Wicked: One Wonderful Night (Fulwell Entertainment, Universal, NBC, aired November 6, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 6) NBC aired a two-hour special called Wicked: One Wonderful Night, aimed at promoting the November 21 release of the Wicked movie’s sequel, Wicked: For Good. The show was actually a live concert of songs from both Wickeds held at the Dolby Theatre, formerly the Kodak Theatre, in Hollywood. It was a typically lumbering spectacle with so much jabbering between the songs and so many unfunny skits (the low point was when they showed a segment that was supposedly audition tapes from would-be cast members trying out for roles in the Wicked movies, but the joke was the sheer unlikelihood of some of the auditionees and it got old almost as soon as it began) the two-hour show had room for only 10 songs. Most of them were sung by the two leads from the movie, Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba the Wicked Witch and Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch. One problem is the Wicked songs by Stephen Schwartz are simply not that memorable; the only two that have had any life outside the show are “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” and even those are hardly on the level of the great songs Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg wrote for the 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie. The songs they performed were an interminable opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked”; Erivo’s first number, “The Wizard and I”; a duet between Erivo and Grande called “What Is This Feeling?”; Grande doing “Popular” with someone or something called Remington, a pre-pubescent Black child of vaguely indeterminate gender; a nice bit where Stephen Schwartz showed up with Grande, Erivo and the original Glinda from Broadway, Kristen Chenoweth, along with an unidentified woman doing “For Good”: Erivo singing “I’m Not That Girl”; Bowen Yang, openly Gay comedian and podcaster, duetting on “Dancing Through Life” with a young man I presume is his podcasting partner; Grande doing “We Couldn’t Be Happier”; Erivo doing “No Place Like Home”; Grande singing “The Girl in the Bubble”; Erivo singing “Defying Gravity”; and for a finale, the two women doing a song that had almost nothing to do with Wicked.

They reproduced the famous medley of Jack Yellen’s and Milton Ager’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Harold Arlen’s and Ted Koehler’s “Get Happy” that Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand had sung on Streisand’s guest appearance on Judy’s short-lived (one season, 1963-1964) CBS-TV variety program. For once the two star singers, among the better baby-divas in the modern music scene, had material worthy of them, and they came through in ways that didn’t match the incandescence of the Garland/Streisand original but came awfully close. Of course Judy Garland was intimately connected to Oz and the world of Wicked through having starred in the 1939 film of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and having introduced “Over the Rainbow” in the opening Kansas-set scenes of the movie. Ariana Grande also had a pre-Wicked Oz connection because when her concert in Manchester, England on May 22, 2017 was attacked by a terrorist suicide bomber, killing 22 people and injuring over 1,000, rather than either calling off her tour or proceeding as if nothing had happened, she performed a benefit concert for the victims and their families on June 4, two weeks later. At the end of the concert she sang “Over the Rainbow,” and as I wrote in my moviemagg blog post on ABC’s heavily truncated TV special on the concert, “She sang eloquently and tapped into the song’s wistful messages of happy little bluebirds flying to (in the words of the spoken introduction to the song in The Wizard of Oz) ‘a place where there isn’t any trouble’ — if there is such a place and Judy Garland’s spirit ended up there, I think she approves.” At the same time the decision to end the show with two imperishably classic songs only made Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked score seem even more mediocre than it is. Cynthia Erivo’s hit “Defying Gravity,” which provided a stunning close to the first Wicked movie, seemed comparatively limp here. Deprived of the ability to pre-record it, and lifted up midway through the song on wires all too visible (director Paul Dugdale and cinematographer Keyan Safyari really muffed the lighting on this one), she sounded oddly nervous, a far cry from the self-assurance of Pink when she gets whirled around above the stage on wires and interacts with Cirque du Soleil-type performers in mid-air. Maybe Grande’s just not used to singing while hovering in space without CGI to help her!