Turning the Wicked stage musical into a film was always going to be a challenge, but if the early reviews are anything to go by, director Jon M Chu appears to have pulled it off.
One of the big early calls that Chu and his cast would have been required to make is whether to sing their vocals live, as scenes were being filmed - as opposed to lip-syncing to pre-recorded tracks - and it was recently confirmed that the two leads, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, made that decision pretty quickly.
“It was an immediate no-brainer for Cynthia and I,” says Grande in a recent Wicked featurette. “We both were like, ‘well, of course we’re singing live.’ There’s something special about what happens when music is live in a room.”
Despite this unequivocal statement, it seems that, initially at least, the question of how Wicked’s vocals should be recorded was up for discussion.
“You know, when we came into this movie we weren’t sure how much we were going to do live or not, but they are the best singers in the world and so every scene they have been singing live,” says Chu in an on-set interview.
“We chose to sing live because it meant that we would be further connected to the words we were saying and to each other,” adds Erivo.
While it certainly helped that both Grande and Erivo had the vocal chops to pull this off, it also meant that the sets had to be suitable for making high-quality vocal recordings.
“So what we’ve managed to do is immerse the audience, because effectively our movie set is also a recording studio,” says Chu. “So that raw and real emotion that we are recording on set right now will be what you hear and experience in the theatre.”
And, of course, emotion and feeling are what this thing’s all about: “There’s something special about what happens when music is live in a room,” says Erivo.
Wicked is on general release from today.
