There’s no rest for the Wicked team. For the nearly two years that the Broadway musical adaptation was in production, costume designer Paul Tazewell, hair and makeup artist Frances Hannon, and production designer Nathan Crowley lived and breathed the wonderful world of Oz. Together, they rendered the American fairy tale into something that will not only meet the expectations of the most passionate theater kid but also reintroduce the timeless story to a world that needs to hear it perhaps now more than ever before.
“To have one of the strong themes be about a person who’s marginalized because of the color of her skin—albeit green—that is something that’s very, very real and is very timely in just how we live and give space to people with difference,” Tazewell says. “I think that runs throughout the film.”
It was no easy feat. Steered by director Jon M. Chu’s vision and guided by the light of the film’s two marquee stars—Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—the trio worked tirelessly to once again bring Oz to life. The fruits of their labor enter the canon of an Ozian meta-universe, one rooted in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel and the subsequent 1939 film. The musical itself, which premiered on Broadway in 2003, is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 revisionist novel, which reimagines the life and motives of the Wicked Witch of the West.
“We always wanted everything to be timeless but accessible. So, when we watch this film in 20 years’ time, we won’t be able to say, ‘Oh, that was made in 2020,’ ” Hannon says. “We’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, doesn’t that look wonderful still?’ ”
Before the first installment of the two-part movie-musical extravaganza heads to theaters on November 22, Tazewell, Hannon, and Crowley sat down with Harper’s Bazaar to talk about all things Oz—from establishing the lore of Shiz University to Jonathan Bailey dancing in a blond-streaked toupee.
Costume designer Paul Tazewell is a staple in the world of musicals. He’s won a Tony for Hamilton and an Emmy for The Wiz Live!, and he earned an Oscar nomination for West Side Story. Now, he casts his visionary eye toward Oz. “When Jon Chu gave me a call to approach designing Wicked, I was absolutely beside myself,” Tazewell says. His ability to make beautiful clothing was a given. But reinventing a world already so ingrained in pop culture? That was another task entirely. “There were a lot of times when we would be deciding what was the best choice for a given design, and [Jon] always went back to: ‘Does it make us feel delight? Does it charm our heart? Is it whimsical?’ ” Tazewell recalls. “We were creating this world that is full of whimsy and playfulness, and that was a wonderful place to live for the just-about two years that I was involved with it.”
Obviously, Wicked has this huge cult following, and The Wizard of Oz is visually iconic. How did you go about adapting what fans already knew and loved about this universe and bridging it into something that also served this adaptation?
This year is the 21st anniversary of Wicked, the Broadway musical. On set, we would say, “Well, the younger audience that will come to see this doesn’t necessarily know the Wizard of Oz film. They know Wicked as a musical and what that story is, and they know the Gregory Maguire novel.” What was interesting for me was to tap into the meta culture of The Wizard of Oz and Wicked collectively and how to see it through a more modern lens.
I went back to some of the original illustrations from the bound book from the turn of the [last] century and some of the images that were from the 1920s. I was tapping into the iconic imagery that’s kind of held throughout all of the different tellings of The Wizard of Oz. If you think about Glinda and the pink bubble dress, my direct inspiration for that was the Billie Burke Glinda from the 1930s film. That color of pink became very important for how I wanted to represent Glinda, kind of a metaphor of things that were airborne, the iridescence of bubbles and effervescence. This young woman who is always light and beautiful and good, the embodiment of goodness.
You and Cynthia Erivo already had a working relationship from Harriet. Can you tell me about the ideas that you both had about Elphaba’s style evolution throughout the first movie?
One of the things that I want to stress was very important for me was creating a balance between the character of Glinda and the character of Elphaba. With the glamour of sparkles and pink and all of those design elements that Glinda has become known for, it is easy to give someone the aura of beauty. But it was just as important to me to really embrace the beauty that Cynthia is, especially since her character is eventually going to be vilified.
