Wicked star Ariana Grande says she used to wear a Dorothy dress as a child. But not in the way that fans might expect from The Wizard of Oz.
“Strangely, I wore it with a Scream mask, which is neither here nor there,” Grande admits during a virtual press event. “It doesn’t really add value to the story.”
One might politely disagree, especially when her Wicked star Cynthia Erivo says there are photos.
However, Grande’s unique twist of genre illustrates how The Wizard of Oz speaks to people across generations in different ways. “I would sit in front of the TV and study Judy Garland and how she sang and how she held her arms. It just always was an escape for me,” says Grande, who plays Glinda—pronounced Ga-linda—in this Oz origin story based on the popular novel by Gregory Maguire and the Tony Award winning Broadway musical. “The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy and all of these gorgeous characters have been a safe space for so many people who feel alone or othered or lost or are looking for friendships.”
Wicked tells the story of the early friendship between Glinda and Elphaba, played by Erivo, during their days of sorcery school. The events outline the rift that made pop culture’s most iconic frenemies before the Munchkins sang “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead” to eulogize Elphaba’s sister.
For Erivo, who gets her first film musical lead after winning a Tony for The Color Purple, echoes Grande’s sentiment that The Wizard of Oz and its witches are inevitably part of any theatre kid’s backstory. She especially finds inspiration in singers who’ve come before them, like Judy Garland.
“I still listen to her live at Carnegie Hall record where she does ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ I think it’s the last time she does it and it’s heartbreaking,” says Erivo. “And then The Wiz came along and with that Dorothy I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh—I recognize her as well.’ Diana Ross as Dorothy was one of those moments where I felt really seen and I connected with that.”
By the time Erivo saw Wicked, she says she already knew the songs by heart. These personal connections help make Wicked, the film, one of the most euphorically great movie musicals in years.
Co-star Jonathan Bailey, who plays the charming prince Fiyero, agrees with Erivo. “It’s funny: I was a theater kid, but also obsessed with music and all the different elements of it. The fact that we’ve all started in theater I think really shows,” he says. “I didn’t realize how much of a theater kid I was, actually, until I was in this film.”
Bailey, like Grande, has his own Wicked wardrobe story. He admits that rehearsals and takes for his showstopping number “Dancing Through Life” invited one wardrobe malfunction after another. “But doing a front flip in that, the first time I did it, all the buttons popped. My crotch split 99 times,” he laughs. “In between takes, I got so sweaty that I had to strip down to literally nothing but a thong. So, that’s the slightly less elegant IRL version of ‘Dancing Through Life’.”
Fortunately, though, with all three of Wicked’s key stars having seasoned stage roots, the musical effervescently comes alive. The adaptation by director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) follows the growing trend of movie musicals that favour live singing. While recording the songs during filming is traditionally a no-no dating back to the advent of sound production, Wicked joins musicals like Les Misérables that challenge performers to express the vocals as part of their performances, rather than having them lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks. It’s a daunting task for the film editors and sound mixers as each take inevitably differs. But the actors say it give them a creative advantage.
“It allowed us to get closer to the action, to the feelings that we wanted to share within these characters,” observes Erivo. “If we’re pre-recorded, you can’t really move outside the margins or improv or change. Singing live gave us the chance to really play with the characters, play with the music a little more and have more fun.”
For Grande, live singing also means a greater chance to connect with the music emotionally. “These songs are far too emotional to be stuck to a track,” she notes. “We have to do it live in solidarity with the many beautiful Elphabas and Glindas on Broadway who do eight shows a week. If we have to do bajillion takes of the song, then we’re going to do it with our sister witches in solidarity.”
“When something’s as joyful and as vocational as it felt, singing and dancing, and returning to my original passions, there was nothing really that was complicated or tricky about it,” adds Bailey. The actor says that playing the dashing prince was a fun chance to inject his theatrical background with tricks he’d learned with the power of the close-up on Bridgerton or Fellow Travellers, which he was shooting when work for Wicked began. “The important thing to understand was that Fiyero, with a flutter of an eyelash or a flick of a toupee, could charm everyone in his way: boys, girls, librarians, students, in order to give him the fullest of arcs,” Bailey says on bringing these elements together.
For Grande, who easily steals the film with her turn as Glinda, casting the right spell meant finding the right space between Wicked and her work as a pop performer. She says the difference was really one of tone. “Glinda has an operatic, very classical type of voice. Even though my range has always been a high range, the style of singing takes a lot of retraining,” says Grande. The star says she spent over two months with her vocal coach Eric Vitro to find Glinda’s voice.
