• Bowen Yang is a prominent figure who is also traveling to Oz.
• Yang recently made appearances in the gay love comedies Fire Island and Bros.
• The 29-year-old Grande has made hints recently that filming may start soon.

Bowen Yang is a prominent figure who is also traveling to Oz. The 32-year-old member of the Saturday Night Live cast is apparently playing Pfannee, a companion of Glinda (played by Ariana Grande), in Jon M. Chu’s movie adaptation of the Wicked Broadway musical, according to Deadline.

Pfanee is a Munchkinlander who attends Shiz University with Glinda and Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo). Yang recently made appearances in the gay love comedies Fire Island and Bros.

Variety reports that The Greatest Showman breakout star Keala Settle has also joined the cast as Miss Coddle. According to Deadline, Brownwyn James has been chosen to play ShenShen, another student of Elphaba and Glinda, and newcomer Marissa Bode will play Nessarose, Elphaba’s sister.

Michelle Yeoh will play Madame Morrible, reuniting with director John Chu, 43, who worked with her on the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians.

Jonathan Bailey, the lead for Bridgerton, was also confirmed to perform Fiyero in September. Also mentioned is Jeff Goldblum, who Variety reports are in negotiations to play the Wizard.

Apart from the news that Wicked will be broken up into two films, adding “even more complexity and surprise” to the plot of the well-known Broadway musical, Chu claimed little else about the movie adaptation has been made public.

Chu clarified in a letter he posted on social media in April, “It became more obvious over the course of the last year as we prepared for this production that it would be impossible to squeeze the plot of Wicked into a single movie without doing significant harm to it. As we attempted to omit songs or reduce the number of characters, those choices started to feel fatal compromises to the source material that had amused us all for so long.”

The 29-year-old Grande has made hints recently that filming may start soon. For her makeover into Glinda in October, she debuted her blonde hair, and even posted some behind-the-scenes images with Erivo, 35, on Instagram.

Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth, and Joel Grey played the original Elphaba, Glinda, and Wizard, respectively, in the Broadway premiere of Wicked in October 2003. Three Tony Awards and even a Grammy Award were later won by the production.

The musical depicts Elphaba’s life before she became known as the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and is based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name (which was adapted into the classic 1939 film starring Judy Garland).

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