Great entertainment at the cinema! 3-D elevates the already lavish visuals into an immersive experience. While this is essentially a stage musical on film, cinematographers have done their creative best to make you feel as if you're viewing from the stage. Better yet, your seat placement is dynamic. Sometimes you're a random citizen of OZ, gawking from the town square at the major players. At other times you follow two steps behind the Good Witch or the Bad Witch, sharing their POVs as the colors of the next scene reveal themselves. It's this dreamlike "being made a part of the show" experience that is my biggest happy take-away.

Acting, Music, and Scripting: The acting is strong. Enough said.

The music is powerful with beautiful singing performances by the leads. The lyrics and melodies works well to tell the story, though I wasn't particularly hooked by any one song as a solid standalone. Also, at least in my theatre, I wasn't knocked out by the over all sound. The mix felt flat. Since this is a major big budget production, I'm going to assume the issue was not in the master recording, but in the theatre's reproduction of it. I'd love to hear back from the audiophiles in my audience. Please write in - especially if you screen the film at an IMAX theatre with its 12 channels of audio.

Lastly, scripting: You have to respect the audacity of these writers to take on such an iconic American classic. Part I and Part II together have been referred to as the prequel to the Wizard of OZ. And that's mostly accurate. But, Part II includes concurrent storytelling. We're given a behind the scenes view into very abbreviated, but pivotal moments in the original story. The major players appear briefly. I mostly enjoyed how this was handled. To hammer home the "behind the scenes" feel, Dorothy is never shot face-on, and if she even has a line on screen, it must have been limited to a single sentence and probably played out as if we and all the cast of Wicked, simply overheard it. Wicked "is" the story, and while Dorothy's adventure is important, it's still just one of many incidents that occur within the story of Wicked.

I don't remember the original story well enough to be appalled by any liberties taken by Wicked. That said, I did enjoy a few "variations" on the iconic characters. Feel free to write in and alert me to any interesting inconsistencies, and whether you're excited by the artistic interpretation via creative license, or incurably aghast at the defacement of sacred Americana that ought be left set in yellow brick.