Yahoo Lifestyle The Music of ‘Wicked’: Stephen Schwartz and Arranger Stephen Oremus on What It Took to Make a Classic Broadway Song Score Even More Popular
Stephen Schwartz will see you now. The worthier wizard of “Wicked” is the one who wrote one of Broadway’s all-time top song scores and now, a little over two decades later, has overseen the transition of that music into a film that is almost certainly on the fast track for Best Picture contention. He is not the only veteran of the seminal Broadway team on board for the music, either, as the soundtrack finds him rejoined by the stage production’s original arranger and music supervisor, Stephen Oremus.
It’s a world-class Team of Stephens. Beyond having been the primary instigator behind turning “Wicked” into a stage musical (drawn from Gregory Maguire’s book), Schwartz is renowned for winning six Tonys and three Oscars as the composer and/or lyricist of the shows “Pippin” and “Godspell” and films like “Enchanted.” Oremus, meanwhile, is a Tony winner for his orchestrations on “The Book of Mormon” and “Kinky Boots,” and has also taken the lead on fleshing out the scores for Broadway shows like “Frozen” and “Avenue Q” and the film “Frozen 2.” (They collaborated closely with a non-Stephen, music producer Greg Wells; look for a separate interview with him coming in this space.)
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Schwartz is currently Oscar-shortlisted for collaborating with John Powell on the instrumental score for “Wicked.” But he’s already gone down in history for song-based achievements, which involve teaching the world exactly what a “war cry” sounds like when divas are enlisted. Variety talked with him and Oremus about past and present creative decisions that went into the music, shortly after the film passed a $600 million global box office mark, making it the highest grossing Broadway musical film adaptation in history.
People who have been “Wicked” fans at points over the last 20 years have been rediscovering different songs that they had kind of forgotten amid the more famous numbers. Is there any song in the score you’re happy to see people rediscover?
Schwartz: No, I don’t think there’s one. But I’m enjoying seeing different things that come that I’ve seen very recently. One was librarians at the Library of Congress who somehow had memorized the choreography for “What Is This Feeling?” and were performing it in the aisles, which was wild. They were very good at it, too, and how they managed to learn that choreography, I have no idea. And then just today, it was a really funny video that someone sent me of a young girl in her garage, painted green and doing a a lip-sync version of “Defying Gravity” by standing in a wagon with her father kind of rotating the wagon around. And then at the very end, as she did the war cry, the father lowered the garage door, like a show curtain. So I’m enjoying seeing these creative personal ways people are enjoying for themselves some of the songs. I don’t have a particular favorite. Stephen, do you have a favorite?
Oremus: Well, as you was saying, the fact that “What Is This Feeling” has become this dance craze go across the internet has been kind of nuts. And the other one that actually I think has been a really the big surprise is the love and appreciation for “I’m Not That Girl,” which is this quiet gem of an emotional moment in Act 1 of our show. And after the film, so many people have said, “Oh my gosh, the way she sings that song, and the way that that comes out of the scene, it’s so beautiful and touching.” I’ve really been pleasantly surprised by that.
Schwartz: Yeah, that’s one of the ones that Stephen Oremus and I made changes in for the movie from the show — how we get into the song, and also, the tempo of it is much slower. We slowed it down once we heard how Cynthia (Erivo) sang it and just wanted to give her voice the room to breathe in it, along with the sort of instrumental interlude. There are differences about it that I’m glad people are appreciating.
Oremus: Interestingly enough, that is the only song in the score that we changed the key for. And we actually raised the key for Cynthia, because it sat in a much, much more rich register for her.
That’s interesting. There’s a history of tailoring things for the actresses that goes back to the original Broadway production. I read that the vocal approach for the character of Glinda ended up changing because Kristin Chenoweth had always wanted an opportunity to sing in her pure soprano range, and so you came up with this idea that she would sing in that range when Glinda was addressing the public, but use something different for her everyday voice in the show.
