Director Jon M. Chu and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz detail how Glinda's new ballad was tinkered with until week's before the film's release. The dramatic lastminute changes to Ariana Grande's new Wicked: For Good song 'Girl in the Bubble' Director Jon M. Chu and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz detail how Glinda's new ballad was tinkered with until week's before the film's release. By Patrick Gomez :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/pgomezheadshot25b24b6c6d8948899ca9b24a6a9a6844.jpg) Patrick Gomez is an Executive Editor at . Formerly at People magazine and The A.V.

Director Jon M. Chu and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz detail how Glinda's new ballad was tinkered with until week's before the film's release.

The dramatic last-minute changes to Ariana Grande's new Wicked: For Good song 'Girl in the Bubble'

Director Jon M. Chu and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz detail how Glinda's new ballad was tinkered with until week's before the film's release.

By Patrick Gomez

Patrick Gomez is an Executive Editor at . Formerly at People magazine and The A.V. Club, the Critics Choice and Television Critics Association member has appeared on 'Today,' 'Extra!,' 'Access Hollywood,' 'E! News,' 'CNN,' and 'Nightline,' and can be seen frequently on 'Good Morning America.' Follow the Texas Native at @PatrickGomezLA wherever your media is social for all things 'For All Mankind' 'Top Chef,' and puppy related.

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November 28, 2025 10:30 a.m. ET

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Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) in 'Wicked For Good'. Credit:

- As Glinda in *Wicked: For Good*, Ariana Grande sings "Girl in the Bubble," one of two new songs written for part 2 of the saga.

- Lyricist and composer Stephen Schwartz originally wrote an intro to the song that ended up on the cutting room floor.

- During the editing process, director Jon M. Chu played around with where in the film the song fit best.

Philip Seymour Hoffman famously said "The film is made in the editing room" — and that was certainly true when *Wicked: For Good* director Jon M. Chu was working on adding a new song to Stephen Schwartz's beloved score.

As the new film heads into its final act, Glinda (Ariana Grande) is pained to see the Emerald City rally around a quartet of "witch hunters" and belt out "kill the witch." It leads the polished perfectionist to reflect on her complicity in the vilification of her friend, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), as she sings "Girl in the Bubble," a new ballad Schwartz wrote for the film.

Just two months before the film hit theaters, that song began very differently — and in a different place in the film.

"Because it had not been field tested, it was like, 'Is it in the right place?' Do we move it a little bit?'" Chu tells **. "There's the scene with [Michelle Yeoh's] Morrible that used to come before it, now we put it after, because there was something missing about that number."

Chu explains that when the Madame Morrible moment, in which Glinda confronts the press secretary, came prior to the song, it felt like the ballad "was just catching up with her. Instead, we really wanted her to lead us into this — or be unable to know where her head was at."

Then there was the intro into the song that Schwartz had written.

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"What used to happen is that Glinda would hear the angry chanting of "Go and hunt her and find her" outside, and she had a little thing that she sang along to it, telling herself not to listen," says the composer and lyricist. "It was an overlap that I think would've worked quite well on the stage and seemed really artificial when we looked at it on film. It's much better, frankly, without the intro."

"It was all too many things," Chu echoes. "We were like, 'I want to be naked in her room. What happens when the fairy tale is no more?'"

The answer? Strip it all away.

"We turned off the score and watched her shut the door in silence, and it was just devastating," says Chu. "You could hear her footsteps and her dress, the clunkiness of her dress. It's a costume for the first time. In a weird way, it's almost meta. I think the audience, even though you may not be thinking of this, but it feels like an actor in a room on a set."

Chu admits that silence is a musical is "dangerous," but they ultimately decided to give Glinda a significant amount of time to sit in that moment.

Glinda (Ariana Grande) in the wake of that Madame Morrible moment in 'Wicked: For Good'.

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"She looks at the mirror and she starts to start her song [a capella]. The strings don't just start, they are hesitant and they grow. For us, those little details really made the song breathless — until it was creating the oxygen for you to understand where her brain is at and how it feels. And then you root for her, and then she goes into Madame Morrible's office and confronts it."

"And then she gets sat down [by Morrible,]" he continues, "and instead of being sat down, she's like, 'I'm getting up and I'm getting out of here.' To me, that's storytelling 101. That is musicals at their best. But that doesn't happen necessarily if you're not digging all the way to the end. That happened eight weeks ago, which is crazy."

Original Article on Source

Source: "EW Movies"

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Source: Movies

Published: November 28, 2025 at 07:38PM on Source: MARIO MAG

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