Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum also star in Jon M. Chu’s ‘Wizard of Oz’-inspired fantasy, based on the $1.7 billion Broadway blockbuster.

One of the signature songs of Wicked is “Popular” — a word that’s also an epic understatement when applied to the 2003 stage musical. Seen by upwards of 65 million people, the show’s themes of female friendship, empowerment and discrimination clearly struck a chord, fueling almost $1.7 billion in Broadway grosses and around $6 billion worldwide. Producers have been in no rush to bring the goldmine property to the screen, and their patience now pays off handsomely in Jon M. Chu’s eye-popping movie version, which enriches the source material while saluting the Golden Age of Technicolor MGM musicals, chief among them The Wizard of Oz.

If you found Wicked on stage too girly or frothy for your taste, or too emphatic in its messaging about otherness being a convenient target for rising fascism, you will likely feel the same about the movie.

Chu might not be Vincente Minnelli, his busy production numbers occasionally threatening to spin into chaos, but he nails what matters most. That would be the shifting affections between two young witches. One is a bubbly blonde princess, vain and entitled and yet to discover her tender heart, and the other a defensive outsider, regarded as a freak because she was born with bright green skin but possessed of formidable powers.

The respective casting of those roles — Ariana Grande as the minimally gifted sorcery student who will go on to become Glinda, Good Witch of the North, and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West — is the movie’s winning hand. Their vocals are clear and strong and supple to a degree many of us have learned not to expect after too many movie musicals that cast merely adequate singers and then Auto-Tune them to death.

Grande and Erivo give Stephen Schwartz’s songs — comedy numbers, introspective ballads, power anthems — effortless spontaneity. They help us buy into the intrinsic musical conceit that these characters are bursting into song to express feelings too large for spoken words, not just mouthing lyrics and trilling melodies that someone spent weeks cleaning up in a studio. The decision to record the songs live on set whenever possible is a major plus.

While suspension of disbelief can be hard to achieve in contemporary movie musicals, Grande and, especially, Erivo (who does her best screen work to date, making Elphaba the bruised, beating heart of the film with a performance of breathtaking raw vulnerability and emotional shading) draw us into the story and the characters’ experiences to a degree that lets us forget the genre’s inherent artificiality.

Chu’s vibrant world-building is a significant part of that. He works with the ace team of cinematographer Alice Brooks, production designer Nathan Crowley and costume designer Paul Tazewell to create a fully dimensional, immersive fantasy environment.

Visual effects are employed throughout, but unlike with so many films groaning under the weight of CG eyesores, digital technology is used less as a shortcut than as enhancer, or for specific purposes like dropping in talking animal characters and stitching together composite shots. Crowley has worked wonders conjuring the magical world of Oz with large-scale constructions on soundstages and backlots, and the cast’s performances benefit from being in tangible settings rather than stuck in front of green-screen backdrops.