Wicked Movie

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‘NO ONE MOURNS THE WICKED’
“In those first 60 seconds, you’re going to experience Oz in a totally new, more raw way,” says Chu of the film’s opening number, which flies over Oz (“you’ll see the nine million tulips that we really planted”) and finds the Munchkins celebrating the Wicked Witch’s death. “The stage show opens as almost dystopian, but I always thought that it’s a celebration that she’s dead, so this should be a happy occasion… It begins a little more joyous than the show, but then quickly takes a turn and gets darker.”



‘WHAT IS THIS FEELING?’
The story flashes back to Elphaba’s first day at Shiz University (like Hogwarts with singing), where she’s keen to learn all she can from the Wizard Of Oz. She’s assigned to star pupil Glinda (Ariana Grande). Complete opposites, they initially clash. “Everyone wonders why this song isn’t just call ‘Loathing’,” says Chu of the number, which features the word frequently in its lyrics, and plays as a montage of the girls’ first weeks at Shiz. “But I love that it’s called ‘What Is This Feeling?’ because I don’t think the feeling is loathing at all. It’s two people resisting the person who will change the rest of their life.”



‘DANCING THROUGH LIFE’
An elaborate sequence in the film sees school hunk Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) encouraging Shiz students, particularly Elphaba, to throw away their books and have fun. Chu calls it “the most technologically difficult” musical number, because it involves a dance sequence in a spinning tubular library — “we were literally defying gravity” — and covers multiple locations, eventually arriving in The Ozdust. In the stage show, it’s a ballroom. Here, “it’s the underbelly of Oz… What happens with Elphaba and Glinda there is the centre of our movie.”



‘POPULAR’
Glinda attempts to teach Elphaba the secrets of popularity in a song that’s more a test of comedy chops than vocals. Chu said it required some adapting to make it less vaudevillian than on stage, “which you can’t really do in a movie”, but he had no doubts about Grande’s comedy skills. “You’ve seen her on Saturday Night Live… She knows her timing.” He says Grande, who lobbied for years for the role, took it extremely seriously. “It’s a full transformation. She was doing Glinda’s voice all the time on set.”



‘DEFYING GRAVITY’
For the show’s biggest song, about Elphaba choosing her own destiny, Chu wanted to create a moment that “uses every inch of the screen and the speakers”. The song is a test for any vocalist, but Erivo made it even tougher for herself: like Grande, she chose to sing live on set. “Cynthia’s flying,” says Chu. “She has this big harness on. I’m like, ‘We’ll be blowing wind at you. You’ll be flipping. You probably can’t sing like that.’ She said, ‘I’m going to do it, Jon. I’m a singer.’” Erivo trained for a year for the sequence, then the actors’ strike hit, delaying shooting by six months. “She came back ready ,” he laughs. And went out on a very long, very high note. “I said, ‘Just fake the end, keep your mouth open…’ But she did it [for real]. Every time.” As with her character, never underestimate her power.