"Wicked" Film Review for DC Theater Arts
Film adaptation reviews = great loophole for remote "theater review" work
Last night, my review of Wicked (2024) was published via DC Theater Arts, where I’ve written reviews and commentary for over three years. Now that I’ve moved to NYC, I am working to find ways to keep it going with my home-base DC publication, and one of my editors and I had the idea to incorporate film adaptations of theater shows into my angle.
He asked me if I wanted to review Wicked for DCTA, and I said:
I’m excited about this article. I focus on how the movie brings the story of Wicked from surface-level kiddie fare (that’s still about some of the most serious, complex, relevant topics you can think of) into full Technicolor through performances and the movie medium.
Huge thanks to State of the Arts subscriber and my main DCTA editor John Stoltenberg for editing this piece.
As a sampler, here’s how the article starts:
“I finally saw Wicked on Broadway in early 2022. I went in blind, and as I left, I was sad to find that I felt underwhelmed. Unmemorable, plotless songs plagued the performance, and the show centers oversimplified, cartoony characters in a story about leading causes of America’s current, renewedly urgent crisis.
The Wicked movie released this past week, directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, has erased these issues.
This film has improved on its source material for the same reason that Spielberg’s 2021 film West Side Story improved on the 1961 film version: it brought its source material’s symbol-based, exaggerated, made-for-musical-theater plotline into reality, taking stock characters and reconnecting them with our real world.”
Check out the article at the link above. I do caveat/walk back some of my criticism of the Broadway show, so don’t be a stranger if you didn’t like that first bit.
Please comment on both the DCTA article and this Substack posts with any thoughts you have—I’m eager to hear other analytical opinions on this movie.
Huge thanks again, DCTA!
More soon.