Warning: Spoilers ahead for major Wicked plot points. Today, Universal’s marketing team bucked current trends and released a new Wicked teaser trailer that features actual singing in it! This teaser gives fans of the Broadway musical and curious newcomers alike everything they could’ve ever hoped for: Ariana Grande as Galinda doing comedically clumsy choreo in “Popular”! A new Cynthia Erivo–as–Elphaba riff in “The Wizard and I”! Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero hamming it up on “Dancing Through Life”! A rat playing the drums! Jeff Goldbl— heyyyyyyyy, wait a second. A rat playing the drums? Pause at the 11-second mark, and you can see her clear as day: a one-second insert shot of a bug-eyed rodent wearing a little multicolor ascot absolutely wailing on a tiny drum kit.
I’m using “rat” as a catchall, but she looks more like a sugar glider, the rat’s whimsical marsupial airborne sister. Later on in the trailer, you get a wider shot of the rest of the band, which is all made up of CGI animals: a bird of prey on wind chimes, a monkey on strings, a giraffe on harmonica, and oh my God, Is the rodent drummer riding the harmonica-playing giraffe? If you zoom in closer, you can see that it says “Ozdust” on our little diva’s drum kit — as in the Ozdust Ballroom, a.k.
a. “the most swankified place in town,” a.k.
a. the nightclub where Elphaba and Galinda and Fiyero and Boq and Nessarose and presumably Bowen Yang’s character “slough off” their school.
