When the “Wicked” singalongs end starting Christmas Day, I’ll be there — but not because I have any intention of personally raising my voice in the song. (Or maybe I’ll just join Dr. Dillmond, the goat master, whose zinger characteristics are probably the closest to the sounds I can produce.) He does You have a natural curiosity about how lucky a whole group of fans will be to sing along with cutting-edge musical theater songs…this one full of stops and starts and sudden transitions from major to minor chords. There will definitely be some trained singers and actors filling the AMC seats who can keep up with these tunes. For the rest of us, a realization may come: I’m not that girlAnd maybe neither are you.
So what other reason do we have to look forward to multiple official sing-alongs, if not, like singing along? This is easy: translations.
Which is to say that the songs in “Wicked” are so good — some of the best musical theater has ever produced, in my opinion — that there’s a benefit to having an environment that allows you to focus on the songcraft without having to be distracted by all the visual distractions the film offers Very understandable. As a 20-year fan of Wicked, my only issue with Wicked as a film is how director John Cho and editor Myron Kirsten occasionally redirect our attention to something else charming or dazzling happening on screen, when what I want most is two and a half hours of close-ups without… Stop by for Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo to deliver the lyrics to classic songs. This is not a serious complaint on my part; I understand that a film music. But I’ll be happy to see each song hit the bottom of the cinema screens, come December 25th. Because for a select subset of “Wicked” fans, the star isn’t actually Erivo or Grande, big as they are. Both – it’s Stephen Schwartz.
Of course, there is a way to get the gist of the experience I expect without waiting for Christmas. It’s a matter of streaming or purchasing “Wicked: The Soundtrack” while settling on Genius.com or any other site that offers lyrics to follow the bouncing ball, so to speak. Even if you feel like you’re getting the gist of the words through the theatrical presentation, there’s so much richness and nuance that’s easy to miss amid the sweeping cuts, CGI, and dazzle and dazzle of it all. The album puts another exclamation mark on Schwartz’s rare brilliance as a composer and lyricist, a la Sondheim. It’s not heresy to say that Schwartz feels like a populist Sondheim in what he did with “Wicked.” The whole score is dark, complex, unwieldy and destructive… and if it sometimes comes across as something people feel like bubblegum, that also attests to the enormity of the achievement.
The first and simplest thing to say about the soundtrack is that they didn’t screw it up. You don’t have to use much of your imagination to think about how to blatantly update a result like this. (Raise your hand if you imagine for a moment that Ozdust Ball could have adopted an EDM beat for a few bars. But that’s not the case.) Schwartz himself co-produced the album with Greg Wells (“Greatest Showman”) and original music-director/arranger Stephen Oremus, it simply looks like the legitimate version if it had something like twice the size of the hole. And for a young audience of budding theater kids, it will forever open them up (no pun) to sound as well as traditional Broadway form, even with content that may seem as fresh to them as a mix of Taylor Swift and today’s titles.
There’s not much that Grande and Erivo do that doesn’t directly follow the model set by Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel two decades ago. But their vocal performances still seem surprising in small, important ways. The epic opening number, “No One Mourns for the Wicked,” allows Grande to run the gamut from hell—predicting moments of both dumb-blonde comedy and operatic tragedy that will strike her throughout the score’s duration. I knew she could go to great lengths in the pursuit of fun (hey, I’ve seen “Sam & Cat”), but hearing her repeat the perfectly sarcastic line “Good news” with all her Sarah Brightman superpowers is an instant tip-off. You’ll be nailing the whole bunch of stuff coming up too.
Erivo takes longer to fully establish itself, by design. In fact, she backed off enough that it wasn’t even halfway through “Defying Gravity” that she felt like she was giving it her full belt. Although the film has already given her “The Wizard and I” as a model much earlier, Erivo seems to keep a little of her full power in reserve, for the moment she fully awakens. The brilliance of those songs as twins in the first act is that “The Wizard and I” is a classic “I want” song, while “Gravity” has to go further as a – literally – ballad. I don’t want to song. Erivo and her singing staff have been wise here: You have to hold back a little, even if it’s just 5%, when you probably have the most middle fingers in Broadway history on the horizon.
While we’re all waiting for that, what fun is Erivo in some of the build-up numbers, having plenty of low key, conversational and even naive vocal moments that make her a lovable innocent before she becomes a truly angry goddess. Having just made the case for Defying Gravity as an enduring film, which Erivo delivers flawlessly, is it strange to say that I reserve a little more fondness for her delicate rendition of I’m Not That Girl?
