The second installment comes to theaters in November. How will it expand on the second act of the musical?
Director Jon M. Chu’s announcement about splitting his film adaptation of the musical “Wicked” into two parts raised skepticism among fans. The subsequent length of the first film — 2 hours and 40 minutes — inspired even more shock among fans, given that it was longer than the entirety of the stage musical.
But the first film was successful, garnering more than $750 million at the box office as one of the highest-grossing Broadway adaptations and raking in multiple Academy Award nominations. The trailer for the second installment “Wicked: For Good” recently dropped, raising more questions on how Chu will expand act two — historically considered the weaker act of the show — into a second full-length film.
“Wicked: For Good” will include all the songs from Act II of the musical as it follows Elphaba, the main character, as she becomes known as “the Wicked Witch” after leaving Shiz University at the end of the first film, having turned against the Wizard of Oz.
In addition to the score from the stage show, “Wicked: For Good” will have two new songs written by Stephen Schwartz, who was behind the original musical. Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba/the Wicked Witch, said she collaborated with Schwartz on one of the numbers, which “speaks to the heart of who Elphaba is.”
Allen Feinstein, a musical theater composer/conductor and teaching professor of music at Northeastern University, said the inclusion of all the music from the original show, plus the addition of the original numbers written just for the film, will likely help expand the storyline of the second film.
“They preserved the vast majority of the score, which is unusual in movie adaptations,” he said. “When you keep all the music, that takes a lot of time. In a theater you’ve got this very controlled environment, which has certain limitations, and songs slow down the storytelling. They’re the reason why musicals are a special art form, but they don’t help you tell the story efficiently. But in a movie, a lot of the time, adapters make the choice to tell the story without all the music.”
Adding musical numbers can be a gamble, Feinstein said. The first film installment stuck to the musical’s score, meaning it’s hard to say how audiences will perceive these new numbers. Feinstein said the added songs will need to convey something new to the audience.
“Songs help us convey emotion or plot or change in character, and we ‘ve done that to a degree where the final product is one that you’re happy with and your audience is happy with,” he said. “Then you try to do it again to make it longer … the danger that you can run into (is) you’re trying to expand something that doesn’t need to be expanded. So that’s the challenge. If anyone can do it, I certainly have confidence that (Schwartz) has both the ability and the judgement to pull it off.”
In addition to the songs, Feinstein said that, much like with the first film, Chu will likely take advantage of the medium to further expand the setting, especially one as fantastical as the world of Oz where Wicked is set.
In the first film, audiences got the chance to see some additional flashback scenes from Elphaba’s childhood, more fleshed-out settings, and musical numbers that lasted longer than they did in the stage version.
“(In theater), you’re not going to be able to do all these sort of very cinematic and CGI effects,” he said. “All these different techniques, which also take time. So you’ve got plenty to fill the time, if you’ve got exciting visual effects that take a few minutes that you can’t do on stage. You can give this character a chance to sing another verse or do a dance or to show something visually spectacular. If you take advantage of those opportunities and you’ve got the resources, you might as well do it as long as it all adds up and is and is ultimately compelling.”
Not only does film allow for more elaborate settings, but it allows for expanded scenes, as Feinstein said, most audiences are able to sit longer for a film than they are for a stage show.
“We know audiences in that particular setting really only respond … for about an hour,” Feinstein said. “So you’ve got at most an hour for your first act, so you go in knowing that you’re going to keep yourself restricted. If somebody said, ‘OK, that material that you were excited to develop, you no longer have that restriction,’ you’re going to take advantage of that.”