Even though she was going to be in green makeup, it was imperative that her style was very specific and true to her and had a beauty. There’s an extremeness about her silhouette that I think is really wonderful and appropriate for her character. Then, the fabrication of all of her clothes—whether it’s the hand-felting in her pinafore when we first meet her, the micropleating in that Emerald City dress, her Ozdust dress-up clothes—there’s very specific thought going into each of those pieces of clothing that is of the same level as what we have for Glinda. They’re completely opposite, but they are of the same level, and they received the same care.
When we first see Glinda, she has these pointed shoulders that are also reflected in Elphaba’s wardrobe. I feel like that’s indicative of how these two characters mirror each other.
Exactly. Their silhouettes become the strongest thing, and the match of those silhouettes—even though we’ve got a difference in hem length, which is specific to their characters, the way that we’ve sculpted their bodies, their silhouettes, is to keep them as a pair. I was always very conscious of the silhouette of the shoulders and what I was doing with Elphaba versus what I was doing with Glinda, and having Glinda have rounder edges, and then Elphaba was more about angularity and points, which was alluding to the pointed hat, which becomes the icon for the character.
Were there any different iterations of the hat?
Yes, there were. Because this world could be anything, how I represented any of the icons that we know—starting with the witch’s hat—that is a part of our American culture. When Elphaba takes it and puts it on her head, it becomes a power source for her, because she is actually making it this amazing fashion statement for herself and it will end up defining her silhouette through the rest of the story.
Jon Chu wanted to start the film with a distance shot of the hat and then zoom in on the shape. When you’re seeing it from a distance, you’re not quite sure if you’re seeing a mountain or if it’s a building. There needed to be something that gave it a strong architectural shape. As you move into it, you realize that it is the witch’s hat, and then the camera moves on.
I have to say, there were probably six other versions of the hat. There was one that was more based on origami; one that, because we wanted it to collapse, was just a straight pointed hat, but it had texture; and one that had more angles. We arrived at this hat with the input of Cynthia, by trying these different prototypes on Cynthia and deciding, yes, this is the perfect hat and this is the perfect scale and this gives her the swagger that I knew that she could create—because she did the same kind of thing when I gave her a hat in Harriet.
It’s just quite wonderful to have that kind of collaboration. When you have worked with somebody before, there’s a shorthand that’s created, mainly because you get to know who that person is and what their sensibility is and what they’ll gravitate to. And Cynthia, she’s an amazing dresser, a fashionista, and she is very courageous in what she decides to wear.
Another one of the hero pieces of The Wizard of Oz is Glinda’s bubble dress. How did the design for that dress evolve?
There were a number of ideas that I had, and this one seemed to ring true for a modern vision of Glinda. Speaking of somebody who loves fashion, the same goes for Ariana Grande. She wears clothes amazingly and is very much in control of large skirts in space. I mean, she has an elegance that’s just inherent. Even if you don’t know The Wizard of Oz, you have seen this image of Glinda in the pink tulle dress that’s covered in sparkles, and it’s very magical in and of itself. It is an image that was created from the 1930s, so there is an old-fashioned quality to it, if you will, although it’s very classic. I wanted to make sure that we were approaching it with a silhouette that could feel more of today. I was inspired by some of the gowns that I was seeing in fashion, as well as marrying it with the idea of the Glinda dress from the 1930s film.
We arrived at those sculptural shapes because I was using the spiral as imagery throughout. The tailor who was making the dress started with a spiral shape that was then twisted into different cones and different sizes of spirals, and then collectively, as they were engineered together, they created this shape that’s really wonderful and dynamic. There’s a synergy about it. It is always moving, kind of like a visual sculpture.
For Academy Award–winning makeup and hair artist Frances Hannon, making the decision to join the Wicked team was a no-brainer (no pun intended). She had previously developed a “wonderful relationship” with director Jon M. Chu on the 2016 heist film Now You See Me 2. And, as she says, “Who would not want to work on Wicked?” Hannon began her Wicked journey by studying the script: “I learned the characters and their timelines, their history throughout the story, and then I started to break down their timelines for what happens within each scene. It’s a bit like making a family tree, but that family tree is only about the visual journey that they go through.”
How did you end up finding the right green skin tone for Elphaba?
