on Golden Age Hollywood, ours was not a Wizard of Oz household, because ours was a non-flying-monkey household. I’m lucky I saw it old enough to escape the formative trauma others suffered (the idea of a film called Monsters, Inc. didn’t sit well with me for some time, so I knew my limits). This simply to say I don’t recall much of the development that led from that moment at camp to my mother and I seeing the national touring production three years later, but we both fell in love with it that afternoon. What could have promised at the outset to be another bombastic, overblown turn-of-the-millennium musical (of which we’ve had plenty more since) soon proved to truly be something different. The Broadway cast soundtrack became a fixture in the car, “Popular” a go-to number for any given performance. I sang it at a middle-school talent show, and my best friend at the time painted herself green to be my Elphaba. I will always love her for that.
Though I sang “I’m Not That Girl” a fair amount too, most memorably at an outdoor gig where our accompanist played it a whole step lower than rehearsed and I got creative with an octave adjustment that remains one of my proudest improvisations. I was one-half of two different stagings of “One Short Day,” the number that introduces the Emerald City as the third character (like New York is the fifth character? get it?). “For Good” (if you don’t know it, you will by the time this year is out) has been present when I’ve needed it most. And—back to age twelve—an impromptu go at “Defying Gravity” after a rehearsal one afternoon turned a key in me, tapped a well of power and passion that let me know I could really do something by following my voice.
These things must sound cliché. They were real and true. Knowing that today’s kids know Idina Menzel as Elsa from Frozen is as strange as, well, the Rent-era folks must think it is to know her as Elphaba. John Travolta did us a favor by ensuring that we all know her as Adele Dazeem.
Not to say I understood any of what was really going on in this piece of media. My love of “Popular” was based on a fundamental misread. I took it as irony. Of course it’s about aptitude, I thought, the way you’re viewed is secondary, if it matters at all. Only after having performed it several times did it occur to me that perhaps Galinda meant what she said, and that she had a point. She was taking a girl with book smarts and helping her—albeit unsolicited—with soft skills. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the former, but the latter, I’ve discovered, can take you at least as far. In embodying the subject of the song, I ultimately became sensible of my status as the object. I was transformed in real time. I have been changed.
***
Never in my relationship to the above did I imagine Jeff Goldblum would figure in it in any way, shape, or form. But here we are.
Some prospective viewers were daunted by the film’s run time; after all, this was only Act I. I was not, especially once I’d ascertained that it incorporated some of the backstory Gregory Maguire chronicles in his 1995 novel. The same friend who’d painted herself green had bought me a copy of the novel for my birthday way back when, a far too early birthday, in retrospect, for the material. Otherwise I steered clear of TikTok and any other potential sources of behind-the-scenes this and Easter-egg that. Everything I did hear later, secondhand, gleaned from those sources, let me know I’d been right to wait. Theatre-kid TikTok is terrifying.
I confess I was unprepared for what an emotional viewing it would be. With the first chords of the overture, I physically felt my heart swell. I welled up at multiple musical inflection points throughout, just from the nostalgia of hearing that score in a big-screen treatment. The arrangements—generally strong, with a few mixes that hit my ear weird—reminded me how strong the soundtrack is, song for song. Act I stands out in the canon for how many numbers have since passed into legend. “What is This Feeling?”, in the final analysis, may be one of the great numbers of the 21st century.
Which brings me promptly to the point that the cast was more than up to the task of delivering them. Finally hearing from Cynthia Erivo, whom I’d heard about for years, was all I’d dreamed it would be. Ariana gave me new reasons to love her, the personality she brought to “Popular” being but one. The only thing I liked more than each of them separately was the two of them together: I’m deeply invested in what I predict will be a new level of chemistry in the second (spoiler: darker) act. They’ve already gone above and beyond to bring Maguire’s teasing hints to fruition:
That the queerness underpinning G(a)linda and Elphaba’s friendship sailed over my head back in the early days may not come as a surprise, and not because I was short for my age. If the being-liked-is-a-form-of-currency message wasn’t computing, well, the expectations musn’t be too high. Suffice it to say I’m now in a position to appreciate it, and in any case it feels glaringly obvious given Cynthia and Ariana’s choices onscreen and off.
I applauded Jonathan Bailey’s performance even before learning he had performed all his own stunts. And if the cameos meant to serve as the cherry on top, then the cherry was as big as the cake. How soon I forgot that my last encounter with Jeff Goldblum was as the little alien guy in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. He’s no Joel Grey, but he can carry a tune! And his obvious enthusiasm is half the battle by itself. (Incidentally, ours was also not a Jurassic Park household, in spite of being very much a dinosaur household.)
On a separate note, that shambling enthusiasm isn’t actually an indicator of sexuality. Who knew? Not some of my family.
To be sure, the film has its flaws, flaws which my judgment may indeed have been clouded enough to stop me seeing at first. The Grande-ified Glinda—the shortened name she adopts by the time the Emerald City is involved—lacks the transferable charisma she exudes in the stage show: her social capital appears to end at Shiz. She shows no promise of usefulness to the Wizard, and, even more oddly, everyone present in those scenes is conscious of it. This component of her character will become increasingly important in Act II, so I’m intrigued to see how it’s handled. And there were line alterations that I wasn’t a fan of: Glinda’s straightforward “yes” in response to being asked if she had been Elphaba’s friend isn’t half as telling as the original “well, it depends on what you mean by ‘friend.’”
But what else can I say? It occurs to me I’ve spent much of my life watching people enchant broomsticks. Some shapes never let us go.
***
A couple of days after our family outing, The Wizard of Oz played on TCM. The production holds up after 85 years; it’s an extremely technically sophisticated film for its time, and it still looks beautiful (its successor took notes). I won’t credit TCM beyond that, as I hold a personal grudge against Ted Turner. He never knew my name, but I did know him. That is, our paths did cross. At school…
I can't believe Jeff Goldblum doesn't come to my house for dinner and to shoot the shit. Life is unfair.