Quietly Watching

  Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap for the same franchise, the same cast, the same director, released a year apart. The easy read is that the sequel simply is not as good. I think the truer read is that nobody split the story down the middle of its quality. They split it down the middle of its structure, and part two got the harder half. The Musical Was Always Front-Loaded Anyone who has seen the stage show knows this instinctively. The first act of Wicked is the one people leave humming. "Popular" is there. "Defying Gravity" is there, the number that sends audiences into intermission levitating. The second act has always been the trickier stretch, the part where the plot has to connect all the...