Wicked, the long-awaited film adaptation of the award-winning Oz-set stage musical, is due in theaters this weekend, and so, needless to say, leading lady Cynthia Erivo is having quite the moment. But then, when hasn’t the Elphaba actress been having a moment? She nabbed a Tony Award in 2016 and an Emmy and Grammy Award in 2017, all for The Color Purple, and she’s also an Academy Award nominee following her portrayal of Harriet Tubman in 2019’s Harriet. Indeed, Erivo can do it all, and probably will.
Nevertheless, as she found out not too long ago, it’s one thing to make a beeline for the title of the Wicked Witch of the West, but it’s quite another to prepare yourself for the writing imaginations of second-graders. Although, frankly, we don’t blame her one bit for being caught off guard by these word wizards in the making.
Erivo made a trip down to P.S. 11 in New York City to fill in as a teacher on the latest episode of Celebrity Substitute, hoping to nurture a love of storytelling in a slew of eager, young, creative minds. The foundation she wound up working with, however, was beyond her and everyone else’s wildest dreams.
Once the students were done fawning over her British accent and inadvertently making layered Wizard of Oz references, the classroom delved into a discussion on the importance of storytelling (stories, you see, are fundamental to a healthy, functioning society, because they “give information and interest people,” and “explain how things began”). From there, it was time to stir up a storytelling soup, using such crucial ingredients as twists, turns, plots, characters, problems, and “‘to be continued’ things.”
Our first candidate came out of the gates swinging hard with an intent to write a story about a Francophile (her words, “her” being a second-grader), meaning a person who’s obsessed (“mesmerized”) with France and Paris and European culture as a whole. Right then and there, this little girl became our first and last hope of finally putting an end to Emily in Paris. Move aside, Lily Collins, Audrey is about to serve up Kennedy dans Paris, and by golly, we will be mesmerized.
Up next was Aman, who’s all but ready to come for the jobs of Mike Flanagan and Guillermo del Toro in the horror department, boasting a résumé that includes making two kids cry at a sleepover with just one scary story. The up-and-coming maestro of morbid tension-and-release continued his reign of terror with a story about a man waking up from a dream(?), and then the lights went off, and everything was gone. Long live the oral tradition!
And that was just the surface of P.S. 11’s elite writers’ room, which also included a story based on Among Us and Five Nights at Freddy’s, and one about an evil sister whose stinky foot was capable of draining the mortal essence out of her siblings while kicking them “where the sun don’t shine.”
Indeed, you can almost feel the change in the air pressure as Random House and HarperCollins gear up for the serial bidding war of a lifetime, and at the center of it all is Cynthia Erivo, inspiring these brave new voices with the same dexterity she will in the Land of Oz this weekend.
