‘Wicked’ Director Explains How Secret Broadway Cameos Happened: ‘It Just Clicked’
It’s Musicals Week at IndieWire. With “Wicked” about to sparkle over theaters, we’re celebrating the best of the movie-musical genre.
Editor’s note: The following interviews contains spoilers for a fun musical surprise in “Wicked.“
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In Universal’s big-screen “Wicked,” there’s plenty for fans of the original musical to love. For those who have spent the better part of the last 20 years listening to the Grammy-winning cast recording (hi!), a big question heading into the film was if original Broadway Elphaba and Glinda, Tony-winning Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, respectively, would make an appearance.
Happily, they do, and it ranks among the very best treats of the adaptation. In the film, when Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) head to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard, they first stumble around the technicolor, magical metropolis — and even catch a little “welcome to our town” performance.
“We knew [we] wanted to include Kristin and Idina somewhere in the movie,” director Jon M. Chu told IndieWire. “And every time we put them as a cameo somewhere, it just felt not appropriate. It felt like it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t utilizing their talents. So when I was talking with [‘Wicked’ composer] Stephen Schwartz, we had this section, it was Wiz-a-Mania. I wanted it to be an amusement park ride, like, ‘It’s a Small World’ where they get in a boat and it goes through this history of Oz. It was gonna be really fun, but it always felt like too much. And then I suggested: What if Kristin and Idina, that was a show that they were in, and they’re the most famous actors in Emerald City? It just clicked.”
Chu continued, “And Stephen’s immediately like, ‘OK, got it. Just go to sleep. In the morning, I’m going to send you something.’ And he rewrote the whole [song] for them, and it was fantastic, his little nods to them. It gave them stuff to do, and it gave them sort of [a] handoff, and it got to show them off, and it got to allow us, the audience, the filmmakers, to pay homage to them and give them their applause.”
The tune, part of an extended “One Short Day,” is one of the only music moments in Part 1 not in the Broadway production. The scene finds Menzel and Chenoweth iconically singing together, and also gives each actress a special moment with their big-screen character counterpart.
“We had them for one night, that was the other thing,” Chu said of the time crunch to make the cameo happen. “So we snuck them into London and from the sun down to sun up, that’s when we got to shoot them, hidden away from the paparazzi cameras that were surrounding our sets. And it was very, very special to have them, Stephen, Winnie [Holzman], David Stone, Marc Platt, all the original team there felt like a full circle, and allowed us to also tell them how much we appreciate them.”
Spare a thought for the Broadway fan in your life, who might just have passed out when Menzel nods to her iconic “ah-ahh-ah” “Defying Gravity” riff.
“All Stephen Schwartz,” Chu confirmed of that note-perfect thrill. “Stephen is like, ‘Guys, I don’t know if this is too far, but I had to give [her] the thing. We’re like, ‘No, that’s the dream.’ Of course!”
The wizard himself couldn’t have scripted it any better.
A Universal Studios production, “Wicked” is in theaters now.
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