Since the film version of Wicked the musical was released, it has been a hit with audiences, fans of the original and people completely new to it alike.
The thing that has gotten everyone talking is the celebrity casting of Ariana Grande as one of the two main characters, Galinda (or Glinda), but what many people may not know is that Grande got her start out as a star on Broadway in “13” in 2008.
So how does the new movie soundtrack compare to the original Broadway?
Overall, as with anything going from stage to screen or vice versa every song is much more subdued and underplayed. It is a lot easier to capture emotions through small actions and there is less of a need to be loud as there is in a live theatre performance.
There are also many parts where the singing in the original is replaced with sing-talking.
That leads the movie soundtrack to feel more out of place when listening alone and not watching compared to the Broadway version.
Listening to the movie soundtrack there are many parts that have auto-tuning which for the most part isn’t noticeable until the song “Popular” where there are many vocal flips that in the soundtrack version of the movie sounded like a bad audio mixing and made those purposeful flips sound robotic and overly auto-tuned.
Other than that, the soundtrack does the job it was made to do, it promotes a movie version of the Broadway musical “Wicked, The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz” while being able to take some creative liberties and adapt it to a very different form of entertainment.
Having this movie version also helps bring theatre and especially musical theatre to a much more accessible format, to get tickets to see wicked live you could easily spend $60+ on tickets for a touring production or over 100 to see it on Broadway not including travel costs while the price of a ticket for a movie ranges from $10-20 and gives people the chance to see a musical they are not able to see even in community theatres since the rights to perform it are not available to the public.
Compared to the “Mean Girls” musical movie version released earlier this year Wicked does movie musicals right.