‘Wicked: The Soundtrack’ Album Review: Stephen Schwartz’s World-Beating Song Score Gets Its Due, and So Do the Divas Who Deliver It
When the sing-along screenings of “Wicked” go down beginning Christmas Day, I’ll be there — but not because I have any intention of personally raising my voice in song. (Or maybe I’ll join in just with Dr. Dillamond, the goat professor, whose glottal peculiarities probably come closest to the sounds I could produce.) I do have a natural curiosity about what luck a full house of fans will have in singing along with musical-theater songs this sophisticated… this full of stops and starts and sudden shifts from major to minor chords. There’ll surely be some trained singers and actors filling the AMC seats who can keep up with these tunes. For the rest of us, there may come a realization: I’m not that girl, and probably neither are you.
So what other reason is there to look forward to the official multiplex sing-alongs, if not, like, singing along? That’s easy: the subtitles.
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Which is to say: The songs in “Wicked” are so good — some of the best that musical theater has ever produced, to my mind — that there’s a benefit in enjoying a setting that allows you to focus in on the songcraft without having your attention waylaid by all the visual distractions the film is very understandably providing. As a 20-year aficionado of “Wicked” as a show, my only problem with “Wicked” as a movie is how director John Chu and editor Myron Kerstein are sometimes redirecting our attention to something else charming or dazzling that’s happening on screen, when what I most want is two-and-a-half hours of nonstop closeups of Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo delivering classic lyrics. This isn’t a serious complaint, on my part; I get that it’s a movie musical. But I’ll be pleased to see every one of lyrics popping up on the bottom of cinema screens, come Dec. 25. Because for a select subset of “Wicked” fans, the star isn’t really Erivo or Grande, grand as they both are — it’s Stephen Schwartz.
Of course, there is a way to have the crux of the experience I’m anticipating without waiting for Christmas. It’s to stream or buy “Wicked: The Soundtrack” while settling in at Genius.com or some other lyric site to follow the bouncing ball, as it were. Even if you feel like you’ve gotten the basic grist of the lyrics through the theatrical presentation, there’s a lot of richness and nuance that’s easy to miss amid the cross-cutting, CGI, razzle-dazzle and diva-ness of it all. The album puts a further exclamation point on Schwartz’s rare brilliance as both melodist and lyricist, a la Sondheim. It’s not heresy to say that Schwartz feels like a populist Sondheim with what he did with “Wicked.” The whole score is dark, convoluted, unwieldy and subversive … and if it sometimes comes out as something that feels to people like bubblegum, that’s just further testifies to the massiveness of the accomplishment.
The first and most basic thing to say about the soundtrack is that they didn’t blow it. You don’t have to use too much of your imagination to think about how a score like this could have been egregiously updated. (Raise your hand if you imagined for a second that the Ozdust Ball could have adopted an EDM beat for a few bars. It does not.) With Schwartz himself co-producing the album with Greg Wells (“Greatest Showman”) and original music-director/arranger Stephen Oremus, it simply sounds like what the legit version would if it had something like double the pit size. And for a young audience of budding theater kids, it’s going to open them up for good (no pun intended) to the sound as well as form of traditional Broadway, even with content that might feel to them as fresh as a combination of Taylor Swift and today’s headlines.
There’s not much that Grande and Erivo do that doesn’t squarely follow the template established by Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel two decades ago. But their vocal performances still manage to sound surprising in small and important ways. The epic opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” allows Grande to run a hell of a gamut — foretelling the moments of both dumb-blonde comedy and operatic tragedy she’ll get to hit thoughout the duration of the score. I knew she could go high-and-nasal in the pursuit of mirth (hey, I saw “Sam & Cat”), but hearing her repeat the completely ironic line “Good news” at full Sarah Brightman sopranic strength is an immediate tip-off she’ll be nailing the full range of stuff to come, too.
Erivo takes longer to fully prove herself, by design. Actually, she holds back enough that it’s not till halfway through “Defying Gravity” that it feels like she’s giving it her full belt. Even though the movie has already given her “The Wizard and I” as a showstopper a whole lot earlier than that, Erivo seems to be holding just a little of her full power in reserve, for the moment when she’s fully awakened. The brilliance of those songs as first-act twins is that “The Wizard and I” is a classic “I want” song, whereas “Gravity” has to go above and beyond it as — literally — an I don’t want song. Erivo and those working with her on the vocals have been wise here: You’ve got to hold a little back, even if it’s just 5%, when you have probably the greatest middle-finger number in Broadway history on the horizon.
While we all wait for that, what pleasures Erivo provides in some of the build-up numbers, by having lots of low-ley, conversational and even na?ve-sounding vocal moments that establish her as a lovable innocent before she’s a righteously pissed goddess. Having just reaffirmed the case for “Defying Gravity” as an all-time corker, which Erivo delivers flawlessly, is it weird to say that I reserve an even slightly greater fondness for her tender rendition of “I’m Not That Girl”?