There are many, many green makeups on the market, but most of them are face paints, as it’s used in the theater. I mixed to find the right color green for the skin tone, but it didn’t stay in all the different lights that Cynthia would be working in. I worked from painting a model green, looking at her in four or five different lights. I worked along with [director of photography] Alice Brooks, who would look at what her lighting situations would be. It was about finding a color that made Cynthia look beautiful in every light, that didn’t look like face paint, and that didn’t transfer onto Paul Tazewell’s outstanding costumes or Ari’s face or other artists during all the various performances that we had to do. It all sweats off, of course, because Cynthia is extraordinarily active, and when singing live, you are repeating yourself 10, 12 times a day on one song. The color had to fulfill a lot of requirements, and that didn’t exist. Mixing the right green color wasn’t the hardest thing; keeping the right green color in every light was.
I discovered a tiny little product that was not made anymore. It was a Canadian product, an eyeshadow, but it had a neon base. In the U.K., we didn’t have makeup made with that in the base. So I took the colors of the green. We have a wonderful makeup alchemist who makes makeup for us to order, and we took the base of one product and added it to my colors in the other. It was a bespoke design for Cynthia, and it worked perfectly.
With the sheer number of performances in Wicked, you have to make sure that glam stays consistent and sustains throughout filming. Was there a specific method that you used?
Every principal artist and every supporting artist had false hair, either a full wig or toupees—added hair of some kind. Everything was to add a little extravagance and to complement the size of the sets and the costumes. For example, Jonathan Bailey wore a large toupee, which nobody would ever know. Jonathan’s got a wonderful head of hair, but once you’re dancing and singing, you get very hot, and then your hair flops. We needed to keep that throughout and also never take too much time on set for checks. You can’t do a big repair job in the middle of a scene. So we added a piece, which Jonathan was delighted with. We added big blond splices throughout his hair, ’cause I really felt like it picked out something in Paul’s costumes. He had all these wonderful big brass buttons, and it just gave a wonderful addition to Jonathan’s look, complemented the costume, and then gave him a journey that he could travel into once he changes later on in the second film.
Speaking of hair, Elphaba and Glinda have two major hair transformations. I want to talk first about Ariana Grande, who has mentioned before how dyeing her hair blond really helped her get into the character of Glinda. Could you talk about what it was like nailing that specific shade of blond?
When she came to the U.K., we had her hair color changed straight away. That started her whole process. We often wigged her for her rehearsals as well, just to see how the hair would swing and move and to have her always start with a feeling of being in character every day, even though we weren’t going on camera. For her younger look, like for the opening for Shiz, we chose to have a warmer blond and slightly shorter hair. Then, when she arrives in her bubble, which is the opening of film one, her hair is paler and longer, but we always wanted to keep her very accessible to her audience. She wasn’t so removed and so styled that everybody couldn’t do that style every day. She carried her blond very well. We lifted her eyebrows to match. We kept her own skin tone, and we used a lot of her makeup range, of course—R.E.M., which is a beautiful range. That worked wonderfully as well on her.
As for Elphaba, she has these beautiful microbraids that Cynthia Erivo wears in the film. How did you both land on this specific hairstyle for her?
I found some references really early on that I sent to Jon. I think it was around June or July, and we didn’t start filming until December. It was some beautiful, fine microbraiding. What I thought would work particularly well on Cynthia was keeping the style very close to her head—so that we didn’t lose Cynthia within it, so we always got her beautiful shape, so that once the hat was on and the costume was on, you could still get light around her face. It is very important; otherwise, one could lose so much of what she was bringing to her character. … Jon showed Cynthia, and she loved the idea. I hadn’t actually had a fitting with Cynthia at this stage, but once we knew that Cynthia was on board, we started having the wigs made. The wig was made short, about six to eight inches long of the right texture. The braids were all put in afterward. Just as a generalization, a wig would take roughly four braiders several days to put all those braids in. There were so many.
I also wanted to touch on Elphaba’s nails. Cynthia has talked about her desire to have Elphaba wear these manicured sets throughout the movie, but could you speak more to what that’s meant to convey about her character?
