Last year, Wicked did the impossible. Adapting one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all time — the first half of said musical, at least — would be enough to drive any director mad. But Jon M. Chu shouldered the struggle and delivered on a promise over 20 years in the making. More than that, he renewed Wicked’s status as a phenomenon, with brilliant, inclusive casting choices that turned this revisionist fairy tale into a shockingly modern coming-of-age story.
That Wicked reintroduces the Witch of the West as a misunderstood Black woman (yes, she’s green, but she is also Black) who heals her inner child, incidentally, helped me heal mine. I found myself among the many entirely taken with Wicked: Part One, but I still worried if Part Two could reconcile Elphaba’s new origin story with the events of The Wizard of Oz. The prequel diverges so radically from its source material that it might as well be telling a different story entirely. Wicked: For Good would have to do more than simply bring these characters in line with their Wizard counterparts; it also has to reconcile what is ostensibly their “true” origins with the characters we meet further down the Yellow Brick Road.
