What is this feeling? On loving and loathing the new Wicked

Exeunt writers discuss queer representation, ableism, and Ariana Grande defying expectations in the ultimate millennial musical

Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Hailey Bachrach: I’m going to try not to be hyperbolic about Wicked. It’s just that when I saw it on Broadway, I was a closeted 13-year-old girl who was seeing the show on a class trip to the New York City from Oregon (to me at the time, an irredeemable provincial backwater where no one understood my dreams of being An Actor), where I’d been alternatingly bullied and ignored by my classmates the entire time. I was also coming into something like political consciousness in the final years of the first George W. Bush presidency, grappling with the idea that stupid, charming people very often did get quite far in life. All to say, Wicked was like a precision shot to my psyche – I was an impossibly ideal distillation of its target audience.

The movie... reminded me how much I love the musical. Can I leave it at that?

We’ve gathered this group of Wicked newbies and devotees (and normal people in between) to talk through a movie that is suddenly everywhere. After what I can’t help but attribute to a post-Cats fear of musicals, recent movies like the Joker sequel, the Mean Girls reboot, and the Lion King prequel have tried to hide their nature in trailers and marketing, but Wicked’s popularity seems like it could spell yet another comeback for the form on film.

This has always been Wicked’s way, of course. Famously panned by the New York critics, overlooked for the Best Musical Tony, it has endured and endured because few people don’t find some resonance in the story of a clever misfit. Stephen Schwartz’s score is rock-solid, and act one finales still live in ‘Defying Gravity’’s shadow. It’s also clever and lightly political without being too sincerely controversial – though I did find myself wondering whether its politics, such as they are, are too obvious and gentle for the world of demagogues and influencers that we live in now. And, of course, a new generation of queer teens get to wonder whether ‘What Is This Feeling?’ was meant to sound so much like that. Two best friends, indeed.

If you let me get started on how Jon M. Chu can never be allowed near another musical again, or wondering how they're going to pad out a 45 minute second act into a 160 minute film, I’ll never stop. So let me turn it over to the group: what's your relationship with Wicked, and why do you think it seems to have turned the world into theatre kids? Are we cool now? Or is it just a bubble of hype?