Popular (from Wicked)

We've all got Oz fever, so this week, writer/composer David Rackoff analyzes "Popular" from the musical "Wicked" by Stephen Schwartz. Why is the hook so catchy? Why are the lyrics so mind-blowing? How does this song help to tell the story of "Wicked"? What is enjambment? Were sopranos funny prior to 2003? How about the Kristin Chenoweth of it all? We dig deep to discover how "Popular" works.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Nothing Like Broadway podcast.
I am writer-composer David Rakoff, writer-composer of the upcoming Off-Broadway Musical, Nothing
Like Broadway, which has the same title as this podcast, but it is a different thing.
Each week on this show we pick a song for musical theater and then we pick it apart
to see how the music works, how the lyrics work, and how it all works together in the
context of the show.
If you have a suggestion for a song for us to do, email us NothingLikeBroadway at gmail.com
and follow us on Instagram at Nothing Like Broadway.
Alright, so this week we are doing Popular from Wiccan.
This song was written both music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and it comes about halfway
through Act One.
It is a convincing song, which is a category of song, which is basically where Galinda
is trying to convince Alphaba to be popular, obviously, and it's also an I Am song.
We're all familiar with I Want Songs, which is a song where the protagonist usually tells
us what their dreams and hopes and goals are, so we know what this person wants.
That's usually given to the protagonist, like part of your world, in The Little Mermaid.
She wants to be part of the human being's world.
Usually an I Am song is given either to the secondary comedy lead or to the villain.
I Am song is like, this is who I am, this is what I'm like, because the villain is not
probably going to go through a bunch of changes.
And so it's interesting in the show, it sort of lets you know that because the wizard and
I is the I Want Song in this show given to Alphaba, because she's the protagonist, and
this song is an I Am song, which sets up Galinda as the villain or the antagonist is really
more what it is in this show.
And this song is basically about power.
It's about Galinda, who is the much more powerful person when the show starts, convincing
or trying to convince Alphaba that the way to get power is to be popular and to do all
these things and flirt and to be light.
And the show is very much about power.
It's about the power dynamic between the two women and also about the power in Oz and
how Oz has all this power and Madame Morrible has all this power.
And it is about, we find out, Alphaba growing into her power and then defying gravity is
where she claims her power.
And so what's exciting about this song is it is Galinda's view of power and it's not
an incorrect view either.
It is usually how someone gains power and it is kind of how Madame Morrible and The
Wizard gains power by becoming popular.
And so what this song shows us in the context of the show is that Galinda, who up to this
point we had sort of thought was vapid and she's introduced by saying, by talking about
basically the wicked witch was evil, right?
When the beginning, when it's a flash forward or the rest of the show is a flash back, however
you want to put that.
And so we're basically from the very beginning assuming that, oh, okay, so I get this show.
It's about how the wicked witch is actually really the good one and then the good witch
is actually the bad one.
And this song is where it sort of starts to get really interesting because you're like,
oh, wait, no, Galinda really is, instead of just being mean to Alphaba, she's now trying
to get her to become in Galinda's eyes more powerful and a better, more successful person.
And so it was really interesting because that was sort of the moment in the show where you're
like, oh, wait, this is a lot more complicated.
It's not just like the one who you thought was bad is good and the one who you thought
was good is bad.
It's like, oh, no, this is a really interesting relationship and a push-pull.
And it lets you know that there's going to be surprises in this story and surprises in
their relationship.
And also just from a musical creation standpoint, it helps to solve the problem of like, how
do you make these roles equal?
Right?
Because you've got the wicked witch who is the main character.
But like, how do you, like if you've never seen Wicked and you only know The Wizard of
Oz, like in the movie The Wizard of Oz, it's like pretty easy to see that the Wicked Witch,
there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with her.
But like Glinda in the original old movie of Wizard of Oz, it's not that exciting a
character, right?
So how are you going to make these two main roles equal?
Especially because at the time, Kristen Chenoweth was probably a bigger and more well-known
name than Adina Menzel.