Even if it is, here’s making the case for “I’m Not That Girl” as “Wicked’s” sleeper song, the one that’s never going to be as uber-popular as… well, you know, but will knock you down flat if you hear it at the right, forlorn time in your life. Its mid-first-act stage placement, or mid-movie here, marks it as a time-passer for some people, close to completely un-integral when it comes to advancing the plot. By Schwartz’s standards, it’s simple and un-ambitious, being the only song in the entire score without a single key change, let alone multiples. It’s also the only one that doesn’t include the slightest bit of narrative information, interpolations of other themes, or any other complicating factors keeping it from being a stand-alone. And standing alone is what it’s about, all right. You don’t even have to be a Swiftie to bask in the emo grief of lines like “Don’t wish, don’t start / Wishing only wounds the heart.” Playing this ballad for all the gentle fatalism it’s worth, Erivo is 100% That Girl.
Other songs bear singling out. Jonathan Bailey does a fine job of sliding down the surface of things with “Dancing Through Life,” which — in one of “Wicked’s” many usurpings of expectations — seems to be setting Fiyero up to be a Gaston- or Prince Hans-style hunk-villain. Before that rug gets pulled to give him his humanity, he gives callow a good name. And “Life’s more painless for the brainless” (and the follow-up “thoughtless/fraughtless” coupling) would be a good line even if Schwartz weren’t foreshadowing his fate in the next act/movie. The revolving library sets during this sequence are a marvel of production design, but another example of how badly you need to hear the soundtrack on its own to catch every bit of the lyrics’ amusing nihilism.
“What Is This Feeling?” delivers two things everyone wants: it’s a patter song, or as close to one as “Wicked” gets — and, more important, it’s the first chance to see how well Grande and Erivo harmonize as frenemies, before the much heavier vocal pas de deux they do in debating the merits of “Defying Gravity.” (Spoiler alert ahead.) Then, the originators of that song, Menzel and Chenoweth, show up in new verses Schwartz has penned to afford them a celebrated cameo in “One Short Day.” Schwartz’s all-new additional compositions won’t come till Part 2, but the interstitial bit he added here offers a good omen for bigger musical surprises in a year.
“Popular” has that overt Ronald Reagan allusion that everybody picked up on when the show first opened, but that few newcomers to the song probably would now, 20 years later — the reference to “Great Communicators,” who come up for mention by Galinda as being more powerful than bright. It’s just a passing bit of political subtext, embedded almost unnoticeably in the frothiest number, a joke that already had a little dust on it when it first appeared, while everyone’s focused on Ariana Grande being pretty — and pretty spectacular — in pink.
But the opening and closing numbers of Part 1 of “Wicked”? This is music that’s so inherently political, these bookends practically count as protest songs. “Defying Gravity” is a paean to activism, as Glinda and Elphaba debate and then sorrowfully settle their differences across the complacency/risk divide. Here, it’s as deeply moving and stirring as ever — a song for anyone who ever had to make the conscious decision in life to take the red pill and deal with the consequences, or admired someone else who did.
Yet the song that always gets me the most is the one that’s almost innocuously hidden in plain sight right at the outset: “No One Mourns the Wicked.” On first listen, it feels like a standard, fairly innocuous musical scene-setter, even if, watching the film, that Wicker Woman being set up for burning does look ominious. On second or third listen, and beyond, it can feel devastating. Schwartz and his collaborators are framing the story with an Oz that is populated by an angry, self-righteous, deluded and even bloodthirsty mob… led by a woman who is going along with the great lie, in hopes of eventually rebuilding a land that fell into genocide and fascism under corrupt leadership. Light-hearted holiday fare to let us forget all about America’s problems, right?
It’s in “No One Mourns the Wicked” that we get the score at its most haunting, with a cast of seeming thousands calling for retribution while Grande rolls through piercing high notes, pretending to put her approving stamp on the national travesty before her. If this doesn’t give you a chill, you’re not really listening. But who is, at the beginning of a film, as coats and popcorn are still being shuffled and a movie has barely begun to reveal its cards?
That’s one more way in which “Wicked: The Soundtrack” becomes an essential post-movie listen, to really take in all the groundwork Schwartz and company have laid in foreshadowing what is actually at least as much a sociopolitical tragedy as a fantasy musical-comedy. It’s the ability to encompass all these elements, so masterfully, that makes “Wicked” not just the greatest song score of our time (or at least tied with “Hamilton” for that) but one of the greats of all time.
And listen, if you just want to forego the darker, societally allegorical stuff and just spin “Popular” over and over and over again until you’ve worn the grooves off the stream, that’s OK, too. We’ve all been there. And thanks to how well Erivo and Grande deliver this material, we’ll stay in that female-friendship-trumps-everything mode a lot longer. See you at the sing-along.
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