Yahoo Lifestyle How ‘The Wizard and I’ Became the Most Challenging Number in ‘Wicked’: From Planting Barley Fields to De-Greenifying Cynthia Erivo and a Scrapped Tornado Garden
A lot needed to happen during “Wicked’s” “The Wizard and I.”
As Elphaba’s (Cynthia Erivo) “I want” song, it expresses the character’s innermost desires: to meet the wizard who she believes will help her, and to feel accepted by everyone, including the audience.
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Director Jon M. Chu needed audiences to fall in love with her. “We needed anything we could to get us to root for her and to be more of an underdog,” he explains.
Visually, Chu had an idea of ascension. The “Wizard and I” number begins with Elphaba and Madame Morrible walking down the stairs in the classroom. By the end, as Elphaba stands alone on the edge of a cliff, she expresses her deepest desire — to be part of a powerful team, alongside the Wizard.
Chu and his artisans worked closely to hit the storytelling points to ensure Elphaba’s big moment worked. He expanded on the musical by showing Elphaba as a young girl before she arrived at Shiz University. Chu points out that, in “The Wizard and I,” it’s the first time Elphaba gets a little bit of a voice — it’s the first time audiences hear her sing. “She has an expression — a way to express herself — that is way more powerful than anybody, any of the characters,” he says.
As Elphaba climbs the steps, people point and stare or run away. The only ones sticking by her are the animals. Each reflects her stage of ascension: the frog, the crickets, the butterflies and, finally, the birds.
Chu also wanted the water element around her. “She can’t touch the water,” he notes, foreshadowing her fate when Dorothy melts her with a bucket of water. Chu asked production designer Nathan Crowley to add stepping rocks, which, as the director explains, “would remind audiences of the child within her” as she hops across them.
At one point, there was going to be a garden. “It was a tornado garden,” Chu says, revealing some of his early storyboard ideas. “It swept up, and she’s ascending on this path that went all the way up.” But that garden idea went away and became the veranda.
Elphaba’s de-greenified moment was all in-camera in the veranda. Chu and the team had wanted multi-colored glass pieces hanging for a reason. Chu says, “When she walked in there, you strip away the school from her. You get into her inner mind, which is swimming in color. She sees herself in the green mirror, which eliminates her green self. You just see a girl in a mirror and how it feels to be normalized for her.”
Editor Myron Kerstein knew to hold on to Elphaba’s expression and let that joy soak in. “It’s almost like you’re breathing in her joy,” Kerstein says.
Elphaba eventually steps into a vast barley field, her moment of triumph building toward the powerful climax of “The Wizard and I.” As with the tulip field that surrounds Munchkinland, Crowley had his team harvest a barley field for Elphaba to run through, noting that “it goes back to the idea that it’s an American fairy tale and you have the Great Plains.” Why barley? Crowley, who cultivated 500 acres of corn for Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” says, “Barley is lower, golden and moves through the wind.”
Costume designer Paul Tazewell based his designs on Elphaba’s closeness to nature. His inspiration was the underside of mushrooms, which he translated to fabric. Her color palette was black and outside the world of Shiz. “She’s just an outsider,” Tazewell says.
Once Elphaba removes her coat, the dress she wears sports a texture that is “definitely an original sensibility,” according to Tazewell. It also has a solid square neckline. He explains, “It sets up the tone of what the rest of her silhouettes are going to be, and that they will be reflective of the Wicked Witch of the West.”
When she runs through the field in the song, Tazewell says, “She’s so emotionally exuberant that she throws herself up in the air.” He used chiffon in both her sleeves and hem, so the dress “flutters out from underneath, so we get this sense of flight.”
Tazewell had a version of the dress built big enough for the harness. “We had to cut holes in the dress so the pickup points [for the harness] were in the right place,” he says.
It was up to production sound mixer Simon Hayes to capture the dialogue between Madame Morrible and Elphaba, and that transition to song. The vocals needed to “sound like as if they were recorded in a studio, but have the authentic emotional content that a live recording has,” Hayes says.
He used two lav mics that were clipped to Erivo. Hayes explains, “If one lav mic has clothing rustle, the other lav mic will generally be clean.” That way the dialog editing team could weave backwards and forwards between the two lav mics and have the desired sound. Hayes also kept a boom mic committed to Erivo at all times; those sat on the edge of the camera frame. “What that allows me to do on the close-ups is to have that very rich sound. So then we’ve got a situation where the close boom cuts with the close lav, and the dialog editing team have got a complete choice about what they use.”
That set-up also captured the authenticity of her breaths, of her efforts. Every single word that she sings matches her unique facial expression at that moment and, Hayes notes, “there’s no getting away from the face.”
With Erivo completely corseted and wearing a petticoat, the other challenge was where to place the mic packs. Tazewell says, “They were often strapped to her leg. We wanted to keep them off of her waist there was already plenty there, and that was the safest place to hide it.”
When she’s running towards the cliffs, Hayes uses wing gags on the lav mics. “We weren’t trying to hide those lav mics. Cynthia was wearing a very sheer black tunic, which didn’t have any lapels that I could hide a microphone behind. And so I went to Pablo Helman, our VFX supervisor.”
Helman would take out the shots where the mics were showing. Most of his work was invisible VFX work. He explains, “We changed the color of the water because it was brown. We put some boats and flowers in there. All the animals were digitally added in, and the sky and horizon had to be digitally altered.”
Cynthia Erivo’s big note at the end of “The Wizard and I” almost didn’t happen.
The “Wicked” song is Elphaba’s first big moment, her “I want” song. In conceiving the Broadway musical for the big screen, director Chu knew how important the number was. Early in development, he had an idea. “I thought she shouldn’t sing the big note because the big note is giving her the power. Shouldn’t she whisper those notes?”
Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz quickly convinced Chu otherwise, and so the big final notes that Elphaba belts out remained. Chu says, “That big note was empowering because it’s an expression of what she feels.”
Kerstein had many options, but his inspiration came from “The Sound of Music” and classic MGM musicals. His goal was to build something through “performance, emotion and restraint.”
As Chu’s go-to editor (the two have worked together on “In the Heights,” “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and “Home Before Dark,” Kerstein leaned into the idea of ascension. “This is the first moment where she’s feeling the joy, and there’s a power that makes her fly for a second,” Kerstein says. As he looked through the dailies, he thought about what was affecting him emotionally. “What was making me cry, laugh — or gives me goosebumps — and I constructed from there.”
Kerstein was building to that cliffside moment. “We had to figure out the right rhythm and pace. We had to match to her performance and to the music, and to make sure that we build all the way to that cliffside moment, and it takes experimentation.”
That final “and I” note held special meaning. There’s more to come. Chu explains, “The emptiness of the sound as she finished that note would give us the retraction, she’s not quite there yet.” He continues, “Her look is so great because she knows she’s not ready, but we don’t leave her hopeless. She turns around and looks back, and smiles. To me, that’s her saying, ‘Just you wait.’ That is the engine of our whole fucking movie.”
It was the perfect parallel for what was to come later: Elphaba would run, and this time she would ascend and fly high in “Defying Gravity,” when her full power and strength are finally realized.
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