Many years we have waited for a gift like Wicked to appear on the silver screen.
The Broadway show and its iconic songs like "Popular" and "Defying Gravity" might not exist without the persuasion of Stephen Schwartz. The four-time GRAMMY-winning composer was instrumental in transforming Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel about the Wicked Witch of the West’s pre-Dorothy life into a musical, before a movie.
A prequel to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, "Wicked" the musical flew onto Broadway in 2003 starring Idina Menzel as Elphaba (the Wicked Witch) and Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda (the Good Witch). It earned a GRAMMY Award for Best Musical Theater Album and has become a mega juggernaut in pop culture. Twenty-one years later, Wicked: Part I arrives in movie theaters on Nov.22 starring GRAMMY Award winners Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda. The soundtrack will also be released on the same day.
Schwartz, who wrote the music and lyrics for Wicked, was part of the creative team who helped bring this beloved story to new audiences. "I am so thrilled with this album for many reasons. Not obviously just the performances of Cynthia and Ariana, but the sound of the orchestra, that incredibly gorgeous, giant orchestra," Schwartz tells GRAMMY.com of the 85 musicians who recorded the songs and score at AIR Studios and Abbey Road in London.
The musical has spent over two decades on Broadway, and the film fittingly brings together many Glindas and Elphabas from the stage. Several Broadway actors are background vocalists on the album, which was recorded in part in New York City.
Wicked: Part II is expected to debut in theaters on Nov. 21, 2025, with two new songs written by Schwartz — one for each leading lady. Ahead of part one, GRAMMY.com spoke with Schwartz all about revisiting his songs for film, working with Grande and Erivo on their vocal tracks, and the musical differences between the stage and film adaptations of Wicked.
What do you think of the film after waiting all these years?
I was really happy with the movie. They were originally trying to make a movie, before I talked them out of that in 1997 and into doing a stage musical. I first heard about the book Wicked [The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West] from a friend, she basically told me the title and the idea. I thought it was a genius inspiration of [author] Gregory Maguire's to have the idea to make the Wicked Witch of the West the protagonist of a story. I was immediately interested in that concept for a musical.
I discovered that the rights had been sold to Universal who were in the process of developing it as a non-musical movie. I worked my way up the Universal food chain to get to Marc Platt, who was running Universal Pictures at the time, and persuaded him not to do it as a movie — at least not right away. I felt it was likely to meet the same fate as the other Oz movie sequels had. I felt it should be a musical, and if it worked as a musical, then someday it could be a musical movie, and here we are, many decades later.
I was very lucky because I think it would have been quite unlikely for most heads of a studio to abandon a movie that they were working on and had a bit of an investment in at that point. But when I walked into the office, Marc Platt sang "Corner of the Sky" to me. So, I happened to luck into a receptive audience to my idea.
What, if any, was your input into casting Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo?
We’ve been lucky with our director, Jon Chu, because he is extremely collaborative. Very often, I think, if you sell your show to the movies, they say, "Thank you very much. Go away. Maybe we'll invite you to the premiere." Here we were very actively involved and part of that was being consulted on casting.
Jon Chu obviously narrowed down his choices, but sent us some screen tests, which included both Cynthia and Ariana. I was familiar with Cynthia from her stage work, and I knew that she had a world-class voice. Obviously I knew who Ariana was, but I was kind of unprepared for how great and appropriate both of them seemed in their screen tests.
Here's a fun fact about Ariana singing. Several years ago, the pop singer Mika released a single that was sort of a spin off of "Popular," called "Popular Song." He had a singer with him on that record, and that was Ariana Grande, before she was Ariana Grande.
Over the years, you had heard both of them sing your songs: Cynthia sang "Thank Goodness" in a PBS special in 2021 and Ariana sang "The Wizard and I" for the 15th anniversary of the musical on NBC. There’s this story of how Jon M. Chu first got both of them in the room together, you sat at the piano and played "For Good." What do you remember about that night?
The whole night was so amazing because they were meeting for the first time. Cynthia and Ariana had such instant chemistry; when they sang at the piano, their voices blended so beautifully together. As the composer, the fact that their voices blend so well was obviously a lucky asset. That chemistry shows up in the movie and it's a key to why I think people find the movie so emotionally satisfying.
Did you know you were going to sit at the piano and play that song?
They were like, "Let's all go inside. And Stephen, why don't you play? Ladies, if you know the words, sing along." It was extremely impromptu. Everybody cried, so it was very emotional and exhilarating.