Schwartz: I think that’s one of the really cool things about musical theater, and I think it’s true more in musical theater than straight plays, is how collaborative the creation process is, and how your lead actors sing can really affect the final version of the song. I mean, not being a playwright who does so-called straight plays, I don’t know how much actors influence the final version of a play, but they have a lot of influence in musicals, because you want to make it bespoke. You want to make every note and every rhythm and tempo work for them as they interpret the character so it all feels natural and effortless. But then that becomes the template (for future productions).
Oremus: Cynthia and Ari (Ariana Grande) have both spoken about this in the press tour. But when we were in rehearsals, they would (tentatively try new things), and Stephen and I would go “Yeah… and? How about some more?” And they’re like, “Oh, we can do other things?” They were were treating the material with such respect, and were so excited to actually wrap their voices around and really inhabit these characters and find for themselves where it needed to be. And, for us, with the music overall, I think that that was also a very big thing to take into consideration. But, you know, we had this piece of history, for 20 years. Everyone knows the cast recording of “Wicked,” so it really was like, how do we honor what we made the first time and blow it up into this brand new, beautiful new vision of the world that we’re submerging people into? That was the fun challenge for us. Every time any of the people on the music team — whether it was one of the orchestrators or the actors — wanted to do something different, Stephen and I would push them in that direction and say: Let’s keep exploring. Let’s have some fun with it.
Is there anything besides “I’m Not That Girl” that you can think of where there was an adjustment made because of who the cast members were and what their voices were?
Schwartz: There certainly were other adjustments made, but I don’t think they were necessarily for that reason. I’m thinking about “Dancing Through Life,” which changed because of the nature of the choreography that Chris Scott wanted to do, and also our ability to get a different kind of rhythm track when we just had more options and more instruments to choose from. Although John Bailey also did new things vocally that we liked and kept in the movie and in the soundtrack, but that really wasn’t changed specifically because of him. That was just more what was available to us.
Oremus: Well, I would also remind you of the end of “Popular”…
Schwartz: Oh, the (extended) end of “Popular,” which Ariana was kind of resistant to —because she thought it might feel as if we were doing it for Ariana Grande, as opposed to for the character of Glinda. And it was only when I said to her, “Look, if I’d thought of this originally, I would’ve done this in the show. I just didn’t think of it until now. But actually it feels more like Glinda to me than what we did originally.” Then she embraced it. But Ariana and Cynthia particularly were very concerned about making sure that every choice was about the character and the storytelling, and not about them as performers outside of the story.
What specifically was that change in “Popular” that Ariana was worried about?
Schwartz: Well, there’s a kind of coda, an expansion of what you could call the “la-las” at the end, that doesn’t exist in the show, but just felt right to us at this time.
Oremus: It almost didn’t make it. Remember, Jon and Chris even were like, “Well, let’s stick with the original ending.” And we all kept pushing …
Schwartz: The music team were like, “No, no, we have to do this.”
Oremus: And then everyone just started playing in the sandbox and figured out a really exciting way to do it.
Schwartz: Yeah. I think Stephen Oremus really characterized the process well, earlier when he said that people came to this with a lot of respect both for the material itself and for the fans, to be honest — other people over the years who knew the “Wicked” soundtrack, knew the show. We didn’t want to disappoint them or make them feel that we had played fast and loose with what it was that they loved about it. But at the same time, it was 20 years later and we had different personnel and certainly a lot more tools at our disposal musically, and we wanted to see what would happen if we made full use of them.
Wasn’t it was a 23-piece orchestra that you had on Broadway?
Schwartz: That’s correct, yeah.
No one at the time seeing the show or listening to the original cast album said, “Oh, this doesn’t sound full.” But now, to have choices of orchestration that are unlimited — no allusion intended — did you feel like, “OK, now we get to do what we finally always wanted to do in our dreams, this very full version”? Or is it more like, “No, we did it exactly with the scope we wanted to on Broadway…”
Schwartz: I think that (the latter) is more accurate. When we were doing the show, we were frankly fortunate to have as many musicians as we did. That had to do with negotiations with the 802…
Oremus: We got grandfathered in. They actually had cut the musicians and we got five more.
