Jon M. Chu’s Key to Cracking ‘Wicked’? Starting at the End

It’s Musicals Week at IndieWire. With “Wicked” about to sparkle over theaters, we’re celebrating the best of the movie-musical genre.

Jon M. Chu had to start at the end when he was conceptualizing “Wicked” — or rather, the middle.

Once the decision was made that that the massive musical would be split into two parts, director Chu needed to work backward from the epic “Defying Gravity” number, which closes out Act 1 in the Broadway show and serves as the finale in the first film.

You need that kind of detail-oriented passion when it comes to the wonderful world of Oz, clearly. It’s a passion the “Crazy Rich Asians” director has had ever since he saw a pre-Broadway San Francisco tryout of “Wicked” back in 2003.

“I remember my mom calling,” Chu said. “I was at USC film school, and she said, ‘Come back. There’s a Stephen Schwartz musical, a new one, and we’ve got to see it.’ We hadn’t gone to the show in a long time, and so I flew back. We went to go see it, and had no context. [We just knew] it had to do with ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ I remember being blown away by not just the sets, but seeing the bubble come down. And it brought me back immediately to the moment of watching ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ And I remember all the little nods to ‘Wizard of Oz,’ which just brought so much to light. [It was] the most intimate and the also most giant theater experience I’ve ever had in my life.”

Cynthia Erivo, Jon M. Chu, and Ariana Grande attend the WSJ. Magazine 2024 Innovator Awards on October 29, 2024 in New York CityGetty Images for WSJ. Magazine I

So it was as a fan first that he thought about casting his film. And any fan knows Ariana Grande had been publicly campaigning to be involved for nearly as long as the project has been in development. (If one hasn’t watched Grande’s performance of “The Wizard and I” from a 2018 NBC telecast celebrating the musical, do that now.)

“She came in, and it was mesmerizing,” Chu recalled. “In fact, we brought her in not once, not twice, I want to say four or five times. Every time she came in, she went deeper. Because I thought, ‘OK, you can do one audition, but the next one, can she actually release herself of looking like Ariana Grande, the ponytail, the stuff. Is she willing to do that?’ And she was, and then all of a sudden, you’re buying in even further. And then the third time she came in, we’re doing chemistry reads, and suddenly she can improv within this character. And it felt like it was coming to life. It felt like a discovery. That’s a crazy feeling to feel. I knew that if we could show that on the screen, we had a movie here.”

And what a movie it is. This “Wicked” is the kind of grand, big-screen spectacle that musical fans have been hoping for since they first listened to a cast album. Take “Dancing Through Life,” a nearly 10-minute production number across multiple scenes and sets, where emotional stakes and huge plot pivots have to be established.

“We wanted to start in the library, because that’s the classic place to start it,” Chu said of the massive song, led by Jonathan Bailey’s popular prince, Fiyero. “But we did not want regular aisles. We wanted what we call the tornado wheel [of] books were in circular motions. Circles were a big shape in Oz that we wanted to establish that gets broken by Elphaba eventually. So we designed this tornado wheel that he would dance through and around. … The amount of engineering that it took for that wheel is insane. I mean, the amount of money and engineering and safety — the insurance company did not want us to do it.”

The number, which starts at school at Shiz University and ends at the Ozdust Ballroom, is relatively sparse on stage. For the film, that provided an opportunity for Chu to put his spin on the kinds of questions that have long confounded “Wicked” group chats.

‘Wicked,’ Jonathan Bailey©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

“I was like, ‘I want the Ozdust to not feel like a school-sanctioned dance.’ I was always confused: Is this like prom, because there’s teachers there, or is this something else?,” Chu said with a laugh. “In the storytelling, we’re like, ‘No, this has to be them sneaking out. That’s what he brings to this: breaking rules, a little bit of that troublemaker mentality to Shiz. It also shows this sort of youthful [folly] of the generation that’s going to lead Oz in the future.”

Puzzling through this kind of minutiae was the work of at least eighteen months prior to shooting beginning in London, going over each lyric for hours a day with composer Stephen Schwartz. But it was work for which Chu had prepped his whole career.

As he discussed in his 2023 memoir, “Viewfinder,” he’s always wanted to make feel-good, big musicals all the way back to his first, never-made Hollywood project, a “Bye Bye Birdie” update. From “Step Up” sequels to the critically acclaimed “In the Heights,” his directing journey feels like it’s been building toward this. So, yes, he’s able to discuss in-depth the intricacies of Glinda’s bubble, or putting his own spin on the enduring American myth, or even just the best way to first show the Emerald City. (More on that later on IndieWire.)

“People have done entering the Emerald City in all sorts of ways, whether it’s ‘The Wiz’ or ‘Wizard of Oz’ or in the [stage musical] itself,” he noted. “And so what’s our way in? And for me it was: Let’s walk through as if almost breaking the fourth wall, where you actually get to walk and see the structures that we were going to build. … It was aspirational.”

It better be: There may be no place like home, but there’s also no place quite like Oz.

A Universal Pictures release, “Wicked” is in theaters now.