Even if that’s the case, here we are making the case for “I’m Not That Girl” as the sleeper track of “Wicked,” a song that will never be as popular as… well, you know, but it will knock you down if you hear it at the right time, In a miserable time in your life. Its placement in the middle of the first act, or in the middle of the movie here, suggests that for some people it’s fleeting, and close to completely incomplete when it comes to plot progression. By Schwartz’s standards, it is simple and unambitious, being the only song in the entire score without a single key change, let alone complications. It’s also the only one that doesn’t have the slightest bit of narrative information, interpolation of other themes, or any other complicating factors that prevent it from standing alone. And standing alone is what it’s all about, all right. You don’t even have to be Swifty to enjoy the emo sadness in lines like “Don’t wish, don’t start / Wishing only hurts the heart.” Playing this ballad with all the sweet fatalism it deserves, Erivo is 100% that girl.
Other songs carry uniqueness. Jonathan Bailey does a good job of skidding along the surface of things with “Dancing Through Life,” which — in one of “Wicked”‘s many usurps of expectations — seems to position Fierrot to be a Gaston or Prince Hans-style hunk. -The villain. Before that rug is pulled out to give him his humanity, he gives a good name. And “life is less painful for the brainless” (and the subsequent “reckless/rough” pairing) would be a good line even if Schwartz wasn’t foreshadowing his fate in the next chapter/movie. The rotating library sets during this sequence are a marvel of production design, but another example of how badly you need to hear the soundtrack alone to catch every bit of the amusing nihilism of the lyrics.
“What is this feeling?” It offers two things everyone wants: it’s a patter song, or as close as it gets to “Wicked” — and, more importantly, it’s the first chance to see how well Grande and Erivo get along as frenemies, before the much heavier sound. Pas de deux They do this in discussing the merits of “defying gravity.” (Spoiler alert ahead.) Then, that song’s creators, Menzel and Chenoweth, appear on new verses penned by Schwartz to give them a famous cameo on “One Short Day.” Schwartz’s entirely new additional compositions won’t come until Part II, but the interstitial portion he’s added here offers a good omen of even greater musical surprises in a single year.
“Popular” has that overt Ronald Reagan reference that everyone picked up on when he first opened the show, but few newcomers to the song likely would now, 20 years later — a reference to the “Great Communicators,” whom he mentioned Galinda as stronger than bright. It’s just a passing bit of political subtext, tucked almost unnoticed into the frothy number, a joke that already had a bit of dust on it when it first came out, while everyone focused on Ariana Grande being pretty — and very stunning — in pink.
But the opening and closing numbers for Part 1 of “The Bad Guys”? This is music So By their political nature, these bookends are protest songs. “Defying Gravity” is a paean to activity, as Glinda and Elphaba argue and then unhappily settle their differences across the divide between complacency and risk. Here, it’s as poignant and poignant as ever – a song for anyone who’s ever had to make a conscious decision in life to take the red pill and deal with the consequences, or admire someone else who did.
However, the song that always piques my interest is the one that was initially almost innocuously hidden in plain sight: “No One Mourns for the Wicked.” On first listen, it sounds like a fairly mundane and innocuous musical scene, even if watching the movie, setting Wicker Woman up for incineration seems ominous. On the second or third listen, and beyond, it can be devastating. Schwartz and his collaborators craft the story with Oz populated by an angry, self-righteous, deluded, and even bloodthirsty mob… led by a woman who goes along with the Big Lie, hoping to eventually rebuild the fallen Earth. To genocide and fascism under corrupt leadership. Light holiday fare that allows us to forget all of America’s problems, right?
In “No One Grieving for the Wicked” we get the most disturbing conclusion, with a group of thousands calling for revenge as Grande rolls to piercing high notes, pretending to put her stamp of approval on the national travesty before her. If that doesn’t comfort you, you’re not really listening. But who, at the beginning of the film, when coats and popcorn are still being shuffled, and the film has barely begun to reveal its cards?
This is another way in which “Wicked: The Soundtrack” becomes essential post-film listening, to absorb all the groundwork Schwartz and company have laid to predict what is actually as much a social and political tragedy as it is a fantastical musical comedy. . It’s the ability to contain all of these elements, so brilliantly, that makes “Wicked” not only the greatest song score of our time (or at least tied with “Hamilton” for that) but also one of the greatest songs of all time.
And listen, if you just want to ditch the dark social metaphor stuff and just spin “popular” over and over until you get the grooves out of your stream, that’s okay too. We’ve all been there. And thanks to how well Erivo and Grande deliver this material, we’ll remain in that winning female friendship –Everything situation for a much longer period. See you at the singing.