An All-Timer score gets its due

When the sing-along screenings of “Wicked” begin on Christmas Day, I will be there — but not because I have any intention of personally raising my voice during a song. (Or maybe I’ll just go with Dr. Dillamond, the goat professor, whose glottal quirks are probably the closest thing to the sounds I can produce.) I Doing having a natural curiosity about the happiness a packed house of fans will have in singing along to musical theater songs that are so sophisticated… full of stops and starts and sudden shifts from major to minor chords. There will certainly be some trained singers and actors filling the AMC seats who can keep up with these tunes. For the rest of us, a realization may come: I’m not that girland you probably don’t either.

So what other reason is there to look forward to the official multiplex sing-alongs, if not to sing along? That’s simple: the subtitles.

That is to say, the songs in “Wicked” are so good—some of the best musical theater has ever produced, in my opinion—that there is an advantage in enjoying a setting in which you can concentrate on the art of singing without your attention besieged by all the visual distractions that the film quite understandably offers. As a 20-year-old lover of “Wicked” as a show, my only problem with “Wicked” as a movie is the way director John Chu and editor Myron Kerstein sometimes shift our attention to something else charming or dazzling happening on screen, when what my favorite would be two and a half hours of non-stop close-ups of Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo with classic lyrics. This is not a serious complaint on my part; I understand that it is a film musical. But I will enjoy seeing all the lyrics appear at the bottom of the theater screens on December 25th. Because for a select group of ‘Wicked’ fans, the star isn’t really Erivo or Grande, no matter how great they are. They’re both – it’s Stephen Schwartz.

Of course, there is a way to get the gist of the experience I expect without waiting for Christmas. It’s to stream or purchase “Wicked: The Soundtrack” as you settle into Genius.com or another lyrics site to follow the bouncing ball, so to speak. Even if you feel like you’ve grasped the basics of the lyrics through the theatrical presentation, there’s a lot of richness and nuance that’s easy to miss amid the transverse, CGI, razzle-dazzle and diva-ness of it all. The album puts another exclamation point on Schwartz’s rare brilliance as both a melodist and lyricist, a la Sondheim. It’s not heresy to say that Schwartz feels like a Sondheim populist with what he did with “Wicked.” The entire score is dark, complicated, ponderous and subversive… and when it sometimes comes out as something that feels like bubblegum to people, it only speaks to the massiveness of the achievement.

The first and most basic thing you can say about the soundtrack is that they didn’t screw it up. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think about how a score like this could have been blatantly updated. (Raise your hand if you imagined for a moment that the Ozdust Ball could have adopted an EDM beat for a few bars. That’s not the case.) Schwartz himself co-produced the album with Greg Wells (“Greatest Showman”) and original music director/arranger Stephen Oremus, it just sounds like what the legit version would be if it had about double the pit size. And for a young audience of aspiring theater kids, it will open them up forever (no pun intended) to both the sound and form of traditional Broadway, even with content that might feel as fresh to them as a Taylor Swift pairing. and today’s headlines.

There’s not much that Grande and Erivo do that doesn’t completely follow the template that Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel set 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 offer a great spectrum – foreshadowing the moments of both dumb comedy and operatic tragedy she will encounter throughout the score. I knew she could go high and nasal in pursuit of glee (hey, I saw “Sam & Cat”), but hearing her repeat the completely tongue-in-cheek phrase “Good News” with the full soprano power of Sarah Brightman is an immediate tip-off – she will also address the full range of things to come.

Erivo needs more time to fully prove itself, due to its design. In fact, she holds herself back so much that it’s only halfway through ‘Defying Gravity’ that it feels like she’s giving it her all. Although the film has given her much earlier ‘The Wizard and I’ as a showstopper, Erivo seems to keep only a small portion of her full power in reserve, for the moment when she is fully awakened. The brilliance of those songs as twins in the first act is that “The Wizard and I” is a classic “I want” song, while “Gravity” has to top that as – literally – a I don’t want to song. Erivo and those who worked with her on the vocals have been wise here: you have to hold back a little, even if it’s only 5%, when you have probably the biggest middle finger number in Broadway history ahead of you.

While we’re all waiting for that, what pleasures Erivo provides in some of the build-up songs, having lots of quiet, conversational and even naive sounding vocal moments that make her a lovable innocent before she’s a rightfully pissed off goddess. Having just reaffirmed the case for “Defying Gravity” as an all-time corker, which Erivo delivers flawlessly, it’s strange to say that I reserve an even greater fondness for her tender rendition of “I’m Not ThatGirl”?

