Wicked

For all the adverts, the promotional efforts across various media, the first real indication that Wicked is not a complete film are the small words 'part one' when the title appears. Not even in the BBFC declaration, but after an opening sequence. Much of that marketing material seemed coy about the fact Wicked is a musical but it's even less willing to concede that Wicked is incomplete. Those who have seen the stage version will realise that 'part one' might as well be 'act one'.

Successive adaptations can have various effects. Distilling the essence of a work, creating something whose purity and strength may be too much for the casual consumer. Successive layers of icing drowning subtle tastes in something cloying. An extra coat of paint hiding detail, making something flat out what was once relief. Material cut to fit one frame might not stretch to fit another. The weaknesses of one medium might become strengths in another, but cracks now papered over might become tears.

At 150 minutes, Wicked Part One is 15 minutes shorter than the whole stage show, but arguably I'm cheating by including the intermission. Part Two is due in cinemas one day short of a year later, an interval whose length should at least allow some time to queue for drinks at the bar. Delays are one of the ways that Wicked expands on its stage cousin, though as a film based on a musical it takes advantage of the medium.

Tom Hooper's Les Miserables really only leveraged the advantages of film once. The hulk being dragged to drydock in the opening sequence dwarfed anything that could be achieved on stage. No quantity of stagehands could reset that amount of ship for shows, not overnight and twice on Saturdays and definitely not before the Bishop's due. As a naturalistic conceit, its cast were singing live, recorded on set, but that balancing act did little for any aspect of performance. Wicked leans into artificiality. Movie magic has many more tricks than stage. A conjurer must use sleight of hand to pull a dove from an envelope but with computer graphics and production tax credits the chick is in the post.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande undoubtedly sing the songs, but not necessarily all at the same time. While Wicked has all the same songs it's not been as tempted to chop and change as Les Mis was. Among the few lyrical expansions for this film of Wicked is a bit of comic business in One Short Day. That's reasonably extended to "in the Emerald City", and one of that malachite metropolis' fantastic features is staffed by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. Though they've plenty of film credits their presence here is because they were the first Elphaba and Glinda in Wicked's original stage run. They're not joined by Norbert Leo Butz whose performances after that include turns in Luce and outposts of the film/stage musical revolving door like playing a singing detective in Catch Me If You Can, adding another layer of unreality in Big Fish. Instead it's Michael McCorry Rose, whose Broadway credits do include serving as understudy for the role Butz held, Fiyero.

There are plenty of others whose musical skills might have had a little more help, though whatever's been done in the mixing doesn't appear to include substitution. There are a few, Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, though why Peter Dinklage was asked to use an English accent is among the film's few genuine mysteries. There are those in the cast like Jonathan Bailey who have been regular presences on stage and screen, and others like Marissa Bode for whom Wicked is a feature début. All are given room to breath in sets that are both expansive and inspiring. A camera can go where an audience cannot, and no quantity of ropes and people with opinions on gaffer tape can make those on stage fly like those on film.

That consistent quality, an almost permanent polish makes the places where the film is weak all the more frustrating. The changes in pace are almost forgiveable - there's so much to look at and wonder that most of the time flies by. Adding a fair few words to One Short Day doesn't make it weak but breaking up Defying Gravity stops it from soaring.

The action sequences that punctuate Defying Gravity are exciting. Its buildup includes one of the film's scariest moments as our protagonists are chased towards the act's highest point, but they undercut its power. The song is justifiably considered an anthem, but it's written as a first-act closer. By turning its big build-up into blundering up big buildings it loses some of its heft. By stopping and starting it loses pace. Perhaps ironically, unlike the stage version it isn't a rocket that once lit will explode into fireworks. Instead it throttles back, almost coasting, and so doesn't quite pull in the way it might.

The book Wicked is undeniably weird. Like Doctor Sleep, it's based on another work and that work's adaptation simultaneously, though Stephen King at least had continuity as author of The Shining. Gregory Maguire was writing almost a century after L Frank Baum, nearly 60 years after the MGM Technicolor spectacular. It's an adult take on the origins of what was a children's story, and those picking up the most recent print run with movie tie-in cover may be in for a shock. Credulity is less stretched by monkey guards or trains riding toothed tracks than by the apparent age range of Shiz university's students. That said, this is fantasy. Once you've accepted that we're in territory that might see houses falling on witches it seems petty to worry about admission criteria.

I'm not sure if Wicked the novel is unfilmable in the same way as Dune but the film is not an adaptation of that work but the musical drawn from it. As I write that I wonder if a form whose conventions are as rigid as those of musicals might better suit the complicated courtliness of Frank Herbert's work, but chaumas and chorus, kanly and the can-can might be steps (without rhythm) too far.

Villeneuve's Dune has a similar disinclination to brevity as Wicked, and that leaves a similar difficulty. It's not impossible that Wicked might also see its creators seeking funding for a part three, and as with Dune they've got plenty of novels to draw from. Until then though we still have a wait for a part two, and I'm not sure if part one can be considered fairly without it. There's an old showbiz adage about leaving audiences wanting more but they're getting wise. Last year Variety had a piece about how audiences will wait for a work to be complete before watching it, and one can't blame them.

Jon Chu is no stranger to musicals. He helmed Lin Manuel Miranda's In The Heights when it came to screens. Winnie Holzman wrote the musical book for stage Wicked and the screenplay here, and in a complicated career also created cult Nineties series My So Called Life. She co-writes here with Dana Fox who penned The Lost City and Cruella, another film whose intellectual-property-leveraging origins are at least as complicated to explain.

Complicated, I must admit, sums up my feelings about Wicked. For fans of the musical, this will give them more of what they already like, perhaps even too much. For those not yet fans I'm not sure this will give them enough. Being a counterpart to The Wizard Of Oz means that Wicked is inherently a work that depends on another, but being just one part of two means that Wicked (the film) is also not independent. Given how many characters in Oz are notably lacking it is perhaps fitting that while we know the ending is over the rainbow it's not here. At least not yet.