A musical is only as good as its songs. If any musical soundtrack has been universally beloved, it’s Wicked. Broadway fanatics and casual fans alike have fallen in love with the wonderfully whimsical music of Wicked. Learn more about who wrote this soundtrack, below.
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Who Wrote the ‘Wicked’ Soundtrack?
The music of Wicked was written by Stephen Schwartz. According to Schwartz, it’s took four years to finalize the music with all the twists and turns of the plot.
“It’s a very complicated story to work out; there’s a lot of plot, there are a lot of relationships between the characters that either had to be used or dropped, there are a lot of surprises and twists and turns to the plot that needed to be figured out so everything worked logically,” Schwartz once said.
In the end, he and his collaborators came up with a story that is equal parts entertaining and thought-provoking. What brought Schwartz to the project was the idea of giving a familiar story a breath of fresh air.
“For me, if you take a familiar story – whether it be the Book of Genesis or The Wizard of Oz – and you come at it from another point of view, the tension between the audience’s preconception and the approach you’re taking to the story adds an extra level of response, plus it helps to clarify the points you’re trying to make,” he continued in the same interview.
“Then I’ve always been attracted to stories about outsiders who are longing to be part of the ‘in crowd,’ and that character of the Wicked Witch of the West, who is green, immediately struck me as a quintessential outsider,” he added. “That’s when we learned that it was really the story of the two girls. It was their relationship that most spoke to people and was most vivid theatrically. That was going to be the key to the show.”
The soundtrack has a diversity of musical styles, tempos, and sentiments, helping to move the plot along. Moreover, the songs Schwartz created here work on their own. The original cast album has found its own footing as a work.
Learn more about the soundtrack–and what songs we can expect in the first part of the film adaptation–HERE.
(Photo by Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)
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