It is very common for musicals to be in contention for the Oscar for Best Sound, but it feels like Wicked, like Elphaba herself, went its own way to create something even more spectacular. Under the direction of John M. Chu, sound mixer Simon Hayes knew that he was in for a unique experience. With the actors singing live on set, this cast could go deeper into the emotionality of their characters while never sacrificing their deepest wants or spectacle for the audience.
Every time I have a chance to speak to someone associated with this musical adaptation, we end up talking about the reception and overwhelming pull the film has had. It’s no wonder that Wicked is one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history (watch your back, Phantom…), and Hayes has felt the response even as this awards season continues.
“Isn’t it incredible how the movie has touched so many people, because you’re not alone,” Hayes says. “Every time I’ve seen it, I’d say that eighty-percent of people have got tears rolling down their cheeks at different points during the movie. What’s interesting about Wicked is also what’s interesting about John M. Chu saying, ‘Let’s go live.’ I think that had a lot to do with this emotional connection that we all felt when we watched the movie. It’s all the emotions coming through.”
I took a moment to gush and tell Hayes that I knew the sound was going to blow me away in the film’s opening moments. We are disoriented right away as we see Elphaba’s hat sitting in a puddle of water as fiery embers quietly fall to the ground. We hear the voice of Ariana Grande’s Glinda confirming that “Yes…the Wicked Witch of the West is dead!” before the flying monkeys crash through a large window and Stephen Schwartz’s incredible score blasts through the theater. What impresses, though, is that the layered sound mixing sticks out immediately.
“I think there’s a loudness war in cinema right now, and I’m so glad that Wicked didn’t take part in that,” he says. “What the re-recording mixers did very, very well was to use dynamics which made the intimate parts dig into the emotions of the characters, but, at the same time, made the huge moments that much more impressive.”
Hayes is a lover of the musical film adaptation. He won an Oscar for Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables, but he has worked on so many films where music is a focus: Aladdin, Mary Poppins Returns, and Yesterday, to name a few. Each musical or film with music has its own identity. He was eager to jump into Wicked for its scope, but he knew that his work would be unlike any other film that he worked on.
“I knew that we had two of the best singers in the world, so I knew that going live was, creatively, the correct choice,” Hayes says. “I knew that they could sing perfectly again and again and again since that’s what they do. What I wanted to be able to provide them with was the space to be able to do that, with the choir in the background on the set. I wanted to get the whole crew completely committed to making a silent space for them–not just because they were singing live, but also because of the emotional content of what’s within that live singing. I wanted both Cynthia [Erivo] and Ari to be able to go very low in volume without feeling self-conscious of what’s going on in the background. I wanted to make sure that they felt supported–if they wanted to whisper, they could whisper while they were singing.
Cynthia has a big voice, but [some moments] allowed her to go very, very low. That helped her connect to the fragility of the song and how she was feeling in the moment. The other important thing about [this] Wicked is that these actors don’t have to sing to the back row. They know that the camera is in a close-up. If I have the set absolutely quiet, they can let their emotions drive the piece rather than thinking, ‘If I go too low in volume, I’m going to get told that they can’t hear me.'”
Hayes points out Erivo’s rendition of ‘I’m Not That Girl’ as a highlight where the Tony Award winner could really take her time to allow Elphaba to explore her moments in the moment. Yes, Wicked is a huge adaptation, but the sound design and landscape never lets the moments slip by without thoughtful consideration.
“The fact that Cynthia was singing to a keyboard accompaniment and not a backing track is what gave her complete freedom to take a moment, take a breath and to have one tear come out of her eye and not feel that she was being distracted or held down by a pre-recorded backing track,” he says. “For the first couple of verses, there’s no choreography or anything else that had to work off that tempo–she’s free in that moment. The keyboard player was asked to never, ever lead her. That allows her heart to drive the character and the emotionality. For that song, it was better to do it that way.”
On the flip side of that, Fiyero’s ‘Dancing Through Life’ is a massive set piece. In addition to a large portion of the ensemble cast toe-tapping in and out of the frame, there are sound designs sprinkled throughout and melded together: the whoops and cheers from the crowd, the turning of the huge wheel in the library; even the papers that Glinda tosses (toss tosses?) can be heard fluttering to the ground before the action move to an entire different space in the reprise.
“A song like ‘Dancing Through Life’ could not be done without the collaboration between myself and sound post,” Hayes says. “You’ve got live vocal tracks and a lot of live effects, but it’s also blended and sound designed with a whole load of post-production sound effects like the wheel turning. That was by one of the sound designers, John Marcus–that wasn’t the real sound of the wheel. The foreground singing and the foreground effects are very real and live, but as you move into ther background, it is a beatiful sound design number with lots and lots of work to build up what you hear. For instance, we absolutely believe it is as audience members because the singing is live and when Jonathan, at the beginning, kicks the book, that’s the real book that you hear. That allows the sound design team to start to build up a world beneaththe reality and extenuate it.”
It’s incredible how Hayes and his team take sound to incorporate it into the arc of the characters, and the greatest example of that is the positioning of Erivo’s microphone for the climactic song, ‘Defing Gravity.’ Any time Elphaba places that hat on her head, it activates a microphone in the brim of the hat, and it quite literally gives the character clearer volume, or–in a thematic sense–a stronger, steadier voice. In a really rad way, the sound design and mix fuse together with one of the most iconic pieces of costuming of all time. Even though Elphaba is soaring beyond comprehension, we feel close to her.
“Like all good things in moviemaking, there was a whole lot of luck involved,” he says. “To take advantage of that luck, though, we have to have the creative and technical knowledge to be able to do it. I knew that mic was going to sound better than anything else, particularly because, when she’s wearing a hat, we generally frame the hat in so the boom isn’t going to be able to get as close as it normally would be able to because we can see the point of the hat. Let’s take into account that that hat microphone is going to be closer than a boom would even be on a big close-up, because it’s only an inch above her eyebrows at all time. Whenever she turns her head, unlike a normal lav mic fixed to the chest, the hat mic is going with the movement of her head like her own personal boom.
We’ve got the best of both worlds. We’ve got a lav closer than a boom, and it follows her like a boom. Creatively, we can hone into her character, and that mic is almost like a looking glass into her soul, and it extenuates every emotion so much more. It suddenly means that we are much more a part of her journey, because she is so closely mic’d–Cynthia is more closely mic’d than any character in any movie will ever be. It just gives the audience a third dimension that they’ve never had been to before, because, when she starts putting on the hat, that’s when she starts to find her power.”
Wicked is available for rent and purchase now.
