here<\/a>, or watch it below.<\/p>\n\n\tThere are two new songs in Wicked: For Good <\/em>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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu<\/strong>: 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 \u2014 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\u2019t be Wicked<\/em> to me. <\/p>\n\n\tI knew this was the first time Wicked<\/em> 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<\/em> in whatever form. By splitting it into two, then you have to face more questions in the second act, because that\u2019s where I wanted to get closer to these girls. I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cDefying Gravity, how hard those consequences really are.<\/p>\n\n\tThere was no scene or song yet that let\u2019s us getting closer to Elphaba and understanding how it feels \u2014how lonely it is \u2014 to be courageous and make a hard choice. She faces the question of \u2018why defend a home that doesn\u2019t even want you?\u2019 The same thing goes with Glinda \u2014 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, \u201cIt\u2019s a song. I know what it is. Give me 48 hours.\u201d And he started sending me voice memos, which is a really fun thing to get in the middle of the day.<\/p>\n
\n\tI can\u2019t imagine getting a voice memo from Stephen Schwartz.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu<\/strong>: It\u2019s pretty epic. One thing about Stephen that I dont think people know is that he is a great storyteller \u2014 not just writing music and lyrics, which he\u2019s always fantastic with \u2014 but he also prioritizes storytelling and character before anything else. t\u2019s not about necessarily the melody for him, it\u2019s about is this telling the story, the feeling that you need for this story. And I love that about him.<\/p>\n\n\tJack, as music editor, I know it\u2019s been said before that throughout the filming of Wicked <\/em>Cynthia and Ariana were singing live, but what\u2019s the mix between singing live versus doing some pickups to smooth things out in the record studio later on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tDolman: There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t know if I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tJon, As you\u2019re trying to edit the film and create that final product for Wicked<\/em>, 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu: 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\u2019m on set I\u2019m 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\u2019t necessarily expect in the beginning. <\/p>\n
\n\tBut 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\u2019s an album when you go into songs, but that\u2019s just not my philosophy. That\u2019s not why I love music or musicals or movement. <\/p>\n
\n\tSo to me, it was like, \u201cHow do you make it feel like it is emerging from the character just as naturally as dialog?\u201d 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\u2019s off beat? That\u2019s all part of the fabric what we\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n
\n\tJon, you\u2019ve just worked with so many great musicians as a filmmaker, from Justin Bieber, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande. I\u2019m wondering, has there been anything that has surprised you with how these people work? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu<\/strong>: I feel very lucky. I learned a lot from each of them. When I think about Lin-Manuel Miranda, I don\u2019t believe in genius. I think people can make genius things, but I don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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<\/em>, and I had to make room for that, and I had to understand that and he had to teach me a little bit.<\/p>\n\n\tI think I felt that similarly with even Justin Bieber, even at 14 years old \u2014 no matter what you say about him, he was doing big shows. And in the tour bus, he\u2019d be alone playing video games after coming down from the show, and then he would go \u2014 just naturally, as a kid \u2014 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\u2019t, quote, unquote, \u201cpart of his brand\u201d or whatever at that moment. I knew very early, \u201cOh, this kid is, like, the real deal. He loves music. He\u2019s going to do this for the rest of his life. This is not a performance. This is just what he does.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tI felt that with Ari and Cynthia as well. What I love about someone like Ariana is she\u2019s also like a tech nerd \u2014 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\u2019s like \u2014 she is fast and she knows exactly where to go. I thought that was so beautiful.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd 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\u2019re not focused on the red carpet \u2014 even though they do that very well, too.<\/p>\n
\n\t Tell me about \u201cNo Place Like Home,\u201d Elphaba\u2019s new song in the film. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu: \u201cNo Place Like Home\u201d is a nod to the L. Frank Baum book\u2026 Stephen really brought this to the table and said, \u201cYou know what happens when you start to question the thing that you\u2019ve been fighting for? What happens when your home doesn\u2019t even want you alive? Is home a place or is it an idea? And if it\u2019s an idea, why do you need to be here for it? Should we just leave?\u201d I think those questions, at least for me, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen did you show Cynthia and Ariana these new songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu<\/strong>: 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. <\/p>\n\n\tSo we all had dinner. This is at the end of COVID lockdown so we hadn\u2019t 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 \u2014 they never did chemistry read together \u2014 and Schwartz got on the piano and started playing their new songs for them. They got to listen to [\u201cNo Place Like Home\u201d] in front of us, and they just, I mean, there was lots of tears. It was just one of those great moments. <\/p>\n
\n\tAnd then he sang the other one for for Ari [\u201cThe Girl in the Bubble\u201d], and then he started playing \u201cFor Good,\u201d and he\u2019s like, \u201cShall we?\u201d 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, \u201cYou better watch this thing right now. This is history.\u201d When they sang, it was like a revelation \u2014 like, \u201cOh my goodness, the world does not know what\u2019s about to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tI didn\u2019t realize those songs were written so early, during COVID lockdown. Did Steven Schwartz take into account Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo\u2019s voices specifically when writing these extra songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tChu<\/strong>: Yeah, at that point, they had already been cast, but he we didn\u2019t say anything to them yet. I don\u2019t think, well, maybe they knew, but they didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.billboard.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2139723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21799,357874],"class_list":["post-2139722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-film","tag-wicked"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Director-Jon-M-Chu-Talks-the-Music-of-Wicked-For.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2139722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2139724,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139722\/revisions\/2139724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2139723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2139722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2139722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2139722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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