Review: WICKED: FOR GOOD at Harkins Theatre and local film houses

Guest contributor David Appleford follows up his review of WICKED with a glowing take on its sequel, WICKED: FOR GOOD, now screening in local theaters everywhere.

Jon M. Chu’s WICKED: FOR GOOD arrives with the kind of expectation usually reserved for royal coronations or Avengers finales. Part One, released just a year ago, did its job dutifully. It was a grand, often literal translation of the stage phenomenon, careful never to stray from the original design. Part Two, by contrast, feels written in a different key: fuller, freer, and more emotionally risky.

Chu’s new film restages the back half of the musical, then expands it, sometimes literally and sometimes emotionally, giving characters new dimensions and the story a sense of finality that even the stage version only hints at. Theater fans will recognize every melody, but the emotional chords resonate differently. If the first film was a faithful matinee, FOR GOOD is the immersive evening performance. It’s riskier, more personal, and far more devastating.

Picking up years after Elphaba’s fateful flight, the film shows us the Oz we’ve only heard about in song. The green girl once dismissed as ‘wicked’ is now a fugitive, nursing her ideals in the shadows, while Glinda, the once-dizzy bubble-dweller, has become an institution. She’s adored and quietly trapped by the performance of goodness itself. When Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse crashes into their world, the myth and the musical collide. For once, Oz feels like an actual, living place, not a painted backdrop. Alice Brooks’s cinematography gives it texture; skies shimmer like watercolor and castles gleam with melancholy.

And here’s where fans will notice the difference: this Oz has grown up. Director Chu and writer Winnie Holzman, adapting her own stage book, aren’t afraid to push beyond Broadway’s edges.

The film keeps the familiar architecture of the score. Stephen Schwartz’s swelling orchestrations still carry you along, but it also introduces two new songs that actually work: Elphaba’s ‘No Place Like Home’ and Glinda’s ‘The Girl in the Bubble.’ They don’t strive to be new showstoppers; they feel like emotional extensions of characters theater audiences already know. Each one fills a quiet gap in the stage narrative. They’re the thoughts we always suspected Elphaba and Glinda might have sung if there had been time on stage.

Of course, theater devotees will ask the essential question: does ‘For Good,’ the song itself still land? The answer is yes, profoundly. Chu stages it with almost startling intimacy. Gone is the stage’s sweeping tableau; instead, the camera lingers on eyes, hands, and the half-spoken tremor in a voice. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (once again, listed in the credits by her full name of Ariana Grande-Butera) deliver the duet as a confession rather than a performance. On stage, ‘For Good’ is a farewell; on screen, it’s a reckoning. You realize just how much these two women have meant to each other, and to theatregoers, over the years.

Erivo’s Elphaba may be the most soul-searching version yet. Broadway fans accustomed to Idina Menzel’s defiant power will find Erivo quieter, deeper, almost bruised. She brings the witch back to her moral roots; a woman whose strength is indistinguishable from her loneliness.

Ariana Grande-Butera, meanwhile, is the film’s most surprising gift. Her Glinda begins as the same high-flying crowd-pleaser we remember, but as fame modifies into image, she plays the comedy as armor. ‘The Girl in the Bubble,’ her new song, becomes a self-portrait of a woman longing to come down to earth. Both performances are likely to dominate award chatter.

Theatre fans will also notice how the supporting characters shift. Nessarose, played by Marissa Bode, who uses a wheelchair in real life, has a storyline subtly rewritten to remove the insensitive implications that shadowed the original. It isn’t a cosmetic change; it reflects a production that’s listening to how audiences have evolved since 2003.

Much has been said about Act Two of Wicked being the weaker half of the stage show without a ‘Defying Gravity’ to pin it down. Chu, Holzman, and composer Schwartz seem to have taken that as a dare. On Broadway, Act Two might have felt like an emotional cooldown. In the film, it becomes the heartbeat. The story breathes, expanding moments that on stage flash by between costume changes. You’re reminded why musicals, even cinematic ones, can still make you weep: because they ask you to believe in heightened emotion: to sing instead of speak when dialog alone won’t do.

WICKED: FOR GOOD remembers that musicals aren’t merely about melody; they’re empathy made audible. For those who’ve spent decades humming ‘Popular’ or ‘Defying Gravity,’ this film won’t replace your cherished cast album, but it might make you hear it differently. Chu’s version of Oz is a story told with both reverence and reinvention.

There are missteps. With an epic running length of 2 hours 18 minutes, you feel the weight of the film dragging it down during the final act, plus the pacing occasionally dips between showpieces where expansion can feel more like padding. But by the time the final notes of ‘For Good’ fade, it’s hard not to feel a little undone. The ending is both preordained and unexpectedly moving, folding the Wicked myth back into the Oz we thought we knew.

This is that rare sequel that understands what made part one beloved. WICKED: FOR GOOD sweeps the audience up in a storm of feeling. It gives us what musicals once promised: a world heightened enough to believe that, like Elphaba, emotion itself can fly. Where the first film was a marvel of replication, WICKED: FOR GOOD dares to step off the Broadway stage entirely.

Photo credit: Giles Keyte, Universal Pictures