Schwartz: As part of the deal, we were able to have a larger orchestra than Broadway shows tend to have now. But we were very happy with our orchestra and/or orchestration originally. And of course when we made that cast album, we did enhance the string section a little bit, as one does. That’s a pretty common practice when you do the recording of a Broadway cast album. But, yeah, I don’t think there was ever a point where we were feeling, “Oh, if, if only we had 87 pieces, we would do this differently.” But it was exciting what we were able to do sonically and musically, when we had that for the movie.
Oremus: Yeah. I think we have to also not lose sight of the fact — and this was the delightful part for Stephen and myself — that we were building it for the screen. We were building it to the edits. (Prior to production) we had recorded everything to these kind of MIDI demos that Greg Wells and I put together in order to make it feel expansive and big, so it didn’t feel like they were just singing to a piano track for the majority of the film, but felt like they had support. And then in post-production, then we got to really go, OK, now we’re gonna make everything real, based on what they shot.
Schwartz: Yeah, Stephen is right in reminding me, and imparting to you, that the orchestration was very influenced by what we saw. In fact, we made an early mistake — or I made an early mistake, and learned from it, because I don’t have a lot of experience, frankly, in taking what was a stage musical and making it into a movie musical. So when we first were working on “The Wizard and I,” which was one of the first songs that we orchestrated, without seeing what was on the screen. Stephen and I were working with Jeff Atmajian, our orchestrator, and we came up with something that we liked and went back and forth a lot and really thought we had it. Then we looked at it against picture and suddenly thought, “Oh no, we don’t have it at all.” And we had to make a rule for ourselves to always look at the picture first, and that everything would always be based on what is going be on the screen, and making sure that we are supporting that visual with what people are hearing.
Is there a way to describe what felt different when you worked more to augment what was on screen?
Schwartz: Sometimes something that made sense as a recording didn’t really fully support what was on the screen. And of course when we redid it, it still makes sense as a recording, but it’s different because it also truly accompanies what you’re seeing. Or at least that was our goal, truly to accompany exactly what was on the screen in terms of where the builds were, where the flow was, where the breaths were, where the motion was and wasn’t… all of that that needed to be supported orchestrationally.
You mentioned having 87 pieces in the orchestra. Is that the actual number?
Oremus: I would have to count. It was about 85, I think, with the percussion and the saxophones that we added. Plus Greg Wells, if you count him as…
Schwartz: That’s true. If you count him, it would be over a hundred.
Oremus: Greg played the full rhythm section. I mean, a few of us played keyboards — Dominick Amendum, me, Greg, we played keys too — but mainly Greg played all the guitars, bass guitar and drums on the whole film.
Schwartz: So there may be several guitar tracks (on a song)… Greg is sort of a one-man band. First of all, he’s a brilliant pianist, which is how I first met him when he was 19. But now he’s also a really fine guitarist, bass player and drummer, and so he was able to build the rhythm tracks on his own. … And obviously some of the songs are more pop-oriented than others, so it was a process. In some songs, Jeff took the lead (with orchestration), and then we would say to Greg, “Well, we’re really missing a guitar feel here. Could you go and play it in?” And then in many cases, as Stephen is describing, it started with a rhythm track, and then we did what we used to call sweetening, back in the ‘70s when I started as a record producer.
Speaking of Greg Wells, I was talking with him and he relayed something you said, Stephen (Schwartz). He said that when the soundtrack was being recorded, and some of those really ominous, premonitory chords were coming up during “No One Mourns the Wicked,” someone in the studio commented on how scary the chords sounded. And he quoted you as responding, “Well, it is a horror movie.”
Schwartz: Yeah, there are definitely horror-movie aspects. I mean, that’s one of the things that I like so much about Jon Chu as a director, that where you needed it to be a scary horror movie with a jolt, he could do that. Where you needed it to be an action movie, he could do that. Where you needed it to be a rom-com, he could do that. Where you needed it to be a tender, personal psychological story, he could do that. His range is so vast and he can do all those styles, and all those genres, if you will, within one movie, without it seeming that it’s lurching around stylistically, because it all feels of a piece. But when he does an action sequence, it’s truly an action sequence, and so on. If you think about the attempted balloon escape that happens towards the end, which is in the movie and not in the show, that is definitely an action sequence. And the flying monkeys are like horror movie characters. So I like that those different cinematic genres are part of the movie and they all fit in into one cinematic world. That’s a tribute to Jon Chu, I think.
