Oz: The Great And Powerful Versus Wicked

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to get a chance to enjoy the musical show Wicked in Boston, and from the moment it began to the moment it closed, I was once again revisiting a familiar and welcome sensation.  Watching a story be presented live before you, seeing how the actors become stagehands and watching drama and comedy be connected to the audience so it can be properly paced gives an experience few movies have ever been able to capture on their own.

Now, I know that the show Wicked is very different from the book.  It has a more bittersweet ending, many characters and plot threads are dropped, and the fates of certain characters completely changed.  The stage show strips out a lot of the sex and politics (seriously, the book could be the next Game of Thrones series on HBO), However, when the person who wrote the book has attended the show dozens of times in the first four years it opened, I think it's safe to say that the edits aren't really all that bad.

There was another prequel to The Wizard Of Oz that came out not too long ago, so I guess the question is which one did a better job telling a good story?  Let's break the two down and see where each one went right and where each one went wrong.

The Setting:

The movie has an advantage here, because it can craft delicate settings full of life, giving us lush gardens, spiked mountainous peaks, and twisted forests.  It gets to fill out the city of Oz and the surrounding countrysides, presenting a living, breathing world.

The stage show, on the other hand, can't have a huge CG budget because it's, well, live.  You can't spend millions of dollars to fill the stage with screens and bizarre settings because it distracts away from the actors and the show.  However, I will say that I think that the stage show I saw at the Boston Opera House left me feeling simply as in awe of the setting as the movie did.  Small touches to settings like the green glowing lights in the Emerald City, the familiar cobblestones and rooftops to show what sort of college the main characters went to, and even how they played with light to give an impression of just how deep into the city the characters ran to hide in a warehouse presented just enough to let my brain fill in the missing pieces.

I didn't need to see the whole Emerald City, I already saw it back when Dorothy visited it.  All I had to see was bright green columns inside the room where they met the Wizard on stage to know what the rest of the complex must look like.  That, I'll say, is a talent that not every stage show has.

Result?  A tie.  Score remains the same.

The Wizard:

In Oz: The Great And Powerful, the Wizard is played by James Franco and he starts out as a devilish rogue, seducing women and tricking patrons of the circus of their hard earned cash before he moves on to the next town.  We see him transform from unrepentant swindler and con man to someone who genuinely wants to help the people he's met and atone for some of his former misdeeds.  

However, as I stated before, I never really got a sense of him being a human being once he arrived in Oz, and his single personality trait seemed to be "just survive long enough to have sex with the next hot woman I meet."  It left him shallow and a bit predictable.

In Wicked, John Davidson gave a very interesting twist to the character.  He's a manipulator, like James Franco's character was, but his goals seem to somehow be both noble and terrible, but we see that his methods are certainly terrible.  He discusses frankly how people can twist the truth until it becomes accepted, especially in a great line going, "Where I come from people believe things that aren't true every day!  We call it "history!""  We see that he's "a sentimental man" (there's even a song about it) who genuinely cares for all of the citizens he rules over like they're the family he never had, but he'll twist facts to turn creatures around the land into dastardly villains so his people have someone to unite against, regardless of if the target deserves it.

It becomes much more believable that the Wizard in Wicked would be willing to send a child and a group of emotionally and intellectually stunted individuals off to kill the Witch on the basis "she's wicked and deserves it."

Plus, the mechanism that the Wizard uses in the show is both one of the most awesome and most terrifying things I've ever seen.

See that giant head behind him?  It moves.  It lights up, the mouth operates, it bobs up and down as it speaks, and it looks like some steampunk nightmare that will burst off of its chair and consume you.  It's like they took The Iron Giant's head and made it evil.

Frankly, I think the stage show did it better with the Wizard, so I'm giving it a point.

Oz: 0  Wicked: 1

Glinda:

Michelle Williams is a great actress.  I'm not going to argue against that at all.  However, when I think back to Oz, I don't really remember her doing much more than being the propaganda master herself and making soap bubbles.  She's in a huge magic duel at the end of the movie, but I already indicated that it came rather out of nowhere.  I will say now, though, that having seen the Wizard portrayed as a master manipulator, seeing the role put on Glinda (who seems determined to "save" the land even though her figurehead is a total sham) gives the character more depth, as you wonder what lengths she'd travel to to defeat the "wicked" witches.

