Switched on Pop - We're off to see the "Wicked"

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

The year's hottest movie is, against all odds, a musical. Wicked, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, just hit theaters, and tells the tale of how a green-skinned girl named Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West. And with any musical, the songs are just as important as the narrative. On this episode of Switched On Pop, Charlie, Nate, and Reanna hop on their broomsticks to break down the music powering this cultural phenomenon. Songs Discussed The Wizard And I - Cynthia Erivo, Michelle Yeoh The Wizard And I - Carole Shelley, Idina Menzel Popular - Ariana Grande Popular Song - MIKA, Ariana Grande Defying Gravity - Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande What Is This Feeling? - Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo Defying Gravity - Kristin Chenoweth, Idina Menzel You'll Be Back - Jonathan Groff, Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I am producer Rianna Cruz. Charlie, Rihanna, tell me what you think of when you listen to this. I feel like I'm in the presence of a holy figure.

Rihanna? So when I was a kid and I was watching TV in the tri-state area, they would have commercials for the Broadway shows going on right now. And so that riff is burned into my brain. And assumedly, Dina Mansell's version of the riff, because it would be in the Broadway trailers. Come see Wicked, you know, come buy a ticket. And it would be on five times a day. All right.

What are we talking about? It's the movie Musical Wicked starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Revo just hit theaters. And we had to bring in the whole team to break this one down, y'all. This is a big cultural moment, right? This movie is the highest grossing open. for a Broadway adaptation ever. Wow. It might even save movies as we know it.

You remember last year we had this collision of Barbie and Oppenheimer. People called it. Barbenheimer. Thank you. We have a similar creation now. We have Glickett. Charlie, are you familiar with Glickett? Only as of this moment, but I did go see Wicked last night and Gladiator 2 was playing at the same time.

So click it. And this thing is so popular with theater kids across the nation that they're planning sing-along showings of the film over the holidays. Oh, God. This movie is inescapable. The press tour has occupied our collective imaginations for the past few weeks. But y'all, what about the music? So, Nate, what you're saying is today we're going to be holding space for the lyrics and the music

of defying gravity. Exactly. Rihanna, Charlie, there's no Wicked without the songs. And the music and lyrics to those songs written by the composer, Stephen Schwartz, for the original Wicked Stage Musical, which hit Broadway back in 2003, when young Rihanna was seeing these trailers in the Tri-State area. The original show is based on the book, Wicked,

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. It starred Kristen Chenoweth and Edina Menzel, set a ton of records for Tickets. at sales won multiple tonies. And now 20 years later, we have a job to do. We have to hop on our broomsticks and break down the music powering this cultural phenom. And in doing so, maybe we'll write some wrongs of our own. Because back in February, we did an episode with our hysterical friend, Richard Weiner, exploring his thesis that musical theater can never be edgy. And, you know, we said some things about Spring Awakening and other shows that rankled some of

our listeners. So I feel like this might be an opportunity for us to give musical theater it's due with a loving analysis of some of these iconic numbers. Okay, there's also some personal rights to wrong as well because in that episode, we were trying to convince Bridger to love musicals because his boyfriend, Jimmy Smigula, is a major Broadway actor who was in Spamelot with Ethan Slater, who is in Wicked. So, you know, Connections. Six degrees of separation. Well, that's not our only connection to this show because my mom, the great Randy Sloan, was in the original production of Godspell in Toronto, which was our friend Stephen Schwartz's first theatrical production. Wow. Whoa. Connections. Yeah, she was Gilda Radner's understudy. Wow. Cool.

Martin Short, Victor Garber, Paul Schaefer, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy. I mean, it was like, a stacked cast. Wow. So, yeah, everything has been building up to this moment. Spoiler, full nepotism. It looks like we're going to like musicals. Outing myself as a nepo baby here. Okay, before we get into the music,

we need to establish a little bit of the plot of this thing. Okay. And I'd say at its heart, this is like an origin story, right? Cast your mind back to 1939 and the classic film musical, The Wizard of Oz,

score by Harold Arlen and Yip Harbour. There's no place like home. There's no place like... A show which introduces some of the most canonical pieces in American music like somewhere over the rainbow. I sing it every day as a lullaby to my little boy.

The movie is where most of us first meet Glinda the Good Witch, who gives Dorothy her ruby slippers, and the Wicked Witch of the West, who is Dorothy's antagonist. 50-plus years later in his book, Wicked Gregory McGuire, changes Glinda's name to Galinda, and he gives the Wicked Witch of the West

the name Elphaba, a play on L. Frank Baum. Wicked, the musical, and the movie. And the book. Ask, who was the Wicked Witch, really? Was she so wicked after all? Was she born wicked, or was she made to be wicked? How good and evil is only what we interpret it to be.