Some of us who loved the show 21 years ago might admit to having spend some of that subsequent time dreading the movie, for fear of people taking it on who might ignore any of those elements, especially losing the darker stuff. But the hardcore “Wicked” heads seem to agree any dread was misplaced.
Schwartz: Well, this is a weird thing for an author to say, but I do really want to give a little bit of a tribute to the studio itself and the studio executives, because first of all, they didn’t fire the original authors and bring in a whole new team, which is what usually happens. And then, secondly, they listened to us. And part of that is because Marc Platt, who’s obviously an old hand in the movie business and a very experienced and much renowned producer, was our producer on the movie as well as our lead producer on the show. So that helped. But also, having worked for other movie companies, which will remain nameless, who are a lot more intrusive and have a lot less regard for what the creators actually think the movie should be, I will eternally be grateful to the Universal executives.
I remember writing a piece on what it looked like for a “Wicked” movie happening, going to Marc Platt’s office to talk to him… and that was 15 years ago. Did it require patience on your part to wait a little over 20 years for this to come to fruition after the show opened?
Schwartz: You know, we weren’t waiting. Stephen (Oremus) will tell you this too, we were constantly talking about, when we do the movie, what if we do this? — constantly investigating things we could do, some of which were definitely cul-de-sacs and wrong turns and dead ends. It wasn’t as if the idea of doing a movie was just sitting on a shelf and we paid no attention to it and then suddenly the starting gun went off and we started sprinting toward making the movie. Stephen Oremus and I were talking a lot over these 20 years about how we wanted to treat the music for the movie. Winnie Holzman and I would constantly talk about, “Oh, in the movie… what about this scene that’s not in the show? And how would we do this particular sequence?” We were more or less constantly thinking about and working on the movie, so that when we finally got the chance to make it — and I think it happened at the right time — there was a lot of back story and back work, preparatory work, that all of us had done.
Does it feel odd when you look back on a Broadway show like “Wicked” and think of all the changes and additions that were being made at the last minute — or even between the San Francisco tryout and the Broadway opening — and then suddenly things are locked in and everything that was done almost on the spur of the moment is locked in as something that feels classic… if you’re lucky, as you were here?
Schwartz: That is the nature of musical theater, and a lot of it is because it’s so collaborative, and some of it is because the audience is one of your collaborators, so you don’t really know what your show is until you have it in front of an audience, and then you make a lot of discoveries. Some of those discoveries can be made through this process of doing readings and workshops and inviting people, but it’s not truly until you just have people walk in off the street and sit down in the seats and the show starts that you also make a lot of discoveries. And so a lot of revisions and improvements happen at that point. So it is quite last-minute, but it doesn’t quite feel… well, I was gonna say, it doesn’t feel like a sort of hysterical last-minute rush, but of course it does. But you know that’s part of the process, so it doesn’t come as a shock.
And now, 21 years later, a chance for more tweaks, albeit not many major ones.
Oremus: In adapting the musical to the screen, everyone that I encountered as we were filming would ask me, “Well, are they adding stuff from the book? Are they changing this, or this?” … And I would say, all I can tell you is it is the most loving adaptation of what we made in the first place. It really is a tribute to John Chu and the authors that anything that was added to this film from what what the original version was really was added in the service of story and character development and just enriching the world. What I love is, as theater makers, we’re so used to telling the story as fast as you can. And I think the very exciting thing that everyone has embraced about this film is, “Oh, they let it breathe.” That means they also continued to develop the characters and story and keep everyone engaged in all the right spots. That, I think, is the feat of this adaptation, that we were able to kind of tow that line and achieve that balance.
Schwartz: Yeah. I mean, Marc Platt very, very early on made the dictum that any change had to be additive. It couldn’t be a change just for its own sake. And it couldn’t be for any reason other than what you’ve just articulated, Stephen. But we kept coming back to that word. As we would discuss choices we were making: Is this really additive?
Oremus: It was really fun having Kristin and Idina (Menzel, the original Broadway leads) come back to join us.
Schwartz: But we always wanted to do that.
