Wicked

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After turning the Broadway smash Wicked into a blockbuster film, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, last fall, director Jon M. Chu and supervising music editor Jack Dolman are returning later this month with the second part of the musical adaptation, Wicked: For Good, to bring the story of Elphaba, Glinda and Oz back to the big screen once again.

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Successfully translating the songs and script of a beloved musical onto film is no easy feat, but the task was made even more challenging from Chu and his team when it was decided to bisect the story into two separate parts. It called for some creative solutions to build out Wicked: For Good into a story that can stand on its own, and as part of this retooling of the show’s second act, Chu and Dolman worked with composer Stephen Schwartz to craft two new songs — “The Girl in the Bubble,” sung by Grande, and “No Place Like Home,” sung by Erivo.

There were other challenges for Chu as well — famously, the director opted for all of the songs to be sung live while filming, presenting a number of technological challenges when editing the film in post-production, and while trying to make the songs larger than life, the sheer scale of the cast, choreography and sets made the ensemble numbers a remarkable juggling act.

But if anyone is up for the task, it’s Chu. He has had a lot of experience directing music and dance-focused films in the past, including his adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. He also worked on multiple films in the Step Up franchise and Justin Bieber’s early concert film Never Say Never.

To walk Wicked fans through the process of adapting the songs of Wicked for the screen, the creation of two new songs, and what they’ve learned from working with top musicians like Grande, Erivo, Miranda and Bieber, Chu and Dolman joined Billboard‘s new music industry podcast, On the Record w/ Kristin Robinson, this week.

Below is an excerpt of that conversation.  

Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts here, or watch it below.

There are two new songs in Wicked: For Good which were not included in the original stage production. How did you work with Stephen Schwartz to make sure the new songs felt like they still fit with the original ones?

Chu: All credit to Stephen Schwartz, he had to have such an open mind and not be precious about what he wrote, and be open to new themes [and songs]. Because I knew by splitting the movie into two — well, one, that was a big decision, but I needed the room, otherwise too many songs would be cut in a one-movie version and wouldn’t be Wicked to me.

I knew this was the first time Wicked was going to be crystallized forever, and so I really wanted to be true to the musical that I fell in love with. I felt the duty to make sure it was Wicked in whatever form. By splitting it into two, then you have to face more questions in the second act, because that’s where I wanted to get closer to these girls. I didn’t just want it to be about Dorothy dropping in and the plot moving. I wanted to understand, once they made the choice to go different ways after “Defying Gravity, how hard those consequences really are.

There was no scene or song yet that let’s us getting closer to Elphaba and understanding how it feels —how lonely it is — to be courageous and make a hard choice. She faces the question of ‘why defend a home that doesn’t even want you?’ The same thing goes with Glinda — we never get to see the moment [in the musical] where she decides to break out and to pop her bubble. So, I knew we wanted to either tackle this in new scenes or songs for those two moments, and of course, Schwartz was like, “It’s a song. I know what it is. Give me 48 hours.” And he started sending me voice memos, which is a really fun thing to get in the middle of the day.

I can’t imagine getting a voice memo from Stephen Schwartz.

Chu: It’s pretty epic. One thing about Stephen that I dont think people know is that he is a great storyteller — not just writing music and lyrics, which he’s always fantastic with — but he also prioritizes storytelling and character before anything else. t’s not about necessarily the melody for him, it’s about is this telling the story, the feeling that you need for this story. And I love that about him.

Jack, as music editor, I know it’s been said before that throughout the filming of Wicked Cynthia and Ariana were singing live, but what’s the mix between singing live versus doing some pickups to smooth things out in the record studio later on?

Dolman: There’s very little of that kind of pickup material at all. It was like being in a candy store all the time. You have these vocals and you have alternate visual takes. And John can speak to this, the alternate visual takes are going to be chosen for a variety of reasons by the director whether that’s performance reasons, for emotional reasons, but each one has these incredible vocals so how do you even begin to choose? Working with singers at the caliber of Cynthia and Ariana is something that I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to be able to do again. And it just meant that you had this embarrassment of riches. You could swap out one live syllable of a vowel in one word with another one, and it would, it would embolden the character in that moment, and it was just incredible to be able to work with that.

Jon, As you’re trying to edit the film and create that final product for Wicked, how did you make decisions based on the fact that sometimes one vocal performance might be your favorite for the music, but also a different shot might be your favorite for the visual?

Chu: It was always a give and take, but when you have the best singers in the world you have a lot of control because when I’m on set I’m not worrying about if they are a little sharp or flat, they are always on. It was great and freeing to let them be live and it is something that we didn’t necessarily expect in the beginning.