So this is a great conceit, because it allows us to create this whole new narrative around the relationship between these two witches, the good and the bad, and takes us into these existential questions of what really is good and what really is bad. As the person who saw Wicked last night going into it knowing truly absolutely nothing, I was surprised to find out that the film slash musical slash book is actually high school musical The Witch. Because unlike the Wizard of Oz in which we go on this great journey on the Yellow Brook Road, the majority of the film, which is, I guess, the first half of the musical,

because they, of course, have to make money and they divided the film into two parts. It takes place basically in high school, like in the Wizard of Oz version of high school. Which is called Shiz University, by the way. Terrible name. Terrible name, which made me laugh so hard every time in the movie they were like, here at Shiz. Okay, wait, wait. You're getting ahead of yourselves, though I do appreciate a good high school.

musical comparison. And yes, there will be spoilers in this conversation. So if you have yet to see Wicked, like all of us, you know, go do that and then listen to this. We'll break down as much as the story, I think, as we need to. But yes, this is a tale of an unlikely friendship between these two people, Galinda, the good, Elphaba, the Wicked. Now, we meet Elphaba. She's born into this prosperous family, but she's this unwanted child because of her green skin. She has these magic, powers, that she does know how to control, that alienate her from everyone. And it's only when she arrives at the aforementioned Shiz University and meets our other protagonist, Glinda, that she gets this opportunity to become something, to master her powers. And she is promised

that she will one day go and meet the Wizard of Oz. This is where we get that mainstay of every musical theater production ever, the I Want song. This is where our character establishes their motivation over the course of the show. And for Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, that motivation is to be accepted. Let's hear how she expresses this in The Wizard and Eye. I love that little shift at the end. When she sings The Wizard and I, the Eye doesn't land on the home court like you'd expect. I don't feel like it's a spoiler to say that if you don't know the end of the Wizard of Oz, it's well established that the Wizard of Oz is kind of a fraud.

And so from the getco, we know there's going to be something amiss that if she gets what she wants, it's not going to go her way. Yeah, if you go to see Titanic, you know the boat's going to sink. If you go to see Wicked, presumably you know that the Wizard of Oz is not a real wizard. Of course, Elfaba doesn't know this. And as you both astutely observe, this song has these little clues that her desires expressed in this I want song will not be fulfilled. Let's talk more about that in a second. But before we do, I'm just interested in how this song establishes her character.

Because my argument here is that the whole productive tension of this show is creating these two foils, Glinda, Elphaba, their opposites in every way. And they sound opposite as well. So like, what is the sound of Elphaba in this song? How does she project herself? Once I'm with the wizard, my whole life will change. Because once you're with the wizard thinks you're strange. No father is. I feel like she's constantly switching between breathy and belting.

And I know that part of her character is putting on this hard exterior, like, that she is more confident than she really is interiorly. And I feel like the blending of those two different vocal styles sort of says exactly that. Yeah, and the role was originated on Broadway by Adina Menzel, currently played in the movie by Cynthia Arriva. And Menzel is noted as having a really lovely Metsa soprano voice. And I think that's carried throughout all the elphabos over time. So here we're kind of in this range. So here we're kind of in this range.

When she sings the wizard and, like she lifts up. But also most of the song is in this lower tone, kind of characteristic Valfaba. When, you know, we're got to it later, you juxtapose it with Glinda, who's a high soprano. So her voice is in the lower range. As Charlie said, it's breathy at points. It has these moments of power, but then becomes subdued. I feel like this is really setting up her character, someone who has this incredible strength, but doesn't quite know how to access it. We get more insight into Elphaba in a moment in this song that becomes a larger theme throughout the show.

My future is unlimited. Unlimited. Yeah. This is a melody we want to remember because it's going to come back. Is there a word for that? Yes, Rihanna. We could call it a light motif. Ah, exactly.

