Since before the moment the technicolored “The Wizard Of Oz” showed on the big screen in 1939, Hollywood has loved movie musicals. While Hollywood continues to make movie musicals, audiences’ attitudes towards them have changed.
The last 15 years have been shaky for the movie-musical genre. Although there have been some successes: “West Side Story (2021)” and “Tik Tik Boom (2021)” some musicals like “Cats (2019)” (shudder) and “The Prom (2020)” have fallen flat leaving audiences feeling disconnected and unconvinced.
Audiences’ general distaste for the musical genre stems from friction at the core of the film: movie musicals ask us to suspend disbelief in a way that often clashes with the realism of acting that modern-day audiences have come to expect. Some movie musicals have successfully navigated this divide. For example, “La La Land (2016)” bridged this gap by casting actors who didn’t have classic Broadway training, making the singing and dancing more relatable and the acting more grounded in the realism audiences have come to expect. Conversely “In The Heights (2021)” does the opposite, leaning into more theatrical elements to create dream-like sequences like “Paciencia y Fe” a song near the end of the show that features the backstory of Abuela Claudia, the matriarch of the neighborhood. During the sequence director John M. Chu employs a choreographed dance in a train station setting to represent the passing of time in her life, a more theatrical film choice than the more traditional flashback scene but one that invokes more emotion from the audience making it better suited to the production.
However breaking into song and dance mid-conversations still leaves some viewers feeling jarred, uncomfortable, and lied to by the movie. And if there is one thing an audience member doesn’t like it is being uncomfortable and feeling like they’ve been tricked, leading into the recent flops of movie musicals like “The Color Purple (2023)” and “Mean Girls (2024)”. The main problem with these two films is that they are ultimately ashamed to be musicals. Both feature little to no music in their promotional material. By hiding this information, studios alienate audiences and make them feel bamboozled when they walk into the theatre and hear piano keys for an opening number.
“Wicked” however is unapologetically a musical. From a press tour that could be a looking glass into a high school theater post-show green room to each and every trailer packed with dance numbers and songs, the production is overflowing with love for the genre. Director Jon M. Chu creates a beautiful world with an almost technicolor shine, harkening back to “The Wizard of Oz.” Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, the leading ladies of the production give powerhouse performances. Further, Wicked honors its Broadway roots by splitting the film into two parts allowing new breath to be given to the story 21 years after the original stage production.
By leaning into the genre’s strengths rather than shying away Wicked represents a return to the joys that made musicals a fundamental part of the movie industry in the golden age of Hollywood.