Of all the Elphaba and Glindas you've worked with over the years, what was special about working with Ariana and Cynthia?
Both bring enormous recording skills with them. They can kind of do anything vocally in a recording studio, and they're both extremely game to try things. We would experiment and Cynthia would try various riffs that came out of the performance. Ariana, at first, was a little tentative about her soprano — which she absolutely has and always had — but had never basically shown in public before. Those sessions were really fun, because as they went on and she could hear how well she was doing, it was exciting and fun for her. They both can listen quite objectively to their performances and comment on how to tweak them.
The great advantage of both of them is that, because they are real singers and have sung on a Broadway stage, they could do live performances when filming as well. We were able to inter-cut the live performances with where we had to use pre-record because someone was flying on a broom or floating in a bubble or doing something that didn't allow them to sing live.
The way their voices sounded in the recording studio needed to match how they sounded when they were on a soundstage, and that was tricky. We had a strong technical team and we were very aware going in that we were going to mix and match.
What advice did you give them?
Just what I always do, which is to talk about storytelling and to remind them what's happening: [Glinda] trying to convince [Elphaba in "Popular"] to let her make her over — or with [Elphaba in "Defying Gravity"] — this is the moment where you demand your power.
With singers like Ariana and Cynthia, who have such great instruments and such virtuosic control of their instruments, I don't have to say things like, "You're flat" or "Sing lighter here," or give any kind of technical notes, because they just bring that. It's always about the acting and the storytelling.
How might the songs sound different in the movie versus the Broadway show? Some of them are much longer.
The word cinematic keeps coming to mind. There's this huge, magical world that Jon Chu has created and the music needed to have the size to occupy that world.
Eighty-five musicians [working in a recording studio] is different from the 23 or so that you can have on Broadway. Songs needed to be adjusted based on the action we’re seeing on the screen. In some cases, things were expanded.
What was the thought behind expanding Elphaba and Glinda’s first visit to Emerald City in the song "One Short Day?"
We wanted to show more of how the Wizard [Jeff Goldblum] was using propaganda to create a fake image and false history for himself. We had the idea [to add it] to this show they play [for Glinda and Elphaba] in Emerald City called "Wizomania," which is briefly done in the Broadway show and kind of a send up to Funny Girl and Jule Styne-type rhymes. "Wizomania" is basically perpetuating the myth that there were ancient magical, wise ones in Oz, who set down all their magic in a book, but they put it in a secret language. That book is The Grimmerie.
We knew that book was very important to the story of the movie, and so we wanted to go into more depth about it. There was a prophecy that when Oz fell into difficult times, someone would come who would be able to read The Grimmerie and restore Oz to merriment. They're looking for someone who could actually read this book and actually do some magic to help the Wizard stay in power.
You also make a cameo at the end of the song as they approach the gates to see the Wizard!
Jon Chu said to [screenwriter and the musical’s book writer] Winnie [Holzman] and me that we should be in the movie. So we wrote ourselves in. We were just going to be people in the crowd.
When we first did "One Short Day," I had cut that last line "The Wizard will see you now!" — I thought we don't need to do that in the movie, because we'll just see them right there at the palace. And Ariana said, "If you cut that line, I'm quitting the movie. You have to have ‘The Wizard will see you now!’"
It wound up being my line. I will say that when I went in for costume and makeup, they gave me two choices of mustaches. I said they had to give me the big mustache because I have to be like Frank Morgan. I have to be the guy [from the 1939 film] who says, "Who rang that bell?"
I think fans would be devastated if that line wasn’t in it.
One of the things that was so good about this team — particularly Jon Chu and Ariana, because she knows the show so well — was that they protected Winnie and me. We said we’ll change whatever we need to change and Jon would say, "No, you can't change that. You have to keep that."
Greg Wells, our producer, wanted to refresh the rhythmic feel of "Popular" and make it a little more contemporary. Greg came up with something which was really fun, and we played for Ariana. And she said, "Absolutely not. I want to be Glinda. I don't want people to think that I'm Ariana Grande playing Glinda. If they hear this kind of different rhythm, they're going to think you changed it because of me, and I don't want to do that." So then we went back to the original.
Do you think we'll ever see Ariana and Cynthia on Broadway again?
You might. I don't think right away because they're going to be doing another year of promoting [the new film]. I could see the circumstances where years from now they're doing Gypsy or somebody writes a musical built for one of them. I could definitely see it.**