Michelle Williams is great, but considering this is a role originally brought about on stage by Kristin Chenoweth (more about her at a later date) and now played by Jenn Gambatese in a portrayal that I found absolutely fascinating.

In Wicked, Glinda (originally "Galinda") is the completely spoiled daughter of a well to do family with no real power except to get others around her to admire her.  She has little to no magical ability, can't remember the names of even her closest friends, spends most of her time worrying about what people think of her, and seems absolutely flabbergasted the first time she doesn't get her own way.    She earnestly believes that, more than anything, what matters to the world is being popular.  In a rather scary way that didn't occur to me until just now, she's absolutely right.

She's flighty, but can become laser-focused at a moment's notice.  She's the most popular girl in school, but finds the eventual friendship of Elphaba (later the Wicked Witch) to be the one relationship she truly treasures.  She's brave and outgoing on the outside, willing to speak for others, but inside is scared of standing up to authority.  She's easily manipulated by outside forces, but is just as able to manipulate her own fans without even realizing what she's doing to them.

In other words, she's an extremely deep character, one who goes from being a character many would love to hate to one we also silently root for.  She's kind and sympathetic one minute, and murderous and angry the next.  Her bond to Elphaba is the crux of the story (to a point I actually wondered if the two were going to kiss on stage), and she counters Elphaba's drama and eventual fall with some of the most hilarious lines in the play.

Wicked completely blows Oz out of the water here.

Oz: 0    Wicked: 2

The Wicked Witches:

I spent ten minutes going back and forth, wondering if I should be splitting this category apart since Wicked is Elphaba's story and Oz makes her a secondary character.  However, I think I can make this work.

In Oz, Elphaba is played by Mila Kunis, and I liked her in this role.  Her descent from caring, naive young woman to a manipulated, heartbroken figure into a being fueled by rage against the people who hurt her was interesting, leaving you feeling slightly sorry for a character who, up until now, was one of the "most purely evil" characters in film (if only because we were told she was).

In Wicked, though, she's much more tragic.  Played by Alison Luff, she's responsible for the creation of several other key characters from The Wizard of Oz.  She keeps trying to do the right thing just to find herself becoming more and more of a villain in the eyes of the other citizens.  Her only friendships seem so delicate to her, and any time she thinks she's lost one, she becomes crestfallen, believing nobody could ever be there for her.  She's filled with a genuine need for sympathy and is her own worst enemy, as when she explains to Glinda why she blames herself for the death of her mother.

Mila Kunis was good, but it wasn't her story, and Elphaba in Wicked just does a better job.  But then there's her sister.  In the play, it's Nessarose, a younger sibling trapped in a wheelchair.  In the movie, it's Evanora, an older sister who's cruel and manipulative of everybody, including her own family.

Nessarose doesn't get a lot of time in the play, though she is also key in the creation of one of the characters from The Wizard Of Oz.  She doesn't have any real magical power of her own, but simply gets the title from the Munchkins because of her relationship to Elphaba.  Her eventual "death by falling house" is more meant to spark Elphaba into coming out of hiding than any sense of divine justice for her evildoing, but while we get her frustration at being rejected for her disability despite being sharp-minded and beautiful and we understand why she lashes out later against another character, she just sort of seems to be "there" for a lot of it.  Her mood swings quickly between lines as she tries to play the victim as well as make people do what she wants, and it seems a bit inconsistent.  

Evanora, on the other hand, makes for a particularly dastardly villain, taking the part that the Wizard played in Wicked.  A master manipulator who gets an entire countryside to rely on her for help even while she's setting up the very forces that are terrorizing her people, she's even more cruel than the Wizard in that while he's willing to sacrifice Elphaba's sister to get the job done, Evanora is willing to sacrifice her own sister to get the job done.

This one's another even tie, though Allison Luff would shoot right past Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz's Evanora is simply a better character than Nessarose.