“Everything from my speaking voice to my singing voice, everything sort of shifted because, just like any other muscle in the body, the voice learns new habits with training and with time,” adds Grande. Grande, like her co-stars, says the vocal training was just one part of strenuous preparations.
“The main difference is that with theatre, you are rehearsing solidly for six weeks, so the world stops around you and you have to finish the hat,” Bailey says. “But it’s almost easier when you are in the same room with the creatives, with your whole ensemble, and everyone else that you’re on stage with because you share that focus and you live and breathe it for six weeks. Your stamina increases naturally. By the time you start previews, you’re sort of ready to go. With film, you’re doing that on your own.” Although Bailey is quick to name-check the choreographers, trainers, costumers who helped bring Fiyero to life.
Director Chu echoes Bailey’s thoughts on collaboration, noting that bringing the musical numbers of Wicked to life cinematically took the collective efforts of the production designers, camera crew, and performers. Wicked refreshingly makes full use of its cinematic canvas as the characters don’t simply use the width and length of the stage, but also the vertical axis as the musical numbers invite the performers to interact with the environment in ways that the stage production simply cannot.
Chu says he found inspiration for this interactive environment in L. Frank Baum’s original Wizard of Oz text, as well as the illustrations by W.W. Denslow that accompanied it. “For every piece of design, we wanted to create a world to immerse the audience into it and break the matte painting,” he explains, referencing the backdrop of the classic film. “Oz has been visited several times in our lifetime cinematically, and so we wanted to give the audience an experience that they couldn’t have before. It’s a touchable world, where things are physical. You can touch the ground. You can touch the thing. There are scratches and dust.”
Among Wicked’s extensive production design? Nine million tulips planted to create the magic of Oz, along with a full forest for Elphaba (where real birds eventually nested and sang live with Erivo), and flowing water to echo the illustrations of Baum’s book. Chu says the team also built the Yellow Brick Road and a functional train to transport Elphaba and Glinda to Oz, but that may be a given.
“It’s how you saw the world as a kid. And in Oz, what we realized is, it is a delight,” says Chu. “It’s a distraction. The happiness is the most important thing while other things may be happening behind the scenes.”
The dimensions of Wicked give a lively energy to “Dancing through Life” as Fiyero does high kicks atop the library tables, while the rolling stacks of the library invite the chorus to dance as if they’re in tunnels of a shape-shifting funhouse. In the climactic number “Flying Gravity,” Erivo and Grande ascend the school’s lofty bell tower before Elphaba flies the coop.
Chu says that getting “Defying Gravity” right proved one of the trickiest shoots for Wicked. But he also cites it as a moment that harnesses elements of film and theatre alike thanks to the camera’s proximity to the actors. “You want to hear Cynthia say, ‘Something has changed within me. Something’s not the same,’ and you want to be right there with her,” says Chu. “And yet you’re in a movie, so want to feel things you could never do on stage. You want to be in the sky with her. You want to see her fly. And you want to feel the exhilaration of that.”
Erivo credits the intense vocal preparations for helping her hit the emotional highs of Wicked when time came to perform “Defying Gravity.” The star says that Wicked actually changed her voice to a coloratura, a soprano range traditionally associated with opera. “I usually do a lot of soul and R&B and lots of big belting stuff, but it uses a different place in my voice,” Erivo says. “And I’m usually on the ground.”
And in keeping with the theme of wardrobe quirks during the conversation, Erivo says she had to sing with a hefty microphone pack hidden in Elphaba’s witch hat. “Putting it on was a really special moment, that the marking of the witch,” says Erivo. “It’s how I felt about when I first held my broom.”
The difference with “Defying Gravity,” she says, was in learning to sing and project without having one’s feet on the ground. “I had to find a different way of using my vocal chords combined, literally, without using gravity,” says Erivo. “That was an interesting challenge, but I really enjoyed it. Once it worked, it was thrilling.”
Erivo says she hopes audiences fly high as part one of Wicked ends and echoes Grande’s earlier sentiment about how the world of Oz brings people together. “Knowing what it feels like to be an outsider, knowing what it feels like to be different, to be the one on the outside, to be a Black queer woman playing this green woman has its parallels, I know what it is to not necessarily feel like the world makes space for you,” says Erivo. “I think we arrived right on time. I think it’s something that we all desperately need: connection, friendship, the capacity for change, and the capacity to accept others and their differences.”
