Wicked Review

The casting is the whole argument and it wins. Erivo sings Defying Gravity live and turns the number into an act of will rather than a showstopper, and Grande, in the harder role, plays Galinda's comic vanity with real technique and then locates the loneliness underneath it. Their scenes together are why the film works at any length. Chu stages the big numbers with a theater person's respect for the geography of a stage, and the practical sets and the field of nine million tulips give the world a weight that a green screen would have drained out of it.

The two obvious faults are the ones nearly every critic names. The photography is dim and desaturated for a story about color, and several sequences are hard to read in a dark room. And stretching one stage act to two hours and forty minutes leaves the middle circling, with subplots that exist because the second film will need them. A generous, well sung, sincerely made adaptation that would be sharper at two hours and brighter at any length.