But if you look at the film as a whole, we all had to agree on what our philosophy is on a musical movie. Because, I think, anyone taking on a musical movie could do in different ways. Some people want to have such clean tracks, no footsteps, no door closing, like they just it want to feel like it’s an album when you go into songs, but that’s just not my philosophy. That’s not why I love music or musicals or movement.

So to me, it was like, “How do you make it feel like it is emerging from the character just as naturally as dialog?” So yes, it might be a little bit messier. You might hear the chair move, and yes, we have to decide, like, how loud that chair is, is it on beat? Is it off? Is it okay that it’s off beat? That’s all part of the fabric what we’re doing.

Jon, you’ve just worked with so many great musicians as a filmmaker, from Justin Bieber, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande. I’m wondering, has there been anything that has surprised you with how these people work?

Chu: I feel very lucky. I learned a lot from each of them. When I think about Lin-Manuel Miranda, I don’t believe in genius. I think people can make genius things, but I don’t think people are just geniuses. However, Lin is pretty as close as you can get. His voice messages of songs are amazing and insane. He has great understanding of language. I think that’s the thing I learned the most, is how important lyrics are. I had done dance movies, and I had done movement stuff and and so I knew how to find the lyricism and musicality in that, but lyrics were so important In The Heights, and I had to make room for that, and I had to understand that and he had to teach me a little bit.

I think I felt that similarly with even Justin Bieber, even at 14 years old — no matter what you say about him, he was doing big shows. And in the tour bus, he’d be alone playing video games after coming down from the show, and then he would go — just naturally, as a kid — to his computer, and he would start writing music in every city he was in. He had a folder from every city and in those folders were tracks and tracks of stuff that he was doing alone. None of this was ever going to be released. It was him as a 14-year-old doing some amazing stuff, but it wasn’t, quote, unquote, “part of his brand” or whatever at that moment. I knew very early, “Oh, this kid is, like, the real deal. He loves music. He’s going to do this for the rest of his life. This is not a performance. This is just what he does.”

I felt that with Ari and Cynthia as well. What I love about someone like Ariana is she’s also like a tech nerd — like, she gets in that Pro Tools and gets down. Like, she wanted to talk about craft with me and in the tech of it all. When she sees that computer and she sits down, it’s like — she is fast and she knows exactly where to go. I thought that was so beautiful.

And Cynthia obviously knows her stuff inside and out. She has such great taste and opinions about how her voice is. So all of them were different, in a way, but all of them were about craft. It was not about the performance of being a star at all. All of them [are doing what] fulfills them as a musician. They’re not focused on the red carpet — even though they do that very well, too.

Tell me about “No Place Like Home,” Elphaba’s new song in the film.

Chu: “No Place Like Home” is a nod to the L. Frank Baum book… Stephen really brought this to the table and said, “You know what happens when you start to question the thing that you’ve been fighting for? What happens when your home doesn’t even want you alive? Is home a place or is it an idea? And if it’s an idea, why do you need to be here for it? Should we just leave?” I think those questions, at least for me, I’ve always wondered about where Elphaba sits with this. Stephen already had an insight on that through this song. It was really cool to hear it for the first time.

When did you show Cynthia and Ariana these new songs?

Chu: The first time the girls had ever heard it was the first time we all got together at my house for dinner. I was about to leave for London to shoot the film so everything was moved out, but there was a piano in there because the person moving in brought their family piano and moved that in early.

So we all had dinner. This is at the end of COVID lockdown so we hadn’t all seen each other in person. And Stephen Schwartz, Winnie Holzman and two girls are there the first time. And the girls are together in front of us — they never did chemistry read together — and Schwartz got on the piano and started playing their new songs for them. They got to listen to [“No Place Like Home”] in front of us, and they just, I mean, there was lots of tears. It was just one of those great moments.

And then he sang the other one for for Ari [“The Girl in the Bubble”], and then he started playing “For Good,” and he’s like, “Shall we?” And they just did it for the first time together. And at that moment, I took my kids out of their bedrooms, and I was like, “You better watch this thing right now. This is history.” When they sang, it was like a revelation — like, “Oh my goodness, the world does not know what’s about to happen.”

I didn’t realize those songs were written so early, during COVID lockdown. Did Steven Schwartz take into account Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s voices specifically when writing these extra songs?

Chu: Yeah, at that point, they had already been cast, but he we didn’t say anything to them yet. I don’t think, well, maybe they knew, but they didn’t know what the song was or how it was going to be. When they came over that day, I was sharing costume designs and some production designs with them, so they were getting a lot that day just dumped on them to get a sense of it all. Everything would evolve though. The songs and images would evolve over time, but this was a starting point to get us there.