Luft, who once played the Wicked Witch of the West herself onstage, calls the Ariana Grande/Cynthia Erivo movie “epic, brilliant, touching and honest”
There’s no place like home, and Judy Garland‘s daughter Lorna Luft couldn’t have felt more comfortable at a recent screening of the Wizard of Oz prequel musical Wicked. “The movie is astounding,” Luft wrote on Instagram. “It’s epic, brilliant, touching and honest.” Her mother played Dorothy Gale in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, and Wicked — based on the smash Broadway musical — takes place entirely over the rainbow in Oz. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande play Elphaba and Glinda, two witches from the film; Luft herself (who is Liza Minelli’s half-sister) once played Elphaba, a.k.a. The Wicked Witch of the West, in a stage production of The Wizard of Oz.
“It’s breathtaking to look at,” Luft continued. “The sets, costumes, makeup, performances, choreography, and the entire scope of the movie is everything I wanted it to be.”
Luft praised Grande and Erivo as “nothing short of magnificent… Vocally, they both are phenomenal and jaw-dropping.” For both Erivo and Grande, the witches are dream roles — a recent promo video shows how emotional they each got when they heard they’d won the parts. Luft also called the film’s director, Jon Chu, a “genius” and said she told him “that he had picked up the torch, the broom and the wand, and carried it forward.”
“We’re just excited for it to all come together, for people to see it,” Erivo told Renee Rapp in a recent Musicians on Musicians discussion for Rolling Stone. Elsewhere in that conversation, she acknowledged some nerves about the movie: “The day I stop feeling nervous about something I give a shit about, we got a problem. They’re the right kind of nerves.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
