In a culturally fractured world, the movie adaptation of Wicked could become the last universally enjoyed piece of art
Do you know, I got really quite emotional at the interval of Wicked, which I saw at the Apollo Victoria as a birthday treat. I’d enjoyed the film adaptation, with Cynthia Erivo sure to become what’s known in the trade as an EGOT: winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar (the only one she lacks) and a Tony.
She will thus ascend to the rank of other EGOTs: Shakespearean actor John Gielgud; actresses Audrey Hepburn, Viola Davis, Helen Hayes and Rita Moreno; and composers Alan Menken, Marvin Hamlisch, Robert Lopez, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Rogers, as well as Pasek & Paul, who were behind The Greatest Showman and La La Land, and the guys who wrote The Lion King together, Tim Rice and Elton John.
Angry producer Scott Rudin, film directors Mike Nichols and Mel Brooks and multigenre entertainers Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend and Jennifer Hudson are also EGOTs. The Pointless answer in the category is Jonathan Tunick, who won a Grammy in a very obscure category in 1989; a graduate of the performing arts school which inspired the movie Fame, Tunick is in his mid-eighties and has been working in musical theatre for six decades, starting with the musical adaptation of the movie The Apartment called Promises, Promises.
His CV has mostly involved orchestrating the work of his friend Stephen Sondheim, from Company to Follies to A Little Night Music, which is the one which gave us Send In The Clowns. In 2024, when Merrily We Roll Along, a lesser Sondheim work, was posthumously revived on Broadway, Tunick finally won his second Tony Award, having been nominated ten times after the 1997 win for his work on the Broadway musical Titanic. His other credits include Mel Brooks movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, as well as the recent live action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.
But all this Egottery is an amuse-bouche to my argument about Wicked, a long-running Broadway show with music composed by Stephen Schwartz and a plot which is part of the Oz Universe. It has been resident in London since 2005, half of that time as a neighbour to Hamilton, which lives in the reupholstered Victoria Palace about 20 yards away.
We know how good the songs are in Wicked: Popular, Defying Gravity, I’m Not That Girl, The Wizard and I. All have timeless melodies and, crucially for the art form, they advance the plot and detail the inner lives of the characters. I do have a friend who thinks ‘bursting into song is lame’, and I agree with her up to a point; if the songs aren’t catchy enough or seem perfunctory, then they don’t grab hold me.
But during the interval, instead of buying £6 popcorn buckets, I spotted a golden thread for how to construct a piece of consensus entertainment: a book, play or movie which appeals to all four quadrants – old, young, male, female – across several generations of reader, theatregoer or cinema fanatic. Let’s start with the big Technicolor works of the late 1930s: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.
All three looked phenomenal, had romantic heroines and sidekicks (if we count Rhett Butler as a sidekick), and involved the audience with stories of good and evil. Plus, in the first two, the songs were good to outstanding; a century on, Heigh Ho and Over The Rainbow remain some of the most popular copyrights ever written, while ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ is in the global lexicon. Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation, should never be deposed as the world’s most successful moving picture.
Into the postwar years and it’s Cinderella and West Side Story that remain cherished, with modern remakes and yet more plots about rags and riches. Plus the songs were good to outstanding, whether A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes in Cinderella or Somewhere in the latter. I need not detain you with the songs of two Julie Andrews vehicles released inside the same year, Summer 1964 for Mary Poppins, Spring 1965 for The Sound of Music; ditto the Lennon/McCartney movies, live shows, ballads and rockers.
Then there’s the music of both Queen, in particular Bohemian Rhapsody (1975), and ABBA, whose US number one Dancing Queen will be 50 years old in 2026. We’ve already had a Queen musical and biopic, and two ABBA musicals and an ABBAtar show which will run and run in a purpose-built arena in Stratford where, in decades to come, maybe they’ll alternate a Freddie Mercury avatar show, or an Elton John one, or an Adele one.
Then come the big two cinematic and literary universes, neither of which I have much time for, but I respect those who put great store in the stories of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I also recognise Michael Jackson was a troubled soul and possible criminal at the same time as I recall the critic Dorian Lynskey writing that Billie Jean was uncancellable. The album Thriller, which will never be overtaken as the planet’s bestselling long-playing record, is timeless, even if it isn’t perfect.
In the middle of the 1980s, the Europeans took over Broadway: the aforementioned EGOT Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music for Phantom of the Opera and Starlight Express, the latter occupying the Apollo Victoria in the 1990s and the Troubadour in Wembley Park today. I remember seeing Les Misérables and having little knowledge of prisoner 24601, being overcome with the force of Victor Hugo’s tale of wretchedness and pain. Bring Him Home and One Day More are a tad melodramatic but there’s a reason they have become some of the most remarkable modern melodies to hop into the hearts of millions around the world.
I’m running out of space, so I have no time to dwell on Toy Story, The Lion King, Titanic or Frozen. I’ll probably deal with Wizard Boy at a later date, but I think the stat is that only the Bible and possibly Mao’s Little Red Book have sold more copies than the seven Potters put together.
What unites all of these cultural mastodons? Love, good battling evil and, best expressed in the Wicked showstopper Defying Gravity, endurance: keeping on, fighting the good fight, keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs. People like to sit in a cinema or theatre, or on the sofa with a book in their hand, learning about how to overcome obstacles; there’s a reason Homer’s Odyssey is still read 2800 years after its composition, and it’s only partly because of the fun episodes involving witches, sirens and Cyclopes.
Odysseus was away from his wife Penelope for 20 years: ten fighting a war, ten trying to get home. Dorothy wanted to get home from Oz, Cosette sung of a ‘castle on a cloud’ and the thrust of Mary Poppins is that Mr Banks wanted to go fly a kite, which I think is a metaphor for a more innocent time before adulthood.
Wicked has endured for 20 years because it’s about as populist as consensus entertainment can get. A bit of a duff second half, though, but they’ll fix it in the movie.