Oremus: And by the way, it was additive because we learned more about how (the Wizard hookwinked the populace).
Schwartz: We were going to do that expanded “Wizomania” anyway. It was just Jon Chu’s brilliant idea to build it around Kristin and Idina.
Speaking of what’s additive, of course people are looking forward to that you wrote full additional songs for the Part 2 that is coming next year. We know you’re not going to give spoilers on those. But I know in reading about the original show that there were things you wanted to do in Act 2, that you couldn’t, like with Elphaba visiting the Badlands, because it was slowing down the final acceleration of the show. And I’m wondering whether, in adding material for Part 2, you went back to some of the stuff you wished you could have kept in the stage show that you dropped for pacing, or whether you ended up just thinking in totally different directions.
Schwartz: We did not. Everything that was written is new. There’s nothing that was cut that we said, “Oh, let’s put this back in.” We were able to do some story expansion because, since the story is divided into two parts, we have more time, and so we were able to explore some things that we had to gloss over or in fact not do at all in the original show. But we didn’t go back. We certainly didn’t go back musically. Without any spoilers, there is one scene that we always wanted to do, and briefly had written, but never made it into the show, and a version of that did make it into… well, as far as I know at this time, in the edit, a version of that has currently made it back into movie two.
Oremus: It’s still early.
Schwartz: It’s very early. … We look forward to it. But yeah, as I said, there’s no, like, “Oh, this song got cut, but now we’re gonna try it in the movie” — there’s none of that.
The whole history of the reception to “Wicked” on stage and then on screen involves some vindication. Not that that’s what motivates you or what you look out for. But it’s always been sort of staggering that the show is as obviously great as it is but was not necessarily embraced as a classic in the reviews from day one, and that some of them in 2004 were almost hilariously dismissive.
Schwartz: I think some of the critics didn’t get what we were doing. What they saw was something that looked big and kind of lavish and visually stunning, and they didn’t understand that there could also be content along with that. I think the audiences got it right away. The audiences immediately got the political connotations, the social aspects of the story. But many of the critics, and it frankly was the New York critics… initially some of the London critics too…. I think when they see big and spectacular, they immediately dismiss the possibility of content. And in this case, that’s what happened. If you do a show with two chairs, then if it’s a good show, or even sometimes if it’s not a good show, that gets embraced, it’s, “Oh, well, this must be a serious show if it’s only got two chairs for the set.” But if you do something that’s as visually sumptuous as (Broadway director) Joe Mantello and his team did for our show, then I think it got viewed with critical suspicion in certain circles. Fortunately, the audiences got it immediately, and so it really didn’t matter what the critics had to say.
Reading the discourse now, it feels like average people are getting the broader undertones and the topical aspects of it even more than might be expected… the darker aspects of the story that did not get sacrificed in the service of a light entertainment. It’s a movie about fascism as well as female friendship and empowerment. It’s just an entertainment to many, but people by and large are expressing feelings about what makes this story feel really resonant to them today.
Schwartz: We’ve been saying we wish it were less relevant. To be honest, we’d live in a better world if this movie were less relevant, let’s just say that.
People are also thinking that “Defying Gravity” makes for a great ending to a movie, as opposed to a lead-in to a bathroom break. How did you feel about this becoming a climax, rather a first-act closer, in splitting the story in two? Knowing what you have in that song, we have to imagine you’re happy it was up to the task of sending people out completely un-frustrated.
Schwartz: It was certainly our goal, very conscious and worked on considerably by the team, to have each movie, and I will say this in advance — because we’re just plunging into movie two now — to have two films that could stand on their own and be entirely satisfying stories in their own right. To be honest, one of the things that got us talking about doing two movies in the first place was we couldn’t figure out how to get past “Defying Gravity.” That no matter what we followed that with other than a break, that you could just feel that the audience needed a break. You could hear the sound of feet running up the aisles for popcorn. It is such an end of an event that it’s hard then to just think, “Oh, that was exciting, and now what’s the next scene?” So I think that was always just built into the storytelling.