It was something actually that Cynthia brought to the table, right in the early days. It was something that was part of Cynthia, first of all, and she absolutely wanted it to be incorporated into Elphaba, which Marc and Jon Chu were very happy with. We started the timeline or the storyline of the nails. You saw the baby first, and then you saw our little seven-year-old Elphaba, but she had tiny little green fake nails on too. Then, with Cynthia, we started with keeping it much simpler in her arrival at Shiz. You know, she had the iconic braid and she had her nails Cynthia-long, but not anything unusual yet, until, as she developed within her time, her nails became very much part of showing her power and her strength.
Cynthia had a wonderful nail artist called Shea Osei. The designs were laid down, and they wanted to keep it within the range of about four looks—because of course, when you have to do changes on set, nails can take a hugely long time. So we devised the nails, set out the basic styles, and then had all our stick-ons ready so that if we had a change of scene during the day, we could have the fake longer one or take off the one that was too long and put on the shorter one. As Cynthia developed her Elphaba, she brought in another one or two designs that she liked the idea of, and it often really brought something to the whole silhouette of Elphaba. She used it beautifully, and it really did show part of her storyline development.
Nathan Crowley is no stranger to creating sets for epic stories, with previous credits on Oscar-winning films like Dunkirk and Interstellar, but recently he’s gained a taste for fantasy. “As you get older as a designer, you realize you’ve crossed a lot of different kinds of genres, and I hadn’t tackled this kind of thing,” he says. His curiosity led him to work on The Greatest Showman, Wonka, and, eventually, Wicked. “With my résumé, I was surprised they hired me, because I’m not the obvious musical guy, but I do know cinema, I know how to make films, and I’ve always done practical filmmaking. Everything we do, we always build,” Crowley adds. “It’s also much more fun making things. Why wouldn’t you want to make things?”
Oz is obviously a very viscerally visual world. What kind of things were you talking about with Jon Chu when it came to defining that world?
Jon was very interested in making it magical. He wanted it to be overwhelming, he wanted you to fall into these places, he wanted color, he wanted the dance to be fluid. So he was very keen on going somewhere new, somewhere we didn’t know. Explaining the Emerald City, defining the Munchkins, understanding Shiz—they were these big keystones. We started by tackling Munchkinland because, out of the three sets, that seemed like the simplest—even though it is not, because there are so many pitfalls. You can take [inspiration from] Alpine villages, Middle Earth. We had to get past the obvious things we could have done. We needed to get past the first design stages and into something new. That really involved those tulips. They defined what the Munchkins did. Then it was like, “Well, maybe each house has a color, or maybe they farm flowers and they take the color out of the flowers.” And it’s like, “Well, then we need multicolored flowers.” You can see where I’m going here. One thing led to another, and it was like, “We have to grow tulips,” which was brilliant. [Laughs] So these things sort of evolve.
The task was to make it beautiful, nostalgic, fun, romantic. And then when you get to the Emerald City, you meet the man behind the curtain, and there’s mystery and there’s illusion and there’s something not quite right in Oz. For me, design-wise, it was like the Grimmerie and Kiamo Ko live in the time of the magic of the land, and they’ve almost been forgotten about by the humans and the Munchkins and the animals. That was the time of Shiz. Then you have the time of the Wizard, where they’ve really lost the land and they can’t ever get back to the Grimmerie and the ancient Kiamo Ko times. There was this sort of hierarchy of design themes that helped me—the falseness of Oz and the grounding of Shiz and then the magic of Kiamo Ko and the Grimmerie. I felt like they were design blocks that sort of helped me along the way—and Jon continuously saying, “More color! More movement!”
Can you explain from a design perspective the importance of doing real practical effects, like planting nine million tulips rather than simply relying on CGI or visual effects to do that work for you?
