Photo: Lara Cornell/Universal Pictures
When the first trailer for Wicked came out, it ended with a bang: The clip revealed star Cynthia Erivo’s final battle cry. What a mistake that was! Elphaba’s last riff in “Defying Gravity” is one of the all-time defining vocal moments in musical-theater history. As soon as Erivo was cast in the Broadway adaptation, fans began anticipating the moment they would finally hear the Tony-winning actress’s interpretation. Instead, the trailer editors just … tweeted it out. That spoiled the single most exciting vocal choice Erivo got to make, and the fact that she was going entirely off script, singing a riff that no Elphaba had ever sung onstage. She added new melismas that brought the syllable higher, then pirouetted her way down, creating a newly definitive version of the song.
Now she’s getting to do it again. There are multiple iconic vocal choices coming up in Wicked: For Good, the sequel that adapts Act Two of the Broadway show, all of which have been kept hidden from audiences thus far. The stakes are high: How Erivo, Ariana Grande’s Glinda, and the rest of the cast sings these songs will become the canonical versions for many fans. And the actors have 20 years’ worth of options to choose from. The Wicked stage show has cycled through countless Elphabas and Glindas, and all of their choices have been documented online. That’s how you end up with freaks (complimentary) like this Elon University Musical Theater twink who can name every Elphaba just by vocal tone, or the person who made the “Elphaba tree.” Given that the Wicked cast is also full of Wicked fans, we have to assume that they’re aware of the vocal lore that they are interacting with. They know that their choices will be picked apart and analyzed for years to come by sickos and freaks like the people reading this article. So, what are we listening for when we hear the new recordings for the first time? Let’s run it down.
Perhaps the single most important and hotly debated “option up” (meaning when a performer opts to take a note higher than written as a stylistic flourish) in musical-theater history is on the song “No Good Deed.” Toward the end of the Elphaba solo, the witch crescendos on the word “Fiyero” three times, ultimately building out to full belt on that final “Ooooooh.” Some Elphabas — as seen in multiple iconic YouTube compilations — will belt out that “O” on one C#5, like Idina Menzel did on the cast recording. Others, like Eden Espinosa or Jaqueline Hughes, start at C#5 and then take it up to an F5 or even a G#5. The opt-up works. It adds to Elphaba’s desperation by pushing her vocals to their upper range, and it has the bonus benefit of activating a gay gene within queer audience members that says, “This slays.” Given that Erivo innovated on the “Defying Gravity” riff, there’s no reason to assume that she won’t add something special to her “O.” Vulture’s official prediction is that she begins with a more classical choice, like taking it up to a G#5, then adds new riffs on her way down.
Here comes a question of levels. On Glinda’s Act Two opener, “Thank Goodness,” various Glindas have performed the gobbledygook lyrics on the bridge with differing degrees of belt. The line goes “There are bridges you cross you didn’t know you crossed until you’ve crossed,” which is nonsense, of course. What sells the line is the Glinda in question figuring out how passionately to sing it. The best-known version comes from original Glinda Kristin Chenoweth, who sang the song with dignity. Megan Hilty, meanwhile, used the line as her one opportunity to truly diva out in the role, belting it with all the gusto she could muster. Grande has already performed the song live once — on NBC’s Wicked special — and she kept it pretty calm until that final word. On her last “crossed,” Grande used the word to open up her vocal cords and release her power. Hopefully, the movie will include her doing something similar. She’s been performing in her “head voice” (a term referring to a singer’s higher register that resonates in the head rather than the chest) for almost the whole song list thus far — let the “Greedy” singer belt.
The fun part of “For Good,” a Glinda-Elphaba duet, is that at the end when they sing together, it’s the one time that Glinda takes the lower harmony. That gives Elphaba a lot of space up top to have fun, while Glinda holds the masonry in place. Most Elphabas don’t mess with the sauce too much on this song, but sometimes Menzel will rock out when she sings “Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea / Like a seed dropped by a bird in the wood.” What can Erivo do with that topline? Maybe give it a bit more grit, since it’s Elphaba’s last time singing in the show and she’s at the end of her rope. Growl, Cynthia, growl!
Jon M. Chu has already confirmed that he wants to de-hornify “As Long as You’re Mine.” For those who firmly believe that Wicked works best as a sexual awakening for pubescents, this is horrifying. The one factor that might overpower Chu’s puritanical instinct is that he already cast People’s Sexiest Man Alive as Fiyero. If Jonathan Bailey sings the track out of the side of his mouth, adds little growls, and sounds really truly turned on, then there is still hope. Make it horny, Jonny boy.
“March of the Witch Hunters” is typically Boq’s one solo moment, but he also uses it to tell the Lion’s story. We already know that Colman Domingo is voicing the Lion (an insane choice to cast an Oscar nominee for a part with no lines, of course, but over-the-top-ness is the point of these movies). Are they going to take Ethan Slater’s lines and give them to a Domingo-voiced feline? We hope not. Slater, who is often derided online due to the mysterious origins of his relationship with Grande, deserves to show the world how talented he is.
In the trailer for Wicked: For Good, Elphaba and Glinda are seen twirling with the Wizard. There is only one situation in which Elphaba could twirl with her archnemesis in Act Two of Wicked, and that’s in “Wonderful,” the song the Wizard sings to try and get the powerful witch back on his side. But Glinda’s not there for that in the stage show. Is the film inventing a way to get Ariana Grande involved? Will she also sing? Will that make “Wonderful” something other than the most boring song in Wicked: For Good?
The one song left off the original Wicked cast recording is “The Wicked Witch of the East,” Nessarose’s solo. In it, Nessa attempts to get Boq to stay with her after Elphaba repairs her legs. While, of course, Wicked fans across the land would love to hear the song finally recorded, there are likely going to be changes to that scene anyway, given that movie Nessa is played by Marissa Bode, a wheelchair-user. Maybe we won’t get “The Wicked Witch of the East” in the film at all. Hopefully, they let Bode take this chance to really show off her pipes and sing out.
Michelle Yeoh cannot sing. She knows it, and, after her performance in the first movie’s “The Wizard and I,” we all know it too. So, what are they gonna do about the Morrible sections in “Thank Goodness”? Honestly, the sung-through sections in “Thank Goodness” would be perfectly fine just spoken in verse. Make it a poem! Don’t make this distinguished actress sing again!
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