And so in order to get Kristen Chenoweth to want to do this, but also just to make the
show balanced, you have to figure out how do you make these two roles both equally
important?
And especially when you have a song like Defying Gravity at the end of Act One, that is obviously
going to be the giant hit and the thing that everybody remembers and it's just thrilling.
How do you give Glinda a song that is basically equally as exciting and important just in
musical theater terms as far as pleasing an audience?
And so that's a pretty hard job to do.
And they did it, or he did it, same towards it, incredibly successfully with popular.
And also when you have a belter who we really care about and like a legitimate kind of opera
E soprano, how do you make her as fun and interesting?
Right? Because Broadway, you know, especially like a Broadway show geared towards younger
people, it's kind of all about the belting, right?
So how do you make the soprano an interesting character who we want to hear sing more and
more and more?
And so what they did is they turned Glinda into this comedic alpha performer, which is
we'll talk about a lot more later.
But like generally speaking, the soprano in a musical and like an opera and stuff, they're
not the funny ones usually.
Right? And even if they're funny, it's like a little bit funny, not like the really, really
hardcore, improv-y, hold the audience in the palm of her hand kind of funny.
Like that is not usually a role that the young soprano does.
That's usually more of like the middle-aged belty person in a musical.
All right. So let's talk about the music of this song.
Just to set the table here, one of the big achievements that Wicked, the musical achieved,
is that it was able to use pop music in a way that illustrates character and helps to
tell the stories.
So prior to this, we've talked about this on a couple of episodes in the past, but prior
to Wicked really, generally speaking, when there was rock or pop music in a Broadway
show, it's exciting and it's fun and it's modern, but it really is hard to express
character and story through rock music.
So like the example that I always think of is hair.
Great score. Love it.
But like almost any of the songs could be sung by almost any of those characters in
almost any order.
Right? Like it's a really cool score to listen to, but it's not something that like in the
way of like a Sondheim show, every song helps to express character and to tell the story.
Wicked was the show that really kind of figured out how to use pop music and rock
music in a way that really helps to tell the story and illustrate the characters.
So let's talk about the genre.
The genre of the song, it's basically a bubblegum pop song.
Right? And so that's completely appropriate for Galinda because she is as much as Alphaba
is like sort of heavy and has these like heavy drama, belting songs.
Galinda is like a pop person.
She would be listening to, I mean, just to pick a really obvious example, Ariana Grande.
Right? Like, like that's in some ways why I'm very, very excited and hopeful about the
movie has not come out yet, depending on when you're listening to this, but I am very,
very excited about it.
So having this song be a pop song, basically, with pop music, pop chords and pop sort of
orchestration helps it to really express the character of Galinda, especially as in contrast
to Alphaba with her big, belty drama ballads.
And then also there's just a fun sort of word play in a pop song, which is short for popular,
called popular, right?
Like this funny that there's word play even before we get to the lyrics in this song.
So one of the interesting things about the music for this song is where they place it
in her voice.
It's set very low for a soprano, right?
Normally, sopranos here are going much more high up into their head voice.
But one of the things that you, if you're a musical theater writer, like I am, is you know,
is that sopranos, once you get up to even like the middle high part of their voice,
you can't understand them anymore.
Like it's all of a sudden you're just into beautiful sounds coming out, but it's really
can't be about the words because you don't know what the hell they're saying.
And so this song is set pretty low.
Like this song is set much more in like a conversational place in her voice for the most
part, which is a really smart choice because that all of a sudden lets us connect with
her on lyrics.
And even when it has like the la, la, la, la, la stuff.
It's not set high.
Like normally you would think in a song like this, the laws would at least give the actress
a chance to show off her beautiful operatic high notes.
But it doesn't.
This whole song stays almost entirely in like a conversational low middle place in her voice.
The melody line is really bubbly.
Like it literally keeps popping up and down and popping up and down.
So it lets her go from her chest voice into her head voice.
So we get like a little bit of soprano.
Like it reminds us that, OK, this is the same person we've heard sing all these high notes
in the first couple of songs.
But now it's like popping up and down and popping up and down, which is sort of the
cadence of like a young California bubbly girl.
