Wicked’s screen adaptation, which released November 22 in movie theatres, might just be one of, if not the most action-packed movie musical to ever be produced. And while in Hollywood that often means lots of smoke and mirrors, specifically loads of CGI and other fakery, the filmmakers have been clear that was not the case with Wicked. Director Jon M. Chu and production designer Nathan Crowley wanted real stakes, and real emotion—and that meant lots of real, practical sets.
It also meant singing that’s not recorded in a recording studio. Yes, even when you see Cynthia Erivo flying a 360-degree loop in the air, you are hearing the Tony winner’s real, live vocals as she’s performing that death-defying stunt. In fact for a majority of the film's soundtrack, the singing you hear was recorded live on set.
To make sure all that singing sounded crystal clear, Chu brought in Live Sound Mixer Simon Hayes. The industry veteran brought with him an impressive resume of movie musicals, many also featuring vocals captures live on set. He is an Oscar winner for his work on Les Misérables. His past projects also include Mary Poppins Returns, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Cats (despite your feelings on that film, the live vocals were captured expertly).
“My career has been building up, giving me the experience, the building blocks in this mad journey towards the biggest musical that’s ever been,” says Hayes of his work on Wicked. “It was kind of like every single movie I’ve ever done, especially the musicals, gave me the experience, the instinct to make the right decisions to be able to support Jon and the cast in the right way.”
Hayes is quick to point out that this recent trend of live singing in movie musicals is not actually new. “If you go back to the beginning of movie musicals, there wasn’t the technology to play back tracks, and lip syncing was so much harder,” he says. “It wasn’t all the time, but some of the vocals on the very early musicals were sung live.” Hayes is talking about things made closer to the invention of talkies, but even movie musicals further along have on occasion featured live singing, perhaps most notably on 1964’s My Fair Lady. Rex Harrison reprised his stage performance for the movie version, and he didn’t so much sing his songs as (mostly) talk them. Harrison was so averse to lip syncing to pre-recorded versions of this that he made capturing his songs live a requirement of his casting. At the time, it was a technical marvel that it happened at all.
And to be fair, pre-recorded vocals didn’t used to sound so noticeably pre-recorded. Ironically, when technology in the studio isn’t as pristine as it is today, the difference between onset dialogue and studio vocals can be almost indistinguishable. In the modern era, it can stick out like a sore thumb. But Hayes says he’s less worried about noticeable quality differences than he is about what it means artistically.
“We were polishing and over-producing the pre-recording vocals and, without knowing it, sucking the emotion, the human fragility, the reality out of the vocal,” explains Hayes. “I think by returning to live vocals, we’re returning to prioritizing the human emotion in the voice.”
For Hayes—and Chu—it’s all about capturing authentic emotions. “There’s something within the breath and the cadence of the way that the lips are moving, the breath that you’re hearing as someone’s walking and singing live, that just sounds real—because it is real. There’s also something within the acoustic of the voice that matches the set we see, because it’s a real acoustic. It’s not synthetic rebuilt digital acoustic.”
And, Hayes says, it’s not just aural. “I want to see the emotion in the way they’re singing,” Hayes says passionately. “There is emotion in that delivery, in seeing the muscles of their throat—it’s part of the performance. When we take that away, we’re stealing from the audience if we can’t give them every single bit of real performance that exists.”
Hayes says that the Wicked’s live vocals were a major emphasis for Chu, who expected everybody working on the film to do whatever was necessary to give Hayes the best shot at capturing the on set singing. For Chu, that meant hiring a cast with the skills to not only sing well, but also reliably hit those notes during every take. Luckily, his leads had stage experience.
Cynthia Erivo, starring as Elphaba, won a Tony Award for playing Celie eight performances a week in The Color Purple on Broadway. Ariana Grande, the film’s Glinda, also has Broadway credentials—she was in the ensemble of Jason Robert Brown’s 13 as a youngster. More importantly, Grande is a two-time Grammy-winning pop icon with many concert tours under her belt. Jonathan Bailey, starring as Fiyero and best known for his work on Netflix’s Bridgerton, won an Olivier Award for his performance as the “(Not) Getting Married Today”-singing Jamie in the West End bow of the gender-swapped Company revival.
As for how Hayes captured all that singing, for most shots, each actor had three microphones: a boom mic above their head and two lavalier mics on their body, the location depending on their costume. For Grande’s Glinda, whose costumes were many times low cut in front, that meant having a mic on the left-front and right-front of her costumes, ensuring she could turn her head without losing the vocals (Hayes clearly learned a trick or two from Singing in the Rain).
