Awards season events don’t often get better than what Universal Pictures rolled out on behalf of Wicked: For Good Tuesday night.
Musicals maestro Baz Luhrmann and actress turned taste-maker Colleen Camp teamed to host and help celebrate the Jon M. Chu film at Hollywood’s boutique hotel and members club The Aster in front of an intimate crowd of VIPs, press and A-listers like Charlize Theron (with her daughter in tow), studio chairperson Donna Langley and Wicked producer Marc Platt. The evening started with a screening of the second installment of the blockbuster franchise at TCL Chinese 6 Theatre down the street before the Aster-hosted reception.
Following a brief dinner and cocktail reception during which stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo mingled with attendees, officials opened doors to a lounge space for the main event that was meant to be a “thrillifying” surprise though tongues were wagging in the lead-up that the co-stars might take the stage for a brief set. That they did by performing the title track “For Good” and a stirring rendition of “Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again,” once performed at the London Palladium by another iconic duo, Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Garland, of course, had the first iconic stroll down the yellow brick road by playing Dorothy in the beloved classic The Wizard of Oz.
They were introduced to the rapt audience by Chu and Luhrmann after a “clock tick” of a Q&A that found the latter offering his ringing endorsement of the film. His appearance alone proved how much he loves what Chu and his team brought the screen as Luhrmann flew in from Tokyo especially to host the affair.
“Look, it’s easy to come from Tokyo to do this,” Luhrmann purred after being introduced as a “genius” by Camp. “Because it’s so hard to make a live-action musical, and when you make one at this scale, that has this much cultural effect, and that can touch the youngest audience member, an older audience member and be both incredibly classical but so pop, so of the moment, so about inclusiveness, so about what brings us together, not what pushes us apart, that’s the great thing about musical form.”
Luhrmann, who knows the form well thanks to Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, then offered a brief anecdote about when he was prepping his operatic La Bohéme in San Francisco more than two decades ago. They were in search of a theater to do tryouts, and it happened to be around the same time that Wicked was being staged in its earliest iteration in the city but it was “dead on arrival,” Luhrmann noted. “I learned that this young man went along and saw it, and his name was Jon. I kind of blame him for not sort of cheering loud,” Luhrmann joked.
The filmmaker then started asking questions of Chu, but first explained how hard it is to make a good movie musical. “My observation about musicals is that everyone comes up and says, ‘It must have been so much fun. It must be crazy fun.’ And what they don’t realize is just how much labor and work goes into creating. If you make one work, then someone in the world today, someone’s singing ‘The Hills Are Alive’ from The Sound of Music. But if you fail, there’s no in between. There’s this sort of sense that musicals just can’t work.”
Chu confirmed what a heavy lift Wicked turned out to be, adding that he also had three kids during the making of the movies. “But how privileged were we to be exhausted by getting the dream that we always beg the universe for. We get to make movies. We get to make not just movies, we get to make movie musicals. And musicals give you access to the soul. It gets you closer to the soul. And it’s not just the lens, it’s the notes. It’s not just the notes, it’s the amazing words of Stephen Schwartz. It’s movement too.”
Looking back on the entire process, Chu quoted an iconic line from Wicked by saying that he was changed. “It makes you have to dream. It forces you to dream bigger than you think you can. You have friends that you’ve worked with this whole time, and they believe in you more than maybe you do on some of those days. You’re rooting for each other, like, go and build this thing. That’s the thing that that energizes you. It doesn’t actually exhaust you in a way.”
Though it took years for Chu to make — and even longer for the feature film adaptation to get a greenlit after its record-breaking success on Broadway — Luhrmann praised it as a franchise that feels “like it was made for now.” Chu agreed.
“I got the job when we’re in the middle of COVID lockdown and the world was falling apart all around us. Driving through West Hollywood, seeing things burning on fire, and you’re like, what is happening? And who are we as a people? This movie came along, and I was reading the lyrics. At first, I thought is this too big of a franchise for me to go do at this moment when I’m trying to find myself as a filmmaker? And I read those words, ‘something has changed within me, something’s not the same,’ and I read it in a way that I’ve never read it before.”
He continued: “Then picturing someone like Cynthia Erivo singing those words and what that meant and what that means at that time. You couldn’t have predicted what it means at this time, but you could feel it in the air already. It just felt like this has to be made now. I don’t care if they’ve waited 20 years, and they’ve had every excuse to not make it, now is the time we have to make it.”