Then of course, Jon Chu did this completely brilliant cinematic realization of it and came up with some ideas that we had not thought of, including the confrontation with the… I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s some things in there that Jon thought of that we didn’t know we were gonna have at that end of the film. But “Defying Gravity” is just one of those moments for various reasons that it’s hard to just keep going without taking a breath.
Anything to say about Cynthia’s performance of that?
Schwartz: Just that it’s hair-raising and astonishing. Ferocious is the word I used in the studio.
And singing live… did you imagine they’d go to some of the further lengths they did?
Schwartz: Because they have the ability to sing live, it was always the intention, that as much of it as could be sung live would be. Nevertheless, everything was prerecorded and worked out in advance, and then they could change some things, obviously, on the spur of the moment, if they had that feeling. But it had been very carefully rehearsed.
Oremus: It really was thrilling because, I mean, the two of them, they’re like athletes. I mean, they really are. You know, I should say Cynthia actually ran like a half-marathon in the middle of the shoot. It was crazy. But it really was amazing to build that up from those rehearsals all the way into the shoot. And to have two world-class singers like that, to be able to do that live, it was just really, really thrilling.
Schwartz: I don’t think we expected Cynthia to be singing live while she was upside down, or Ariana to be singing live while she was doing the high kicks. They exceeded our expectations in terms of their abilities.
You have to be pleased that the score got shortlisted for the Oscars by the music branch.
Schwartz: I’m happy, and I really want to give a shout-out and great credit to John Powell, who was my collaborator on the scoring part of it. I feel what he did in his use of thematic material and making the score seamless with the songs is really remarkable. And I wasn’t sure it would get noticed. So I’m glad even to have gotten this far. Very, very high marks to John Powell, for, in addition to his talent and musicality, his generosity in trying to make sure that the aspects of the score that he did were part of a whole and not, you know, a neon sign flashing his name.
Oremus: The other astonishing thing regarding John Powell’s work is that in hia writing, amongst all of this brilliant score that Stephen Schwartz has written of these songs, he’s fitting in and elevating these moments, and having to get back into songs. And sometimes it’s within a song where he’s connecting different moments. He did it so beautifully and so seamlessly.
Schwartz: I mean, that’s the word; the point of something being seamless is you don’t notice it. So I’m glad that some people are noticing the skill with which John did that.
Part of what many people love about the “Wicked” song score, and it continues in the work you’re describing that Powell did on the instrumental score, is how much could happen within a song in terms of different leitmotifs or reprises or self-interpolations, on top of dialogue sometimes entering into it. There’s just a lot going on, starting from the first number, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” which is practically four or five songs in one. So looking back at some of those San Francisco reviews in the early 2000s, where some critics would make accusations like the songs being “unmemorable”… not everyone has the ability to process everything that’s going on, on first listen.
Schwartz: Yes, I mean, what people mean when they say something is “memorable” is that it got repeated over and over again. That was our secret with “Day by Day.” That’s why “Day by Day” was memorable in “Godspell,” because it was the same thing over and over and over and over again! So no wonder people remembered it. So I always feel like “unmemorable” is just one of the stupidest things that critics say about something. Listen to it a few times, and then if you don’t remember it, fair enough. But for something on first hearing to need to be memorable, I feel it’s a stupid criterion.
Really, one of the best songs in the show isn’t even a separate song unto itself. It’s “Unlimited,” which just comes back as a sub-theme, or interpolation, as people would say today, repeatedly.
Schwartz: Well, you used the term motif, and I think that’s accurate. And you know, John Powell and I, and Steven Oremus, particularly, spent a lot of time before scoring happened —, before John was writing and I was writing to the extent that I did write the score — talking about the motifs: What did they mean in terms of the characters, in terms of the story? Really kind of identifying how they could be used to enhance storytelling, which is another thing that I feel John did extremely skillfully.
The ultimate memorability of the songs will be further proven at the sing-along screenings happening nationwide.
Schwartz: I might have to sneak into one of those just to see what that’s like.
But if these songs have so many choruses-within-choruses, and put singers as world-class as Ariana and Cynthia to the test, it does raise the question of how many of them are really all that simple to sing along to…
Schwartz: Well, we’re not saying that people are gonna sing along well.
Oremus: Nor do they have to. You sing along because you love it.
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