Wicked review: a stunning film adaptation that avoids all the usual pitfalls of moving musicals from the stage to the screen

By Julian Woolford, Head of Musical Theatre, GSA, University of Surrey

The journey from successful stage musical to big-screen adaptation is rarely truly successful. From director Joshua Logan’s use of coloured filters in the 1950s adaptation of South Pacific (which looks as if something is wrong) to Tom Hooper’s recent mega-mess movie of Cats, there are so many pitfalls to avoid.

The suspension of disbelief we willingly embrace in live performance is disrupted by the naturalism of cinema so that the aggressive ballet of the West Side Story gangs looks prissy and tame when filmed on the realistically gritty streets of New York. Similarly, Nathan Lane’s…

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