To get a good balance in film—and especially cinema, especially big-event cinema—you can’t just rely on one methodology. You have to combine methodologies. Of course there’s CGI in this film, but we have to balance it out. We need to give the editor and the director reality to cut from to CGI. You really want the audience not to be pushed out of the film by feeling the fakeness of it. You need to create a reality that CGI can work from. The thing about photography is, there’s emotion. You lose some of that going to CGI. You have to build enough set to make CGI understand the lighting emotion of the surfaces that it can then add to, rather than trying to falsify that. It’s very difficult. If you have the real sun and you have flowers blowing in the wind, sure, you can fake that, but can you fake it? I always call it nostalgia, like, I feel like I know that. And so that’s the balance, and it’s really important to me.
Speaking of the memory of The Wizard of Oz, I believe Shiz University might be one of the only set locations in Wicked that doesn’t necessarily have a visual predecessor in the original film.
That’s correct. Really only the stage show and the [Gregory Maguire] book [portrays it]. There’s no real reference.
There’s lots of things you can fall over on that road to design. You’ve got Hogwarts, you’ve got Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, you’ve got all these great establishments. And you don’t want a dark gothic—that isn’t Shiz, that isn’t Wicked. Shiz is supposed to be this place of learning that everyone wants to go to, so it’s got to be a happy place. When you come through the arch, it has to be “Oh my word, I made it to Shiz.” It’s probably how you really should feel about getting to Oxford, even if it’s just a bunch of courtyards and dark stone. You want to romanticize that.
The history of Shiz is about cultural mix. So we took architecture from all over the world, and I just rematerialized it, like Italianesque stone, Venice steps. We made them out of wood instead of stone. [The students] arrive by water, but that theory is based on [the idea that] you can’t come by horse and car because the animals are free and there are no cars in Oz. You can’t go by hot-air balloon because the Wizard owns that. You can’t go by train ’cause that’s the Wizard’s. That’s his technology he’s brought to Oz. So you’re kind of left with the fact that you’re coming by boat and rivers, which is an old tradition, which is in all of our history: waterways. So it was like, “Of course, we come by boat,” and then by coming by boat, the romanticism of the water and coming through the arch and the sort of Venetian lake, this all comes to play. As Marc always used to say to me, “It’s an American fairy tale.” So the arch you come through is based on some of the White City architecture from Chicago and the Sullivan arches; there’s Americana in the arch. It’s not a European arch, it’s an American arch. We have to pay homage to that architecture as well. I know everyone thinks America doesn’t have architecture, but it’s got tons. [Laughs]
One of my favorite parts about Shiz was the library. It also has one of the best dance sequences I’ve seen in a long time in a movie-musical adaptation. How often are you in conversation with choreographers when you’re designing a set for something that’s intended for a prominent performance like that?
They’re there from the beginning. I think I came up with the spinning-wheels idea very early, because for me, “Dancing Through Life” and the introduction of Fiyero was like, “We have to have the coolest thing. He’s this hero, so we have to do this wonderful thing.” If the set can move and it only moves for him, then that gives him this sort of upper status. Early on, we realized we were going to make these practical wheels that spun, but to do that, we really had to build a maquette, like a table-size version of all the spinning wheels, and give it to Christopher [Scott], the choreographer, to sit with it. It all was mechanical, the little maquette. He could play with it and try and figure it out because it was very difficult for him, that set. We built it early in the schedule, and they didn’t shoot till mid-schedule, so he could spend time with it and learn it and practice and develop the dance. So we are with Chris all the time. He’s practicing, and we tape out the sets with his dancers in a warehouse so he knows the parameters, and we change everything to suit what his team needs to do. Then, we go out and start building the real set and get him around. It has to be collaborative. It’s not like, “We built the stage. Show up and figure it out.” It’s all done through a lot of time and work on behalf of the other departments.
When it came to the Emerald City, how did your initial vision of the city evolve from the start to the end?
I think it was the hardest thing to design. When you think of the Emerald City, it’s like the White City in Chicago: “I want to go there. It’s a dream.” The Emerald City has to be a dream. So the design actually took an enormous amount of time. The architecture has to be whimsical; it has to be. The Wizard is an illusionist, so there’s a falsity to it. [The Wizard’s castle] has to get transparent as you go higher because, as you go up, the outer material is false because it’s held together by a wood structure. So you are revealing that the Wizard is an illusion. He’s false. So that’s an important story to tell at the end.
These interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.