Wicked’s best scene is a wordless dance number

Of all the moments in Wicked that I thought might make me cry, I certainly didn’t think it would be “Dancing Through Life”—the upbeat ensemble number where Winkie prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) decides to “corrupt” his fellow university students by sneaking them into a local dance club. The song starts as a fun, flirty showcase for director Jon M. Chu’s exuberant take on the beloved Broadway show. Then, suddenly, the sequence pivots into the standout moment of the entire movie: A moving dance duet in which perky Galinda “Glinda” Upland (Ariana Grande) and misunderstood Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) set aside their squabbles and finally see each other as two young women yearning for connection. It’s a silent conversation that communicates more than many of the movie’s sung-through numbers do.

The dance scene happens in the stage show too. Queen bee Glinda has leaned into her worst mean-girl impulses by tricking Elphaba into wearing an ugly hat to the crew’s night on the town. But just before Elphaba arrives, Glinda discovers that her emerald-colored roommate has gone out of her way to do something nice for her. Suddenly Glinda has a crisis of conscience. As the club bursts into laughter at Elphaba’s arrival and she doubles down on her outsider status by performing a bizarre interpretive dance in the middle of the room, Glinda decides she has to make up for her cruelty. She joins Elphie in her strange dance and turns it into the cool thing everyone wants to do. 

Onstage, it’s a sweet but relatively swift turning point between the two young women. The staging emphasizes the kindness of Glinda’s action more than the connection between the two future witches. And while it’s an important moment in the show, it’s not one you’re likely to still be thinking about heading into intermission. That couldn’t be further from the case in Chu’s adaptation, where it’s pretty much all I’ve thought about since seeing the film. 

In Chu’s “Ozdust Duet,” Erivo’s softer, more vulnerable Elphaba isn’t comedically defiant in her dance, she’s clearly compensating for a deep sense of hurt at being laughed at. And Grande’s Glinda knows just how sky-high the social stakes are for both of them. She could just as easily drag herself down as raise Elphaba up. But she feels guilt-ridden enough to take the risk, and in doing so she finally stops and sees Elphaba for who she actually is—someone who’s stared at constantly and yet seldom perceived in a meaningful way. 

It makes sense that Chu’s strongest directorial moment would involve dance. He got his start directing Step Up 2: The Streets and formed his own dance crew before launching a dance-themed web series called The Legion Of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD). That dance direction background means Chu excels at turning fragmented images into musical moments that are greater than the sum of their parts. The other scene in his filmography that rivals Wicked’s “Ozdust Duet” is the wedding from Crazy Rich Asians, which similarly depicts a silent bit of emotional connection within a larger-than-life musical moment.

Ironically, however, that dance director perspective hasn’t always served Chu well in the movie musical genre. While people are a little too quick to toss around the term “music video” when critiquing modern movie musical direction, it’s sometimes an apt description of Chu’s work. A true movie musical director is first and foremost an actor’s director—someone who uses their cinematic tricks to enhance the singing, dancing, and above all acting of their central performers. (Even the much-maligned quick cuts in Rob Marshall’s Chicago mirror the isolated movements of his Bob-Fosse-style choreography while emphasizing the frenetic lives the characters are leading.) Chu, however, is much more of a music-video-style director in that he doesn’t mind cutting away from a performance moment for the sake of an interesting visual.

One sees that impulse in his 2021 adaptation of In The Heights, and again in Elphaba’s first number, “The Wizard and I,” where Chu is more interested in creating a general sense of playful visual whimsy than in locking us into Erivo’s emotional journey. He doesn’t care about randomly cutting away from her face so long as he feels like he has a visual that captures the same emotion—and that’s what separates him from a true movie musical auteur like Kenny Ortega, who never ever loses track of his performers’ faces, even in his more elaborately staged numbers like the “I Want” songs from Newsies and High School Musical 3. (“The Other Side” from Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman is another great example of actor-centric musical spectacle.) 

Chu’s direction can still be really, really fun, and frequently is in Wicked. It’s just that in songs like “What Is This Feeling?” and “Popular,” he’s as interested in showcasing sets and props and costumes as he is in zeroing in on the arcs of each song. The lyrics sometimes feel incidental to the action, as they might in a dance piece, rather than the core motivation of what’s happening onscreen. (“It Won’t Be Long Now” from In The Heights is his biggest culprit around this). And the moments Chu does simply train his camera on a real-time performance—“I’m Not That Girl” in Wicked, “Champagne” in In The Heights—are memorable because they’re the rare times he seems to remember that musical theater songs are really just heightened dialogue scenes, and it’s okay to film them that way. 

Part of what makes “Ozdust Duet” so special is that it’s the only musical moment in Wicked without any elaborate setpieces or major jumps in location. Chu and choreographer Christopher Scott simply zero in on their two central actors and the real-time connection that happens between them on the dance floor. Elphaba will later sing about a romantic crush, “Hands touch, eyes meet / Suddenly silence, sudden heat.” But that feels equally true here. The two young women press the backs of their hands together as the score weaves in notes from their future ballad “For Good.” Moving in unison, Glinda suddenly realizes that Elphaba is deeply, deeply lonely, and that perhaps she is too. She reaches out to touch the green face she once scoffed at. I was crying even before I realized that Erivo had tears streaming down her face too. 

Cinematographer Alice Brooks has called the scene “the heart of the movie,” while Erivo described it as “sometimes painful, sometimes joyous” to shoot. And I suspect that, more so than any of the movie’s showier numbers, it’s the moment of Wicked that’s going to linger with audiences until we get next year’s follow-up film. It’s a shining example of Chu stepping up his game as a director to reorient Wicked as the story of two unlikely friends who find a once-in-a-lifetime connection with one another. And, best of all, he does it through the true language of movie musicals.