219 - The Music of Wicked

Dolby Creator Talks

Academy Award® and Grammy Award®-winning songwriter Stephen Schwartz, Tony Award®-winning musical director Stephen Oremus, and Oscar-nominated composer John Powell join guest host Jon Burlingame for an in-depth discussion about bringing the iconic Broadway musical “Wicked” to the big screen. Together they discuss how they collaborated with director Jon M. Chu to adapt the beloved musical into a cinematic experience, the challenges of blending live and pre-recorded vocal performances, and the ways in which they expanded the orchestral arrangements to match the scale of this massive Hollywood movie musical.

“We had spent so much time — and by ‘we’ I mean myself and [writer] Winnie Holtzman — when we were writing the screenplay, which of course includes the songs [and] going through everything very meticulously with [director] John Chu, that basically he came in knowing how he was going to shoot it… But then, of course, once you're actually there and working with bodies and working within the environment, things will change… This was an extremely collaborative process all along the way. It wasn't as if we did some music work, then went away, and came back and were surprised by what was done with it… Nobody sort of went off and did his thing by himself.”

—Stephen Schwartz, Executive Producer, Music and Lyrics, “Wicked”

Be sure to check out “Wicked,” now in theaters in Dolby Vision® and Dolby Atmos®.

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