Erivo’s Elphaba, on the other hand, often had a uniquely perfect spot to affix a mic: the brim of her iconic witch hat. “The hat is only one inch above her eyebrows, so that is a really close personal mic,” Hayes explains. “And when she turns her head, the hat mic goes with her, as if it’s a miniature boom.” Erivo would also get more lavalier mics for when she wasn’t wearing a hat or wanted to take it off.
The actors also got state-of-the-art in-ear monitors, or IEMs. That allowed them to hear their accompaniment tracks without them getting caught on their vocal mics. Hayes says he had to collaborate with costume designer Paul Tazewell on how to hide the IEM cords, and sometimes the mics, too. The IEMs, for instance, were custom painted to match the actors’ exact skin tone. But, Hayes admits, there was also some amount of digital removal of IEMs and lavalier mics from the finished cut of the film.
Live singing also freed the actors from being restricted to a pre-determined tempo. “When we were getting emotional moments and weren’t in a dance, we would use a live keyboard in the IEM, allowing the performance to take the priority and drive the music rather than the music driving the performance,” Hayes says. “Then as we started approaching the driving bass, the rhythmic DNA of Wicked, we would seamlessly cross over from the live keyboard into the pre-recorded music track that was expertly produced.” The latter was, of course, important to ensure that the various camera angles wouldn’t all have different tempos when stitching everything together.
Beyond the actors, Wicked’s London-based crew also had the challenge of eliminating background noise, so Hayes could get the cast’s singing recorded in as close to isolation as possible. And background noise, it turns out, can come from a lot of different directions. Hayes says that outdoor film shoots usually require multiple, very large electrical generators to keep things looking like sunshine all day—and they can be quite noisy. “We had four electrical generators, one on each corner of the football pitch-sized Shiz University set,” says Hayes. “We had to put every generator at least 100 yards away from the edge of the set so that we couldn’t hear them on set.”
One of the unique challenges in terms of background noise on Wicked was how often there was wind on set. Wind, Hayes says, is the enemy of sound capture—even when they're piping it in via movie magic (as they often were on Wicked). And Elphaba can’t fly high singing “Defying Gravity” without wind in her magically gigantic cape, after all!
“We developed a technique with the special effects department for silent wind,” Hayes says. “We would leave the machinery that creates the wind outside of the studio and pipe it in using flexible tubes, a little bit like air conditioning ducts but flexible.” That setup allowed technicians to get all the wind they want without sending any to the actors’ mics. Even a little error there, Hayes says, and the vocal would have to be re-recorded in a studio, which both he and Chu wanted to avoid at all costs.
Hayes can’t say the exact percentage of what you hear in Wicked’s final soundtrack comes from the live capture and how much ended up needed a studio re-record, but he’s unequivocal that the latter was minimal (excluding the chorus vocals, which comes from an offscreen ensemble that included lots of Wicked stage alum).
For the soloists, Hayes says: “All I can tell you is that Ari and Cynthia and Johnny and Jeff [Goldblum, the film’s Wizard] sang everything possible live on set. Every single time we sang live."
Of all the background noises Hayes had to tackle, there was one that stood out for how unusual it was: birds. Wicked was the very first movie to shoot in London’s Sky Studios Elstree. Since the interior of the stages had been exposed to the elements during construction, the Wicked team found some unwelcome squatters when they started building the movie’s sets. A legion of London pigeons had nested in the studio’s ceiling. Hayes didn’t want to hurt them, but also didn’t want their cooing ruining takes. Luckily, an assistant, Robin Johnson, had an excellent idea.
“Robin said, ‘Let’s just play them the sound of a hawk,’” Hayes remembers. “We played back a YouTube recording of some hawks hunting, and suddenly we didn’t have pigeon problems anymore. They flew out of the studio doors and went and lived their lives in happiness and didn’t have to listen to any hawks in the studio.”
Of course, as we pointed out to Hayes, that did also mean they missed out on hearing Erivo and Grande’s thrillifying vocals. “They can go to the cinema and buy a ticket,” Hayes said laughing. Surely Universal would be only too thrilled to add even more to Wicked’s box office bonanza.
Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
Ariana Grande in Wicked
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
Cynthia Erivo, Jon M. Chu, Ariana Grande, and production company of Wicked
Jon M. Chu, Cynthia Erivo, and Ariana Grande
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Wicked
Ariana Grande and cast of Wicked
Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh in Wicked
Jonathan Bailey and cast of Wicked