Right on the tip of my side. Yeah, light motif. Going back to the days of Wagner, a melodic theme that returns and always makes us think of a certain character or emotion. Unlimited. It's a very powerful melody. In researching this and reading Stephen Schwartz's, insights into the score, he actually tells us that this melodic motive is borrowed from the original

Wizard of Oz, from that iconic song we mentioned earlier, over the rainbow. So, oh yeah, here's Unlimited. Just focus in on the first like seven notes of this. Okay, so there's Unlimited here, somewhere over the rainbow. So that's a really fun nod to somewhere over the rainbow. So that's a really fun nod to the original score that inspired this whole thing. Wow. Keep this unlimited light motif in your back pocket, folks. We're going to need it later. But now let's wrap up Wizard and I, returning to this note you made earlier about the subtle

foreshadowing in the song, because when we get to the final chorus, there's a few words that make your ears perk up. Okay. Sorry to pause it at such a climactic moment. but there's a couple things we need to discuss here yeah there's this line about so happy i could melt right is that how she dies eventually that's not good right because that's what happens that we know what's coming right the water's going to melt her so that's a little that's one of those moments where you're like oh that's that's not good and then later she she sings when they see me

everyone's going to scream and we know they're not screaming in joy it's not good they're screaming in terror So on one hand, it's this celebratory I Want song. And on the other hand, you know that the seeds of her demise are being planted within this. The dramatic irony of it all makes it a very sad song, honestly. When I was watching this in the theater, I was like, ooh, like, I don't know, it's supposed to be celebrated. And yet you have this deep feeling of foreshadowing. Even at the apex of the song, which I will play for you now, you'll hear something at the very end, two chords that don't belong, that give us that sense.

even at this moment of triumph that something bad is coming. I'm so glad you played that moment because I remember hearing that, and I was like, I need to go home and learn that on the piano. What is it that they're doing? Right. We're in the key of C major. But then the last two chords we hear are these really funky D-flat with a sharp 4. And then a B major with a flat 6.

and then resolving back to C major. It's like really tense and dark right at the climactic zenith of this character's I Want song. So this song is telling us things are not going to end well for Elphaba. Maybe this is a bit of a reach, but in harmony, the chords which are just adjacent to whatever your home chord are often feel the most dissonant, just like you've played. We're in C. and so D flat and B are on either side of that C by just one note. And it's often the thing which is just off by one that feels the most out of control and unstable. And so it's kind of like this I want song has this like the sense of a center.

I want this meeting with the wizard. But actually just off in the shadows, something is discordant, just like these harmonies. For all the complexity that the song bestows on Elfaba, her, dramatic counterpart, Galinda, gets a very different musical treatment. Let's listen to her big number, Popular, and hear how Schwartz creates this other musical profile that really contrast to everything we just heard in The Wizard and I. Popular, you're going to be popular. I'll teach you the proper boys when you talk to boys, the ways toivalard in drums.

I'll show you what shoes to wear. How to fix your hair, everything that really counts to be popular. I'll help you. So this is the moment when these two characters form their unlikely friendship. And we get to know Galinda a little better. Just from that excerpt, how does this character sound different than Elphaba? Very bright, a lot of nasal. A little grating.

Well, on The Wizard and I, you hear Elphaba belt out these notes, right? large, they're strong. Glinda doesn't have the same power in her vocals, so there's some notes in that clip where you could hear, like, she's flat, you know? She's not hitting the notes exactly and also doing this really breathy head voice

that together, it's like, you see the character in your head. Whereas Alphabet, you don't really see it that much. You're just listening, but this is like the way that Galinda's voice is, you're able to picture who Galinda is through the song.

is not picturing Ariana Grande who can belt, who can whistle tone. I've never heard Ariana go, popular. It's a very unattractive way of singing. But it's sort of fitting for the overly confident popular girl character she's playing. Yeah, she's never enunciated so much in her life. And hats off to Ariana Grande. I mean, she crushed this part, both of them. Cynthia, Ariana, incredible performances.

So we hear this character. I like how you said that, Rihanna. And I think we hear someone who is a tryhard. Is that fair? Mm-hmm. I would say so. Even the musical accompaniment is trying too hard. Check out the rhythm of these chords.

The bass notes are always anticipating the downbeat in a way like they're trying too hard. They're too excited. They're showing off because there's another way to play this that's a little more straight where every bass note lands on a downbeat like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. But that's not what this accompaniment does. It goes, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It lands on that fourth beat, like, it's too giddy and overconfident and maybe a little anxious as well, frankly, to land on that downbeat. Yeah. There's so many moments in the film when the attention is not on Galinda, she asserts herself into the scene and sort of pushes other people out of the way, just like.

like this bass note is doing. I love that. So this song really gives us insight into Galinda's character. And there's another moment later in popular that tells us a lot about who she is. Kind of simple, kind of optimistic, kind of like a pop song. I would describe her voice as brassy. And I love that moment when the brass comes in. Wow, wow.

