Welcome to Know-It-All. Within the age of mental property grabs, docudramas, and so very many sequels, it may be tough to discover a approach into the difficult worlds we see on display. On this sequence, Vox consultants clarify what you could know to get into the most recent scorching launch.
Like a friendship between a preferred blonde princess and a dour lime-skinned outcast, the story of Depraved is a little more difficult than it appears to be like.
Depraved is billed because the “true story” of Glinda the Good and the Depraved Witch of the West, the very well-known, very what-you-see-is-what-you-get witches from The Wizard of Oz. It’s based mostly on a well-loved, very catchy Broadway musical that’s been round for 20-plus years. It additionally stars pop queen Ariana Grande and powerhouse Cynthia Erivo, and the film’s very expansive, very costly advertising marketing campaign appeared decided to ceaselessly alter the best way we take into consideration pink and inexperienced.
Depraved is all over the place. Absolutely it will probably’t be that impenetrable!
However do you know that the Broadway musical was based mostly on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist novels which had been, in flip, impressed by L. Frank Baum’s beloved sequence of over a dozen books about Oz? And {that a} main plot within the novels includes sentient, speaking animals that love sonnets and science? Or that Depraved is mostly a political thriller about corrupt authorities officers scapegoating a minority and creating an enemy of the state?
Beneath the film’s ethereal aesthetics and its bubblegum pop moments is a broiling, chaotic story of energy, greed, and discrimination. The extra you recognize about Depraved, the weirder and weirder it will get.
With that in thoughts, I requested my colleague Constance Grady to assist us navigate the world of Depraved and Oz. Grady has learn Gregory Maguire’s authentic novel a number of occasions, the Baum novels as a toddler, seen the Broadway manufacturing, and like me, noticed the film this week. We mentioned every thing from anti-goat fascism, to Grande’s scrumptious efficiency, to what from the e-book didn’t make it into the diversifications. Right here’s what you could know in regards to the film musical of the second.
Do I’ve this right? Depraved is a film musical adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway present Depraved which is an adaptation of the novel Depraved which is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz.
You’re proper, however there’s one other adaptation layer in there.
The entire thing begins with the L. Frank Baum youngsters’s novel The Great Wizard of Oz, which he printed in 1900. Baum’s e-book was so profitable that it was nearly instantly tailored into a Broadway musical of its personal (now largely forgotten) and a whole franchise price of sequels, 13 of which Baum wrote himself. Then in 1939 we obtained essentially the most well-known and, for most individuals, canonical model of the story: The Wizard of Oz, the Judy Garland movie based mostly on the Baum novel.
The primary Depraved was Gregory Maguire’s novel, first printed in 1995 as Depraved: The Life and Instances of the Depraved Witch of the West. Maguire’s gimmick was to take Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned Depraved Witch of the West from the 1939 movie — certainly certainly one of childhood’s scariest villains — and make her the beating coronary heart of his novel. He renamed her Elphaba, a reputation prompt by the initials of L. Frank Baum.
Depraved the musical got here in 2003, with music from Stephen Schwartz and a e-book by Winnie Holzman. It was a smash hit success when it got here out, and it’s nonetheless working on Broadway now, 21 years later.
The musical was such successful that Common, which owns the rights, has had numerous variations of the movie in growth for a really very long time now. Lastly and eventually, in 2021, Common put director Jon M. Chu of Loopy Wealthy Asians on the duty. Chu cut up the stage musical into two halves, with Depraved Half 1 to premiere in November 2024 and Depraved Half 2 set to return in 2025. And now right here we’re!
At completely different occasions, the entire Ozstories have been my favorites.
I grew up on the 1939 film like everybody else. When Dorothy opens the black-and-white door to her Kansas residence and walks out into sensible, Technicolor Oz? That’s what cinema was made for, child!
After I was round 8 or 9 I stumbled on the L. Frank Baum novels, and I used to be tickled to search out that they contained such an expansive and playful mythology. I devoured up these books like sweet. Then at round 11 years outdated, I learn Depraved and was entranced by it: all that ethical complexity, all of the political intrigue, all these slippery, winding sentences.
When the musical got here alongside, I instantly resented it for being a glitzier, easier story than the e-book was — actually boiled right down to the difficult friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, set towards the backdrop of the Wizard’s manipulations — however after I was 17 I noticed it on Broadway and was overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of it and the gleeful drive of the songs. When Elphaba began flying on the finish of act one, I burst into tears.
