Critics are pretty much in agreement that the Wicked movie is a faithful adaptation of the classic stage musical, with some tweaks to help successfully translate the story to the big screen.
However, you can’t please everyone, and it seems a couple of Wicked purists are unhappy at certain iconic lines being cut.
Among the bits that didn’t make it into the final edit were several spoken-word parts of the song One Short Day – “I’ve always wanted to see the Emerald City” being one and “Elphie, come on, we’ll be late for Wizomania!” being another.
Speaking to Variety, director Jon M Chu explained: “When you don’t have a live audience to play off, some of the comedy doesn’t quite work.”
Jon went on to recall how Ariana Grande (a true Wicked superfan) reacted when she heard he’d intended to cut the line “the Wizard will see you now!” from One Short Day, revealing: “Ari was like, ‘I promise you, we have to have it’. So I was like, ‘OK, let me figure it out’.
“There were debates all the time,” the Crazy Rich Asians director continued.
“In the beginning, when Glinda says ‘It’s good to see me, isn’t it?’, in the show she says, ‘No need to answer. That’s rhetorical’. But in the movie when she said the line, the joke didn’t land. Not because of the way she performed it. But because there’s no audience to give the feedback for it.
“We put fake Ozian reactions, but it was too meta, too early. That was a scary one to cut because it’s like a Bible line.”
In that same interview, Jon answered the big question many viewers were left with at the end of part one – whether the sequel would feature this key element of The Wizard Of Oz.
Last month, Jon also made headlines when he jumped to Wicked’s defence over one key criticism of the film.
Wicked is in cinemas now.