Even if it is, we’re making a case here for “I’m Not That Girl” as “Wicked’s” lullaby, the song that will never be as wildly popular as… well, you know, but will knock you flat if you hear it on the right, a lost time in your life. Its placement on stage in the middle of the first act, or here halfway through the film, marks it out for some people as a time-passer, almost completely non-integral when it comes to advancing the plot. By Schwartz’s standards, it is simple and unambitious, 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 contain the slightest bit of narrative information, interpolations of other themes, or other complicating factors that keep it from standing alone. And standing alone is what it’s all about, okay. You don’t even have to be a Swiftie to bask in the emo sadness of lines like “Don’t want, don’t start / Wishing only wounds the heart.” Erivo plays this ballad for all the soft fatalism it’s worth and is 100% That Girl.

Other songs deserve a mention. Jonathan Bailey does a good job of sliding to the surface with “Dancing Through Life,” which — in one of “Wicked’s” many overestimations of expectations — seems to make Fiyero a Gaston- or Prince Hans-style hunk-villain. Before that rug is pulled out to give him his humanity, he gives Callow a good name. And “Life is more painless for the mindless” (and the subsequent “thoughtless/fraught” pairing) would be a good line even if Schwartz didn’t foreshadow his fate in the next act/movie. The revolving library sets during this sequence are a marvel of production design, but also an example of how loudly you have to hear the soundtrack on its own to catch every bit of the lyrics’ droll nihilism.

“What is this feeling?” delivers two things everyone wants: It’s a banter song, or as close as “Wicked” can get — and, more importantly, it’s the first chance to see how well Grande and Erivo harmonize as enemies, before the much heavier singing match the two they do this when debating the merits of ‘Defying Gravity’. (Spoiler alert ahead.) Then that song’s creators, Menzel and Chenoweth, appear in new verses that Schwartz wrote to give them a celebrated cameo in “One Short Day.” Schwartz’s all-new additional compositions won’t arrive until Part 2, but the interlude he’s added here bodes well for bigger musical surprises a year from now.

“Popular” has that overt allusion to Ronald Reagan that everyone noticed when the show first opened but that few newcomers to the song are likely to do now, twenty years later – the reference to “Great Communicators,” which Galinda came up. as more powerful than clear. It’s just a passing bit of political subtext, almost imperceptibly embedded in the frothiest song, a joke that already had a bit of a dust-up when it first appeared, while everyone was focused on Ariana Grande being beautifully – and quite spectacularly – in the pink wash.

But the opening and closing songs of Part 1 of “Wicked”? This is music, that’s what it is So Because they are inherently political, these bookends practically count as protest songs. ‘Defying Gravity’ is a paean to activism, as Glinda and Elphaba debate and then mournfully settle their differences over the divide between complacency and risk. Here it is as deeply moving and poignant as ever: a song for anyone who has ever had to make the conscious decision in their life to take the red pill and deal with the consequences, or admired someone else who did .

But the song that always gets me the most is the one that’s almost harmlessly hidden in plain sight from the start: “No One Mourns the Wicked.” At first glance it feels like a standard, fairly innocuous musical scene setter, even if watching the film ominously sees Wicker Woman being burned. On the second or third listen, and beyond, it can feel devastating. Schwartz and his collaborators formulate the story with an Oz populated by an angry, self-righteous, deluded and even bloodthirsty gang… led by a woman who goes along with the Big Lie, hoping to ultimately rebuild a country that has fallen build. under corrupt leadership to genocide and fascism. Light holiday fare to make us forget all about America’s problems, right?

It’s in “No One Mourns the Wicked” that we get the score at its most terrifying, with a cast of seemingly thousands calling for retribution as Grande rolls through piercing high notes, as if putting her stamp of approval on the national travesty for presses her. If this doesn’t give you chills, you’re not really listening. But who is that at the beginning of a movie, while jackets and popcorn are still being shuffled and a movie has barely begun to reveal its cards?

That’s another way in which “Wicked: The Soundtrack” becomes an essential post-movie listen, to really absorb 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 of these elements so masterfully that makes ‘Wicked’ not only the greatest song score of our time (or at least tied with ‘Hamilton’), but one of the all-time greats.

And listen, if you just want to skip the dark, socially allegorical stuff and just play “Popular” over and over again until you wear out the grooves of the flow, that’s okay too. We’ve all been there. And thanks to how well Erivo and Grande deliver this material, we stay in that female friendship-trump-everything mode much longer. See you at the sing-along.