To be honest to 17-year-old you, there’s not less than one particular person, if not 10 to twenty individuals bursting into tears at each efficiency when Elphaba defies gravity. It’s a spectacle. It’s monumental. It’s as essential to Broadway because the chandelier coming down in Phantom of the Opera.
God, it’s really so good. For that second, I even forgive Schwartz for writing the lyric “Nessa, Nessa, I’ve obtained one thing to confess-a.”
Depraved is famously certainly one of solely six musicals I get pleasure from. And I really feel just like the film sticks to the musical. How properly do the musicals keep on with the e-book?
The musical may be very, very loosely based mostly on Maguire’s e-book.
What Gregory Maguire wished to write down was a very refined allegorical exploration of the character of evil itself and what may drive Elphaba to wickedness. As such, his Depraved is bleak, at occasions self-indulgently so. Maguire’s Elphaba is raised by missionaries in a Southern Gothic childhood proper out of Flannery O’Connor. After she abandons each faith and education and is politically radicalized by the reason for Ozian Animal rights, she turns into a terrorist, complicit in a number of acts of violence towards civilians. By the top, nonetheless a lot you may sympathize with Elphaba’s trigger, you perceive why individuals name her the depraved witch.
Depraved: Half I (the official title of this film) feels much less like “wow, this woman is admittedly depraved” and extra like, “oh, she’s simply misunderstood.” Possibly we haven’t gotten to the total terrorist half but, however I can’t think about Elphaba’s morality is ever going to be as ambiguous because the novel.
Completely. The Depraved of the stage present is a a lot sweeter and sillier model of the story. Schwartz and Holzman ditch as a lot of the faith and the politics as they probably can to concentrate on the connection between Elphaba and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North — or Galinda, as she initially calls herself.
Maguire imagined Glinda as Elphaba’s faculty roommate, and she or he’s key to Elphie’s faculty years, however he largely abandons her after Elphie drops out of faculty to enter politics. Schwartz and Holzman, nonetheless, make comedian, superficial Glinda into the center of the story. Maybe partly to make room for the shift in focus, Elphaba’s misdeeds are considerably toned down, and as for Maguire’s darkish, heartbreaking ending … let’s simply say it will get, um, revised.
The film satisfied me that Glinda is definitely the splashier, better-written function. I’ve all the time envisioned Glinda as an SEC-coded imply woman — blonde, bubbly, a bit passive-aggressive quite than aggressive-aggressive. Grande will get us there, and appears to actually perceive what makes this character so surprisingly humorous.
So purchase or promote: Oscar nominee Ariana Grande?
This film struggles loads with its tone. It doesn’t know whether or not it needs to be as foolish because the stage musical or as severe because the Maguire e-book, and because of this it finally ends up veering wildly round. The one aspect of this film that by no means has this drawback is Grande’s efficiency.
Grande nails it high to backside. She makes spoiled, egocentric Glinda so gleefully imply, so deliciously phony in all her virtue-signaling, that you simply need to chortle at her the best way you’ll chortle at Regina George — after which she exhibits you Glinda’s tender, insecure coronary heart, and also you fall in love together with her.
Grande has all the time had an uncanny knack for vocal mimicry, and right here she pitches her talking voice into one thing midway between Judy Garland’s earnest Dorothy tones and the distinctive showbiz patter of Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the function of Glinda on Broadway. You wouldn’t assume you possibly can mix the 2, however Grande does, and she or he makes it make sense. As for the singing — properly, that type of goes with out saying, doesn’t it? She’s in phenomenal voice.
No matter occurs with the Oscars race this 12 months, I’ll know that Grande is the Academy Award nominee of my coronary heart.
Tonally, the film goes from Legally Blonde to The Fugitive. The final 10 minutes are completely bonkers. What on the earth?
Yikes, proper? For me, this tonal mismatch is the massive flaw of the movie, and I feel it’s a byproduct of this very lengthy and winding adaptation course of.
When Schwartz and Holzman tailored Maguire’s Depraved, they stripped away as a lot of his quite baroque mythologizing as they might whereas nonetheless permitting the plot to make a modicum of sense. The vibe of this musical is mostly: Why go on and on in regards to the ontological variations between people and animals if we might be singing enjoyable bops about being standard? It doesn’t all need to be so severe on a regular basis.
