As the composer Stephen Schwartz was working on the 2003 stage musical “Wicked,” one of the stars, Kristin Chenoweth, repeatedly asked for another number for her character, Glinda, to sing in the second act.
“I kept saying, along with the team, ‘There isn’t one,’” Schwartz remembered in a video call earlier this month.
Schwartz eventually owed Chenoweth an apology, because now, in the movie “Wicked: For Good,” arriving more than two decades later, Glinda gets her Act 2 showstopper. It’s called “The Girl in the Bubble,” and it finds the questionably good witch played by Ariana Grande using her elegant soprano to come to terms with the fact that her identity has been built on lies.
The song is one of two created for the sequel film, which hits theaters Nov. 21. The other, the anthemic “No Place Like Home,” plays earlier in the movie and features the misunderstood “wicked witch,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), explaining why she continues to fight for Oz, a land that has rejected her. In interviews, the creative team explained why they decided to add the songs and how they went about crafting them.
The director Jon M. Chu said there was no mandate to add more tunes in hopes of gaining Oscar nominations. (Only songs written directly for the screen are eligible.) Instead, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble” were born of the decision to flesh out the second half of the story for its own feature film, a follow-up to the box-office smash, simply titled “Wicked,” that was released a year ago. That meant bringing to life character beats that took place offstage in the Broadway version.
“It was about: We need to go deeper with understanding where Elphaba and Galinda are during their journey,” Chu said, using the Good Witch’s name in the first movie. He added, “Those were either going to be scenes or they were going to be songs, and I would never have pushed Schwartz to write a song because he needs to be inspired by a moment, but he raised his hand immediately.”
When Schwartz and the book writer Winnie Holzman worked on the musical initially, they were struggling with its length, Schwartz said. Adding more material, as Chenoweth requested, was not in the cards.
“It really is a very streamlined second act, which I think is good,” said Holzman, who wrote the “Wicked: For Good” screenplay with Dana Fox. “The first act is really rich and has a huge ending, which is amazing, and then it’s like: ‘Let’s go like a freight train. Let’s not linger. Let’s not exhaust the audience.’ But this is a whole different situation now.”
There was both more time to explore the two characters’ motivations and a new recognition that Glinda has the bigger arc in “For Good” than even Elphaba, which made the need for a new song evident. Whereas Elphaba realizes her purpose during “Defying Gravity,” the soaring number that closes the first movie, Glinda is passively swept into the Wizard’s propaganda machine. On top of that, the technology available onscreen allowed Schwartz to make use of some classic Oz imagery like Glinda’s bubble, an homage to Billie Burke’s entrance as Glinda in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Also, because it’s a movie, we have this beautiful bubble,” Schwartz said.
“So that led to the metaphor of the girl in the bubble,” he added. “It sort of laid itself out that that would be the song.”
Schwartz aimed to keep the melody simple, “almost folklike,” to allow for Grande’s stripped-down performance as she examines herself in a mirror. Though Glinda usually shows off with vocal frills, here she is quiet, even a little tremulous at first.
“I think she was sick that day that she sang this,” Chu said. “You can hear it’s not the perfect note from Ariana Grande that it usually is. She struggles to pull it out.”
While “The Girl in the Bubble” was a clear choice for Glinda, the sequence that includes “No Place Like Home” went through a long development process, Schwartz explained. In the stage show, the audience just hears about how Elphaba is waging her rebellion against the Wizard. “For Good” opens with Elphaba in action, disrupting the building of the Yellow Brick Road. When she encounters a group of animals — the talking creatures the Wizard has scapegoated — as they’re trying to escape Oz to avoid persecution, Elphaba sings the new tune to convince them to stay.
“Elphaba makes an enormous sacrifice at the end out of love for Oz to try to make things right in Oz in the only way she realizes is possible,” Schwartz said. “Winnie and I and the team felt that it was really important from a storytelling and emotional point of view to understand how much Elphaba actually loved her homeland.”
Schwartz said he had hoped to write a song named “No Place Like Home” even before “Wicked” entered his life, and, once he started working on the musical, had long wanted to connect the phrase to Elphaba. Like “The Girl in the Bubble,” “No Place Like Home” references material from L. Frank Baum’s original Oz novels but that is best known to audiences through the 1939 classic.
The callback to the iconic line Dorothy utters after clicking her heels together was one reason Holzman thought the phrase “no place like home” made for a meaningful title. “Thematically, one of the things we were wrestling with trying to write the movies — and this is something we were wrestling with all along, but it became more pronounced because there is just more nuance you can bring — is she is somebody who is hated in her home,” Holzman said.
The lyrics about choosing to stay in a place where you feel like you don’t belong resonated for Chu as the son of immigrants, and he discussed them in depth with Erivo.
“We talked for hours about what it means to be in America and to be someone like her,” he said of Erivo.
Musically, Schwartz wanted to channel the “soulfulness” and the “ferocity” in Erivo’s voice in what he called the “contemplative” tones at the beginning of the track and the “more militant” sounds that emerge later. However, when it came to the lyrics, real-world analogues were also very much on Schwartz’s mind.
“That felt to me like what Elphaba would say whether she was in Oz or whether she was in America in our current situation,” Schwartz said. “She would take action. She would try to get allies to help her with her resistance.”
To Schwartz, both songs give the audience a better understanding of who these women are and, in the case of “No Place Like Home,” corrects a misinterpretation he has encountered in the past.
“It always kind of bothered me when people thought it was a happy ending, and I’m like: ‘No, it’s not. It’s bittersweet, there’s great loss on everybody’s part here at the end,’” he said. “And I think that is more vivid in the movie, partly because of the existence of this song.”
Meanwhile, “The Girl in the Bubble” gives voice to Glinda’s personal growth. Back in 2003, it never occurred to Schwartz to musicalize that. Sorry, Kristin Chenoweth.
“Maybe if we’d thought of it then we would have, but we just didn’t think of it,” he said.
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