She's like, you're not going to be as popular as me. There's a lot that goes down at the end of this song. We have that pop song interlude where we get like the most classic pop song vocalization. La la. La la. Yeah. It's like so simple and brainless. It's great.

And what's crazy is this is not even the first time Ariana has sang popular in this pop song arena. She has a song with Micah, I think that's how you pronounce it, M-I-A-on-her-first record, Yours Truly, called Popular Song, that interpolate. that interpolates this very show tune. It might be Mika. We'll have to find out. But regardless, this feels like Ariana Grande auditioning for this role 10 years ago. And then we get this quasi-operatic cadenza.

Wow. Again, she can't help but show off, you know? And I don't think anybody was being like Ariana Grande can't sing, you know, like she cut her teeth in music. musicals. She's always had a very strong vocal prowess with whistle notes and whatnot. But this is like next level. Like my jaw dropped when I heard this in the theater. I did not know she had that in her. So at this point in the score, we've met our two central characters. We've heard how different they sound. Now let's follow Wicked's lead. Let's take a brief intermission. And when we come back, let's see how these two characters come together in one of the all-time climactic musical theater songs.

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They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. All right, y'all, there's a lot more that happens in Wicked, but at this point, we need to jump right to the very end of this movie. And the song that in the original musical was the end of the first act. Now it's the end of the first part of the Wicked Diptic. This is one of the great musical theater songs of all time.

In the movie version, it clocks in at seven and a half minutes. Wow. Stairway to heaven. And it really synthesizes all of the themes and the contrast that we've been hearing up till this point. We have to spin Defying Gravity. Something has pinched within me. Something is not the same. I'm through with playing by the rule of someone else's game.

So this song is playing the long game because we are starting in this really low, slow place. There's only one way to go from here and it's up. We talk a lot on the podcast about this idea of text painting, you know, but I think this is like doing the opposite where the lyrics come forward and then the music is bolstering those words where she's talking about something has changed within her. And this instrumental is like brooding. You know, it's uncertain. We can't really discern anything out of it.

And then when she sings rules, it lifts and we get this horn line, you know, that's like, ah, she's figuring. figured herself out as she lifts up the register. I'm through with playing by someone else's game. Schwartz set this song in the key of D-flat. And he says he did that very deliberately. D-flat, that's a really low key. It gives you a lot of room to elevate.

So I think that's a very calculated decision. D-flat is also one of those dissonant core. that we heard earlier in The Wizard and I, now we have gone to define gravity. We have moved up to that key, which had been dissonant, when it had been set against the key of C. So before Wizard and I, C major, now we're up to D-flat, the true essence of this character, perhaps. We are defying tonal gravity. So from this place of depth, we get to ascend to the highest reaches of this song in the chorus.

Oh, we're cooking now. Oh, we're cooking now. What makes this chorus so effective? I think part of it is the internal rhyme. I think I'll try defying gravity. There's so many I words in there. I think I'll try defy in gravity. It's very subtle, but it kind of carries you along.

that line and makes it so easy to sing and so easy to listen to, it's very satisfying. Then the melody itself defies gravity. The first time, I think I'll try defying gravity. Next time, I think I'll try defying gravity. So we went up where we went down the first time. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we're literally defying gravity. And then we got this hallmark of a great musical theater piece, a piano vamp. And when you hear that, you're like, okay, here we go. Shit's about to get real. Like, something's about to get real serious.

Someone's about to start sing-talking. That's what's going to happen. Not only do we get sing-talking, we get a duet between these two characters who have been the focal points of the whole story. And this is the only time they've sung together, except for a song earlier, where they expressed their intense hatred for each other.

That's called, what is this feeling? Let's just listen to that for one sec in the middle of Defying Gravity. Loading, unadulterated loathing for your face, your voice, your clothing. Let's just say, I love it all. Okay, so that was the only other time they've sung together is when they were loathing each other. But now, in defying gravity, we get a moment of true harmony between these characters. This moment is short-lived. Elphaba says, come with me.

Galinda's like, I can't. Oh, yeah. And we've completely forgotten the plot of this movie at this point. There's this whole talking animal oppression subplot. Right. It's a metaphor for fascism. The wizard has been revealed as a fraud. who's trying to turn the talking animals

into the common enemy of the people. And Alphabet has superpowers. Yes, there's a book of spells called The Grimery that only she can read. Basically, everyone figures that one says, hey, you, you've got superpowers, you must be a witch. And now since she's been discovered to be someone with superpowers and a witch,

as the wizard says, to unite people, you need a common enemy. And so she is going to be the enemy of the people. So we had this fleeting moment of harmony. Now it's past and it's time for Elphaba to come into her own. She's got to fly west. She has to become the wicked witch of the west. And here is her diva moment. Earlier in the musical, we noted she sounded breathy, kind of unsure at points. There's no doubt here. There's no ambiguity. That just kicks ass. Was that some good sing-talking for you? Fly. That's all, all I wanted to hear. You know, coming out of this musical, I was thinking about, what is the,

sort of genre trope that it's working in. It has a lot of rock instruments, but it doesn't have a lot of like pop song repeated choruses. There's a lot of through composition. And now I'm realizing, Wicked is Prague rock. Lots of key changes, fun rhythmic dexterity. I think that this is like straight up rush.