Oz: 0    Wicked: 2

Other Characters (and a touch of story):

This is where I gave Oz its most praise, if I remember correctly.  Zach Braff as the flying monkey, Joey King as the porcelain girl, Bruce Campbell as the guard, these were my favorite parts of the film.  They were completely solid roles, well built, well developed, and well acted.

However.

Of course there's going to be a "however."  

However, if the Wizard had these beings as his most trusted allies and friends, where would they have been in The Wizard Of Oz?  I mean, to be fair, the movie had much more limited technology to deal with, but there were also things in the classic film that Oz barely addressed. Sure, we saw scarecrows being used in a plan, but we have no idea why one might come to life and dance later.  We saw mechanical robotic-like beings built, but nothing to indicate why there might be a tin man wandering around chopping down trees.  There's a large gap between the background characters of Oz and the characters we see in The Wizard of Oz.

Wicked, however, circumvents this brilliantly.  We have not just the origin of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch, but we have the "secret origins" of multiple characters we later see in The Wizard of Oz.  The story even manages to circumvent a few of the logic loopholes that come from the story towards the end by showing what happens to the characters after Dorothy's climatic confrontation with Elphaba.

Once you notice the first side origin story, you say, "Ohhh, clever."  After the second, you start to catch on to what's happening, and you find yourself thinking back, looking for any lines of dialogue that might indicate who the third might be.  When the third one is revealed, you're left wondering about the character's relationship to Elphaba, and your mind starts trying to fill in the holes ahead of the story, but trust me when I say you won't see the resolutions coming.

The only flaw is that, because most of the focus is on Elphaba and Glinda, the side characters still don't get as much depth.  We meet them, we get a small glimpse of them "before," but after the transformation it's just a few lines of dialogue that let us know why they become what they become.  Madame Morrible is a rather key person in the stage show, but we don't really know much about her other than she's a bit full of herself and is devoted to the Wizard.  Doctor Dillamond is an interesting character (a talking goat professor), but his appearance is treated simply as "oh, look, it's him" and when things start to change for him it's just generally accepted as "it happens" by most of the people.

I love the side characters of Wicked, I really do, and I love how closely they tie into the classic film...but I need to give this one to Oz if just because the characters feel more developed and complete.

Oz: 1    Wicked: 2

The Story:

This part was going to be much longer, but I think I can sum up all of my arguments rather concisely.  Oz is about a man swept to a foreign land who meets characters very much like those he knew before, he leads on a young woman and breaks her heart turning her into one of the greatest villains of the land, and manages to lie and cheat his way into being a hero and saving a kingdom where he develops a relationship with Glinda the Good.

It's a story we've all seen before, but it just really, really bothered me that (at least to me) the creation of the Wicked Witch in Oz is just as much Oz's fault as it is her sister's, and he doesn't really suffer any repercussions for the act.  He gets to calmly rule the Emerald City until a young girl shows up and murders the woman he once lead on because he wanted to sleep with her rather than pay attention to the fact he was in a completely strange new land.

Wicked, on the other hand, has layers to its story.  It's the story of two young women who become the best of friends until their paths split and they find themselves on opposite sides, both doing what they think is "right."  We have a story about how politics and propaganda work, and how you can take even the most noble person and turn them into a villain with the right "spin."  We have a story of growth, as both young women figure out what they're meant to be in life (though not at the same time) and are willing to face it head on.  

But most of all, it's the first part.  It's a story of two best friends who, regardless of what the world, other relationships, and social class try to do to drive them apart, will be there for each other.  You'd almost call it a love story, but to simply give their relationship that kind of label almost feels like it cheapens it.  Both women feel responsible for the other, but both of them need the other to be able to face what the world brings.  No matter how hard the conflict pushes the two of them against each other, even at their most strained moments, you keep seeing that they'd do anything for the other one, no matter the cost.

There's really no contest here, Wicked is the superior story.

Oz: 1    Wicked: 3

So there you have it.  If you ever get the chance, try to catch a performance of Wicked, I guarantee you won't regret it.  I wish I saw Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel on Broadway performing it (especially since Idina Menzel was so good as Elphaba that it won her a Tony award), but the cast here was quite excellent, and probably did one of the better jobs I've seen capturing their roles.