People love Wicked. James Corden—not so much. The Broadway hit—you can still get tickets to it—has been around since 2003. Unless you’re a fan of the BBC sitcom Gavin & Stacy, Corden, who took over the Late Late Show in 2015, has not been a hit anywhere near that long. In the years he’s been in Hollywood he’s built up a loyal fanbase of … not him. Anyone but him. He’s a big enough star to turn up in event movies like Cats with A-list stars like Judi Dench and Idris Elba, yet people hate him. To be fair, Cats was widely regarded as such a confusing disaster that the creator of the original musical transformed into a dog person. The man behind the original musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber, was so put off cats that he adopted his first dog.
That’s a pretty meek response compared to what the very thought of Corden appearing in Wicked has prompted in thousands of Broadway fans. A Change.org petition is making the rounds—it’s fast approaching 50,000 signatures as of Monday—asking that "James Corden in no way shape or form should be in or near the production of Wicked the movie. That’s pretty much it.” The petition doesn’t come with any explanation of how we got here, but the comments hint at a lot of not-fandom, with one reading, "We’ve suffered enough," and another simply reporting that “James Corden is an extremely irritating man." The original Broadway production of Wicked won three Tony Awards and turned Idina Menzel into a household name. So far the only cast members announced in the Jon M. Chu film adaption are Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. (More James Corden stories.)
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