“Wicked: For Good” Is Very, Very Bad

The best thing about the 2024 movie “Wicked” was that it ended. After some two and a half hours of dubious “Wizard of Oz” revisionism, stolidly antifascist politics, and digitally shellacked song-and-dance spectacle, the director Jon M. Chu brought the curtain down on a high note. Soaring on a broomstick over the Emerald City, Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo)—green of flesh, pointy of hat, unfailingly pure of heart—ascended to the peak of her magical powers and struck fear into her enemies. “I’m flying high, defying gravity!” she sang, while also flying in the faces of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), a totalitarian humbug, and her complicit frenemy, Glinda (Ariana Grande), a woman with the pastel-pink stylings and the moral courage of a frosted cupcake. Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West, a convenient scapegoat for a fearmongering authoritarian regime. What a world, what a world. The End.