Of their model of the story, the Wizard’s plans are obscure, however clearly evil, and Elphaba’s resistance to his regime is likewise obscure, however clearly righteous. The Wizard’s fundamental sin within the stage musical is that he’s mendacity to his individuals to stoke up their fears and marshal assist to his personal aspect, as a result of this musical hit Broadway in 2003, when George W. Bush was nearly to invade Iraq. Aside from that, we don’t know that a lot about why he’s so unhealthy. We don’t actually care, both. All of it just about works for those who simply sit again within the theater and let the songs wash over you.
Chu, nonetheless, takes Depraved very critically certainly; a lot in order that he’s stretched out the musical’s 90-minute first act right into a lugubrious two hours and 40 minutes, principally by retaining the pacing gradual and solemn. The aspect impact of transferring so slowly, although, is that it places a number of strain on the political subplot of this musical to not solely make sense, however to be emotionally impactful. Sadly, the entire background that might make it work obtained left behind in Maguire’s novel.
Are we alleged to care this a lot about anti-animal fascism within the film? Or the musical? Do the individuals who tailored Depraved care that a lot?
Yeah, this is among the massive plotlines the place the cracks within the adaptation present. It additionally makes for a type of fascinating timeline of how completely different authors have thought of Oz.
One of many inconsistencies of L. Frank Baum’s Ozis that it’s a land the place animals can discuss and go on quests and be visitors at dinner events and so forth — you’ll recall the Cowardly Lion — but additionally all of the characters are continuously consuming meat. It’s the type of minor quirk in worldbuilding {that a} youngsters’s e-book can skate proper over, but it surely turns into bizarre and complicated in an grownup novel.
So when Maguire wrote Depraved, he imagined an Ozthat distinguished between Animals, who’re speaking and clever beings who put on garments and maintain jobs and might be invited to dinner events, and animals in lowercase, who’re non-sentient and might be killed or handled as chattel. In Maguire’s Oz, the Wizard consolidates his energy partly by making the Animals right into a scapegoat race.
Emphasis, fairly actually, on “goat.”
Over the course of the novel, we see them go from full residents to residing underneath restrictions to slaves who’re often cooked and eaten. Elphaba is radicalized into terrorism when her favourite faculty professor, the Goat and Animal rights agitator Physician Dillamond, is assassinated by the federal government.
When Schwartz and Holzman obtained their arms on the story, they had been remodeling it as soon as once more right into a youngsters’s story, in order that they didn’t significantly have time for this piece of worldbuilding. They ditched the excellence between Animal and animal, in order that Physician Dillamond turns into a man in a foolish goat costume who exists to nudge Elphaba into realizing that the Wizard won’t have her greatest pursuits at coronary heart. It will be a stretch to assume that the stage musical actually needs the viewers to care about animals on the whole or Physician Dillamond specifically.
Chu, characteristically, appears to need to give the animal plotline extra gravitas. He makes Dillamond an eerily photorealistic CGI goat who seems in certainly one of Elphaba’s visions shivering and cringing in a cage, in a darkish foretelling of the Wizard’s eventual objectives. Below Chu’s solemn and barely heavy-handed contact, you may really feel how essential the animal rights plotline is to Elphaba’s character arc. However the a part of Maguire’s novel that made you care in regards to the animals, and about Elphaba’s dedication to their freedom, was jettisoned way back. It’s an uneasy stability.
This contradiction is a part of why, I feel, Grande’s Glinda feels a lot like a breath of contemporary air at any time when she seems on display. The a part of this story that Schwartz and Holzman cared about was Glinda and Elphaba, in order that’s the a part of the story structure that continues to be rock stable. It doesn’t matter what occurs, you may’t not root for his or her friendship.
Are we going to get extra of that in Depraved: Half II? Are individuals going to need to see the second half of this musical if it’s all about authoritarianism?
I’m very curious to see how Chu handles Depraved: Half II, as a result of the second act of Depraved is famously a lot worse than the primary half. All the long-lasting songs are over by then (though personally, I fairly like “No Good Deed”), the storytelling will get slowed down in mythology that by no means turns into both clear or fascinating, and Glinda and Elphaba spend many of the act in separate locations, successfully depriving the present of its strongest dynamic for lengthy stretches of stage time. Within the stage present, you’re usually invested sufficient within the characters on the power of the primary half to sit down by way of the second half with minimal complaints, however for that act two to carry its personal for a full film? Difficult! As for the anti-animal fascism, although, we will all breathe straightforward. As initially staged, Depraved’s act two focuses on the animal rights plotline for precisely so long as it takes to hook Elphaba up together with her iconic flying monkeys and never a single second longer. We’ll see if Chu retains it that approach.
