How ‘Wicked’ Adapted Its Broadway Roots so the Film Score Could Fly
There’s a secret magic hidden just below the surface in the Land of Oz. No, it’s not the Grimmerie, nor even the many aspects of visual design crafted by the production team of “Wicked.” It’s the film’s score, which builds on Stephen Schwartz’s classic Broadway compositions and allows director Jon M. Chu to stretch and extend sequences so cinematic moments can really land. Composer John Powell created these musical bridges across numbers and across the Emerald City, but he got the job without having seen any version of “Wicked” before.
“I knew some of the songs, obviously,” Powell told IndieWire. “One of my first gigs in Hollywood was working on the songs of ‘The Prince of Egypt’ with Stephen [Schwartz] and Hans [Zimmer] and so I had to admit to him that I’d never seen the musical.”
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But that outsider perspective was invaluable to the music team on “Wicked,” many of whom could trace their roots back to the original musical. Powell thinks of the film version of “Wicked” as an emotional reaction to the memory of the Broadway musical, which gave him the freedom to play with the existing material without being overburdened with its history.
“My gig was to try and suck up the emotional content of everything Stephen had done and make sure that it was working for this new movie,” Powell said. “It’s about learning the ‘Wicked’ language, but then applying that to cinema.”
What music needs to do on a stage and what music needs to do coming through Atmos speakers of a movie theater are decidedly different assignments. But Powell found that the existing musical language he was adapting was already pretty cinematic.
“The grammar of [Schwartz’s] harmonic language was very sophisticated. It doesn’t matter that he was using drums and bass and guitars and stuff. It’s still an extremely tight harmonically, emotionally-strung set of cordal and melodic leaps,” Powell said.
The keyword to maybe the entire “Wicked” score is “leap.” Octave jumps, particularly any time Elphaba sings “Unlimited,” are at the heart of the musical’s language, a deliberate echo of Dorothy’s “Somewhere” in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and evocative of a hero’s journey.
“When you leap like that, you’re searching for something. I think that language was built into Stephen’s language — if you go back and look at ‘Godspell’, it has that searching and optimism,” Powell said. “I think it was the shapes that I looked for at the time, and then the language that is different is the driving — how do you drive the thing, and also the intensity of the language, the density has to be lessened, and the melodic quotations have to be a little bit moved away from the dialogue.”
Powell acknowledges that it probably seems like the demands of the score were different, but he found key similarities in Schwartz’s musical style with his own — even if Schwartz isn’t keen on major thirds and Powell snuck some thirds on the bottom of cues. The real negotiation happened with managing melodic ideas from the songs so that the score could do narrative lifting without hitting the audience over the head with themes or pre-empt our thinking about the most iconic numbers in the Broadway show.
For instance, Powell tried building a little rhythmic riff on “Defying Gravity” into moments earlier in the film — when Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) meet at school — so it would work as a kind of musical engine for our Wicked Witch, driving her ever closer to her destiny.
“If nobody knew the song, we probably would have done it, probably it could have worked because it’s this little rhythmic motif that tells you this is an itch the character has and you can follow it through, but we were in a situation where [‘Defying Gravity’] was the thing; we’re balancing between people who have never seen the musical and people who have, so we had to be very careful about both sets,” Powell said. “It took seven reels to figure out how to do that last reel.”
Not that the reel with “Defying Gravity” wasn’t complicated in its own right. Film editor Myron Kerstein told IndieWire that the risks of stopping and starting what is arguably the best-known musical number from “Wicked” were incredibly high.
“By embracing these stops — which are really difficult because, first of all, it’s technically challenging to stop a song on the dime and then make that feel like you didn’t just pump the brakes too hard and you’re skidding across the tarmac, you know?” Kerstein told IndieWire. “[But we realized] a moment of connection was going to help the song build into an even bigger climax.”
Kerstein juggles multiple lines of action throughout the sequence, especially if you count the moments of Erivo and Grande interacting as a separate throughline from Erivo’s performance, and leans on Powell’s score extension of the number to move through them while trying to hold the audience as close to the drama of the moment as possible.
“Even before the war cry, we stopped the song again to have these building moments of everyone looking at [Elphaba], these beautiful, Spielbergian, ‘Jurassic Park’ moments of looking at this deity, but we’re pulling every lever editorially,” Kerstein said. “And then we have John Powell’s score in between trying to connect all the dots to feel the power of that completion of Elphaba’s origin story — when she puts on the hat and the cape and this moment of, you know, the superhero has been born.”
Kerstein relies on Powell’s musical bridges to keep the audience held close to the song, even when Elphaba isn’t singing, and uses little variations to ease us in and out of the number’s different musical modes — which range from theater-belting with a magical, Broadway-sized cape to purely cinematic, when Elphaba sees her younger self (Karis Musongole) reflected in the glass of the tower as she falls.
Conductor and executive music producer Stephen Oremus told IndieWire that the balance between Powell’s score and Schwartz’s original song was a high-wire act. “Stephen Schwartz’s song provides such an emotional and dramatic lift off for each moment— but then Powell was able to keep ramping up the tension with the chase sequences and the broom levitation— not to mention the stunning moment of the fall when she grabs the broom! The handoff back to the song is so natural as the song team builds the music back into Cynthia’s triumphant vocal,” Oremus said.
“The whole thing about ‘Defying Gravity’ is I’d done lots of analysis of bits and variants on it — and I think in the second movie, you’ll hear quite a lot more of where I’ve used the rhythmic nature of it,” Powel said. “By the time we get to it [in Film 1], there’s this feeling of withholding, I think, and I think that was the right thing to do. So, it’s really about flow and about being very careful to allow the story to unfold and never pushing in advance of it.”
In all his work on “Wicked,” the thing Powell wanted to avoid was being ahead of the audience in any way. So the carefully calibrated flow between the score and existing music ultimately came out of Powell using his outsider perspective to honor the love Chu holds for Schwartz’s original work.
“The dialogue between me, Stephen, and Jon was Stephen being right there, knowing exactly how everything worked, Jon holding onto his memory from 20 years of how he felt about [seeing the show], and me trying to bring the perspective of someone who’s watching the film for the first time,” Powell said. “It was very much a grinding of all those feelings until something very honest came out of it.”
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