This episode also is remedying one of the major problems I had coming out of the movie, where I was like, Cynthia Arevo's performance is very uneven, where the songs at the beginning of the movie are delivered in a less inspired fashion than the songs in the back half like defying gravity. But through this conversation, I'm realizing that's a choice. She's unsure of herself at the beginning of the movie. Elphaba isn't comfortable with her place in the world, and so her delivery is a little bit more tense, a little bit with pause. Here she's fully committing vocally. And I think This is really illuminating that shift for me where I realize, no, that's on purpose.

We actually get a callback to that earlier style right at the penultimate moment of defying gravity. It's another unlimited light motif. There's our unlimited slash somewhere over the rainbow light motif making one final appearance before we get our big finale. And curtain. The riff in question. You can't bring her down. She just keeps ascending. It's like this is what it has in common with Hamilton.

And where King George sings that the oceans rise and empires fall, except where he gets it backwards when oceans rise, the melody falls. And when empires fall, the melody rises. Oceans rise. Empires fall. We have seen each other through it all. The king sings so confidently that he understands the direction of the world, but it's actually going against him, just like the actual king of England in this time of history.

And the wicked witch of the West, Elphaba, she's singing. Everyone's going to bring her down, but she just keeps rising further up and up and up above. She is unlimited, defying gravity. That riff feels so unprocessed. It's really jarring, which I think is the intention. You know, like, you hear this, like, this massive breath that she takes before she launches into it. Yeah, well, let's end with this riff because never has a little vocal adlib and so minutely disgust. And I love that.

Because the original, the one that young Rihanna Cruz heard in the commercials back in 2003 is sung by Edina Mansell, sounds like this. I feel like I'm going to say something unholy. I think I like the new one more. Am I allowed to? It's funky. It's probably going to hate me. The breath. That breath is crazy, Rihanna.

You're right. She also holds the note for so much longer. It's like Cynthia Arevo is flexing here. She's like, I can change it up. I can make it more funky and I can extend the note longer. I agree. I think the new slaps. I like to imagine a group of musical scientists in a lab being like,

how do we take this and make it even more extra for the movie? And they're moving the notes around until they find the exact right alchemy that will make this ad lib. Payfield to the original, but also usher a new generation of wicked fans into the franchise. And it's not a fair comparison because I read that the original show had like 25 orchestra members and this orchestra is over 100 players. Oh my goodness. There's a lot of extra support, not to say anything negative of the vocal whatsoever, but there's just a lot more going on to build up the energy in this moment. There's so many songs from Wicked we haven't even discussed in this episode,

but what I hope we have been able to do here is tell part of the musical story of this cultural phenomenon through a few of its key iconic songs. And for anyone out there who left our last episode on musical theater, appalled, dismayed, infuriated. I hope we've assuaged some of that emotional intensity by demonstrating that we truly do love musical theater and we really genuinely want to know how it works and understand it better.

And let this be a peace offering to you. To quote the lyrics from Defying Gravity, I hope you're happy. I feel unlimited. We are unlimited. Unlimited. Unlimited. Unlimited.

It's head. Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarland, edited by Art Chung, illustrations by R.S. Gottlieb. Remember of the Fox Media Podcast Network, production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine.

Subscribe at NYMag.com slash pod. Find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you listen to podcasts. And reach out to us at Switch on Pop on social media. Tell us your experience of these songs, popular, Wizard and I, Defying Gravity,

and the ones we didn't get to talk about. No one mourns the wicked. or dancing through life. Good songs. I want to know what everybody's favorite riff is, personally. Favorite version of the defying gravity riff. Yes, where do you fall in the great riff debate of 2024? Are you more of a Areva or more of an Adele Dezim?

The wickedly talented. The wickedly talented Adels. I destroy a lot of restraint throughout this recording, not dropping that. So, you know, pretty proud of myself. We're going to be back next Tuesday with another story on a major pop act. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Unlimited.