2024: Wicked: The Soundtrack - Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and the Wicked Movie Cast

For I am a sentimental man...

I want to start this post about Wicked: The Soundtrack with the disclaimer that I hate musicals. I hate the schlocky, smaltzy show-tunes of the West End and Broadway. I hate that specific kind of un-natural stage singing, and the high-budget Hollywood adaptations they spawn. I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber - and his terrifying face - and I hate Lin Manuel Miranda. I hate diagetic songs and I hate jukebox musicals (well, all except for Girl from the North Country, of course). I just really hate the self-satisfaction and forced-fun smugness of it all and how hollow and empty so many of them feel.

Conversely, I love the great American songbook, so much of which grew out of or grew alongside musicals, both in the theatres and cinemas. I love the music and lyrics of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter or Gershwin and Johnny Mercer.

And now, I also absolutely love Wicked: Part I.

I love the songs and the performances and the ingenuity of the lyrics, I love the balance of pathos and comedy. The genuinely moving, heartbreaking emotions in the music and performances. I love the exceptional sound and huge, immersive and overwhelming production. Between them, composer, arrangers, conductor and producers Stephen Schwartz, Greg Wells and Stephen Oremus have done an extraordinary job making this music all sound so vital, alive and powerful.

In fact, the whole movie - based on both the book by Gregory Maguire and the stage-play by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz - is an unexpected joy. It’s a fantastical and fully realised world of wonder; magical reality and really magical moments, connected by catchy, exciting and affecting songs, deeply moving emotional moments and all underscored by such monumental and, importantly, fully believable performances from the entire cast.

Not only was I wary of the idea of watching a nearly three hour musical in the first place, but, to top it off, one which had both Ariana Grande and Jeff Goldblum in it, too? Forget about it. I had no expectations, but neither of them are Ariana Grande or Jeff Goldblum in this movie. They are Glinda and The Wizard, just as Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba, Michelle Yeoh is Madame Morrible, Peter Dinklage is Dr. Dillamond and Jonathan Bailey is Fiyero.

Grande’s character Glinda may not be able to perform magic in the movie, but her singing is nothing short of spellbinding, enchanting and bewitching. Her mastery and control over her voice is truly stunning. Sliding from her usual soprano into her whistle register - the highest register of the human voice - she displays both an exceptional vocal range as well as an exceptional emotional range. She is variously funny and tragic and horrible and redeeming and misunderstood and good throughout.

Cynthia Erivo, too, is revelatory in the lead role as Elphaba. Her ballads The Wizard and I, I’m Not That Girl and, most famous of all, Defying Gravity, are fantastic vehicles to show off her talent as a vocalist and actor. For every height that Grande hits in her own performances, Erivo plumbs the deepest depths of the soul of these songs. The pair have an undeniable and unbeatable charm and chemistry together that binds them irreversibly in your mind, and pushes the other on to greater and further heights. Plenty of others have played these roles before this pair, but surely none have truly become Elphaba and Glinda in this way before.

Wicked is an unbelievable tale of talking animals, witches and wizards, flying monkeys and magic but it’s all done so earnestly, with so much care and attention and love that you can suspend your disbelief without a seconds thought. There is not a moment where the movie drags, or where it feels like it’s touching three hours. In fact, you don’t want it to end. It’s lucky this is just part one, but I’m already worried though that just two parts aren’t going to be nearly enough.

In songs like the delightful What Is This Feeling?, Popular and Defying Gravity, the intelligent internal rhyme schemes recall the great Cole Porter, whilst the melodies would have made these songs prime candidates to join the pantheon of cultural standards if they'd have been released in a musical in the 1940s or 50s. You can just imagine Doris Day doing Popular or Sinatra singing a line or two from various other songs in the soundtrack.

Someone who is surely familiar with the songs from such plays or films of those eras is Jeff Goldblum, who has a deep love of jazz standards and who has released live albums of them alongside The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. His version of Sentimental Man here is a wonderful, breathy, speak-singing rendition that recalls the breathy, speak-singing of Audrey Hepburn’s Moon River, written by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, from Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

The Wizard of Oz is a timeless story that everyone knows, and at the heart of this musical are two timeless struggles which everyone has either witnessed or experienced, and two that are particularly prescient to the current time and political landscape that we find ourselves in.

Elphaba, played brilliantly by an unbelievably talented black woman here, is of course rejected, shunned and feared for the colour of her skin (green), whilst later in the movie the people of Oz are manipulated into fear and mobilisation against a common - and manufactured - enemy by a weak man with no true power of his own except for the influence to corral a cabal of hatred in an uneducated public (see Trump, Musk, Biden, Starmer, Badenoch, Bolsonaro, Milei, Farage, le Pen etc). The story is a parable of our time, or really, rather, a parable of all time, and can act as a warning against the wave of disinformation, manipulation and deception that is flooding modern life.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the musical though is not the excellent and impassioned singing; huge and fantastic arrangements, perfect production values, clever lyrics and important social issues at the heart of the story, but the childlike wonder the whole thing inspires in my girlfriend any time that it's on.

Playing Glinda was so important to Ariana Grande because of her lifelong love of the part and of the play, and similarly, my partner has loved the musical ever since she was a child as well. This excellent update of it for the big screen has unlocked a pathway back to that childhood for her, and so allowed me to spend time with her youngest, purest and most innocent joys. She has always loved this production and now, thanks to both her love of it and my love for her, I love Wicked as well, now, too.

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As a disclaimer, as harsh as I was on musicals at the start of this post, Wicked isn’t the only one that I really enjoy. I also love Grease and La La Land and Jersey Boys. I haven’t seen Randy Newman’s Faust but expect I’d like it if I did, and the same goes for anything Tom Waits ever did the music for, like Woyzeck, Alice or The Black Rider. Actually, maybe not so much The Black Rider, I’ve heard that soundtrack album…

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Next up, I’ll either write something about Blue Valentine by Tom Waits or My Funny Valentine by Frank Sinatra, or maybe the song Valentine by Fiona Apple (or Suki Waterhouse, Laufey or Snail Mail or whoever else happens to have a song called Valentine).

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