‘Wicked: For Good’
Directed by Jon M. Chu

In 1995, the original front cover of Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” featured an image by Douglas Smith of the title character. (Like L. Frank Baum, working with W. W. Denslow in 1900, Gregory Maguire has enjoyed a highly successful collaboration with a noted illustrator.) 

In this cover illustration, you can barely see the witch’s face, just a hint of her rather severe features, her sharp nose and chin, and her chartreuse complexion — the rest is obscured by the brim of her iconic, big pointy hat.  The message, apparently, is that you won’t learn very much about the Wicked Witch by looking at her — this picture especially — to know what she’s all about, you have to read this book.

Most later copies of the novel, especially the paperback editions, replace that cover with the poster from the 2003 Broadway musical: we see the broad outlines of two women, obviously good friends, one with pink caucasian skin and a white outfit gossiping or whispering — making so called “girl talk” to the other. The witch still has green skin, but clearly more conventionally attractive, gentle features than she did in 1995, and the big hat still covers every but her nose and ruby red lips.  

Even from the two covers alone, we can clearly see how the emphasis has shifted: what started as a tale of a Wicked Witch has now become a story about female bonding.

Just as Mr. Maguire has reshaped the narrative originally laid down 125 years ago by Baum — what was a lighthearted children’s modern fairy tale became a narrative that literally defines the term dark fantasy — so book writer Winnie Holtzman and composer Stephen Schwartz reworked Mr. Maguire’s story into something much lighter, a tale not only of friendship but coming-of-age. 

And now, they’ve completed the latest retrofitting, not only of Baum and Mr. Maguire’s material — but of their own — with “Wicked: For Good” — the second of two theatrical feature films directed by Jon M. Chu based on their own 2003 musical adaptation of Mr. Maguire’s 1995 novel.

At the end of the first film, we witness the transition of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) from a green-skinned outcast and un-“popular” school girl into the ultimate high-flying animal rights activist. Perhaps the previous film, which is titled “Wicked Part 1” on screen, in letters patterned after the classic 1939 “Wizard of Oz” — should now be retroactively retitled “Wicked: Defying Gravity.” 

The latter is the big song that climaxes the end of the first act of the show, which has now become the first of a-two film retelling of a two-act musical based on a novel based on an earlier, long-running fantasy franchise.

Ms. Holtzman also inserts a considerable amount of whimsy, which is much more in alignment with the original Baum stories than Mr. Maguire’s — especially where Glinda (Ariana Grande) is concerned.  As Glinda might say, the movie and the show “de-heavy-ify” the book.  The 2024 movie was able to become lighter still in that while the Shiv (school) sequences only take up a chapter or so of the book, in which Glinda is only a relatively minor character — depicted as kind of a spoiled but well-meaning ditz, reminiscent of actress Billie Burke in most of her other roles besides Glinda in 1939. 

In the Holtzman / Schwartz tellings, “Wicked” is as much Glinda’s story as that of Elphaba — Mr. Maguire’s name for the un-named witch in the Baum book.  Elphaba’s acts of terrorism, against the wicked wizard and his evil empire, are a lot less terrifying — in an early scene reminiscent of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” wherein British-led Arab forces derail an enemy Turkish train, Elphaba — flying on her broomstick — disrupts a military construction crew using the forced labor of animals, strange Oz-ian beasts of involuntary burden.

The corresponding chapters in the book are anything but cheerful: Elphaba engages in far more terrifying acts of sabotage — you really understand why, driven by misinformation from the Wizard’s government, the whole country would hate her — engages in an extracurricular affair with Fiyero, the now-married (to someone else) leading man from act, and may or not may not give birth to a son — she doesn’t actually remember, she was in a coma when and if it happened.  

Ultimately, she’s destroyed by a far more willful Dorothy Gale — in the book, she travels to the lair of the Witch to apologize for dropping a house on her sister — in the screenplay she’s determined to melt Elphaba with a bucket of water.  Dorothy is treated as a sacred presence — we only see her from the back or in shadows — rather like The Christ in William Wyler’s “Ben Hur.”  

Ms. Holtzman also had the idea, inherited from the 1939 screenplay, to literally transform the two major male characters, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) and the tall-for-a-munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater) into, respectively, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman.  The major change by Ms. Holtzman was with the Wizard himself; in Mr. Maguire’s telling, he’s a completely unsympathetic figure, whereas the lovable but ineffectual con man played by Jeff Goldblum in the films and Joel Grey on Broadway is more rooted in Frank Morgan’s 1939 portrayal.  

There’s so much going on in “Wicked: For Good” that the story doesn’t have the chance to get bogged down in the customary second-act problems of major book musicals. The story is somewhat condensed; it seems to take place over months rather than years. The screenplay leads into more connections with the 1939 film, as in the song “No Place Like Home,” one of two, along with “The Girl in the Bubble,” newly written by Mr. Schwartz for the film. 

Mr. Maguire obviously approved of the lighter approach masterminded by Ms. Holzman and Mr. Schwartz, and not just for the cynical reason that the show quickly made him very wealthy.  Two years after “Wicked” premiered on Broadway, he published the first of three sequels, which he dedicated to the Broadway cast and creators.  

The most moving scene in all of the Oz uber-franchise is still the episode in Baum’s first book where the Tin Woodsman explains to Dorothy and the Scarecrow how he lost his heart.  In emphasizing the relationships — Elphaba and Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero — “Wicked: For Good” comes close to capturing the warmth and intimacy of that moment — and all the flying monkeys in the world couldn’t change that.