“Wicked” Costume Designer Paul Tazewell on Designing For the Film Adaptation of a Beloved Musical

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Transcript

00:00The fan base for the musical of Wicked is huge and I'm also friends with the costume designer,

00:12the original costume designer of the musical, Susan Hilferty, and I was around when it was

00:19originally being designed and being made. That said, I wasn't hugely familiar with all of the

00:28costumes and so, thankfully, and this is different because I was in a similar situation when I

00:35designed West Side Story with Steven Spielberg and the beloved original film, you know, it's

00:42a beautiful design by Irene Sheriff. So to try and not adopt the design that's already been done,

00:54paired with the fact that John Chu, the director, was very much interested in developing a completely

01:04different world of Oz and in how we see it. And then the fact that, you know, we need to honor

01:17the original source material, you know, the Wizard of Oz book by Baum, the 1930s film, and then Wicked

01:26the musical. So there's all that that's already out there that everyone has in their kind of

01:34zeitgeist of stuff, of information, you know, and it became my job, challenging, to capture the spirit

01:46of each moment, and then develop a look that was somehow original. I think that there was

01:59the little clip said something about icons and I really did want for people to, audiences, to

02:06embrace Glinda in the same way that Billy Burke in The Pink Dress was embraced. That, you know,

02:16the romance and the fantasy of that was imbued and comes to life with Ariana Grande as Glinda.

02:31So that was part of the process for every decision that I was making when I was designing the costumes.