‘Wicked’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, This is Jon M. Chu and I am the director of “Wicked.” “And Elfie. Can I call you Elfie?” “Well, it’s a little bit perky.” So we’re about midpoint in the movie. And these two roommates, who are very different from each other, have moved into this semi-small dorm room. And it’s Glinda and Elphaba, played by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and they’ve just bonded over sharing stories with each other. So this is the beginning of their true friendship, their first date, shall I say. This is a very iconic scene. “Popular” is one of those songs that everybody knows from “Wicked.” It’s probably the most used in talent shows, and there was a lot of pressure to do this right and to find our way cinematically into this. But of course, it’s all around Ariana Grande’s performance here of showboating and showing her power to transform Elphaba into someone who could be popular. “Exactly what they need.” And Ari is just a master of comedy. You can see it in all her moves and how she interacts with Cynthia Erivo. When you actually listen to it too, it’s her beats and her pauses are just masterful. Paul Tazewell, our costume designer, designed this beautiful, new word I learned, peignoir, for her that has now become iconic on all the dolls and things, and this giant chandelier that she swings on. It seems simple, but actually there’s a lot of manpower that is running that thing. There’s a guy actually on top who’s spinning it and helping her get around, and this was a lot of play for us. We got to really allow the song to come in and take our time to come in. We had a pianist in the corner because everything is live as well, so that she could use her own tempo. “Popular, you’re going to be popular.” And what the concept was for this was rather than go into a giant closet because it’s a dorm room, that the closet was all the bags that we had seen in previous scenes. I love this moment where she grabs the ruby slippers and taps it three times as our nod to Wizard of Oz. But in each of these devices, even though again, they seem simple, there’s grown men in small spaces pulling it open and shutting it, and the engineering in each took months and months to design right. One of the biggest things that Cynthia really wanted was that she didn’t just want to be a passenger on this, she really wanted to be a part of it. She’s not resisting it as much as in the shown in fact, she’s actually really enjoying this attention and this friendship. “Not when it comes to popular” That mirror alone. It’s so heavy and has so much engineering. It’s actually very, very dangerous. Later she’ll actually step on it. And so that alone took many, many months to design, including this thing that folds back and that she falls back on. And I love this moment where she swans around her. We did this about 18 times. We had to grease up the floor. Her peignoir couldn’t get caught on that hanger. But again, Ari is a master of physical comedy and she does it like she was born to do it. “What?”