Right.
Like how you would talk if you were that character in comedy songs and just in musical
theater in general, the lyrics are basically the script and the melody is the delivery.
So if you're a good writer, Steven Schwartz obviously is, you're going to put the cadences
that if this were just a monologue, like a spoken monologue, you would want the actress
to be talking like that, where she's like, you know, like a little girl, like popping
up high and then going back down and popping up high and just kind of going up and down
and up and down and up and down, because that's a very character way for this character to talk.
So the chord progression for the main part of this song, depending on how you want to
slice it, is basically one, five, minor six, four, five.
Which is a very, very common pop music chord progression, which is again, completely appropriate
for this.
So like I was just looking at some songs that have similar chord progressions.
If I were a boy, Beyonce, I just had sex, the Lonely Island song.
I'm yours, Jason Mraz, Edge of Glory.
We're never ever getting back together, but Taylor Swift and complicated by Avril Lavigne.
And like the piano, it's a very piano heavy song, and it has like that sort of light,
chunky piano accompaniment like this.
And while all of these things seem like just right and obvious to us in retrospect, when you are doing
something we've talked about before called song spotting, which is where you have the script
for the show or the outline of the show, and you're going and figuring out like, OK, where
do the songs go?
And then what kind of songs is going to be?
This is not an obvious kind of song.
This is not an obvious kind of music.
This is all very, very clever and very creative and smart and not obvious.
Like it's not like if you were to wipe everyone's minds clean and have a different team of song
writers or a different songwriter come in, you probably would not get a song that was
anything like this.
You would get some sort of soprano song, even if it was a comedy song.
It would be a comedy song that like showed off all of her high notes as a way of like
competing with the big belty songs that the other character is going to have.
This is a very, very smart, creative, inventive choice.
So let's talk about the lyrics.
So this is obviously a very, very rhymy song.
And rhyming is generally considered to be a sign of intelligence in a musical.
So when you have a song that doesn't have any rhyme, that often means the character is either
not as smart or is just in sort of like an emotional state.
And so they're not really thinking.
But like a really, really rhymy, rhymy, rhymy song as this song is, is really like our first
clue that Galinda is much smarter than we originally thought.
And the lyrics for the song, because they are so rhymy and so clever and so ingenious,
basically, I bet you I don't have no specific knowledge of this.
I bet you this took a long time to write.
Like that's one of the things as somebody who likes to write wordy, clever songs, I can tell you
it takes a lot longer than you think to write a lyric like this.
It's about the talent, the skill, the training, but also just like the time and determination.
Like I know in Hamilton, I think my shot and satisfied, he has said, I think took him almost
a year to write each.
Like that's a crazy, crazy amount of time.
And those are incredibly complicated songs that I would like to do on this podcast.
But it's also like, wow, that's a lot to analyze like a four hour episode.
But this song, absolutely, I would guess is not like Stephen Schwartz was inspired over the weekend.
This is like a project and like you just sit down with your paper and pencil and erasers
and you just keep on just banging it out, banging up, banging out and kind of a beautiful
minding it and making lots of lists of things and ideas and just put a lot of time in this.
This song is definitely something that was not written very quickly, probably.
It's very unusual for a soprano song to be focused more about the lyrics than about the music.
A sort of powdery, list kind of clever, funny comedy song all about the words for a legit soprano.
There's a ton of internal rhyme, which is where it's not like the rhyme at the end of the line.
It's just inside the sentence is extra rhymes.
Also, there's something called enjambment, which is where the sentence that the lyric is does not end
at the end of the line where the rhyme is.
So it just keeps on going on almost like disregarding where the end of each line is so that it can just
be these longer, more complicated thoughts, but you're still having the perfect rhymes perfectly set up.
So let's look at the first chorus.
Popular. You're going to be popular.
I'll teach you the proper ploys when you talk to boys, little ways to flirt and flounce.
I'll show you what shoes to wear, how to fix your hair, everything that really counts.
So the line, I'll teach you the proper ploys when you talk to boys.
The rhyme is ploys and also boys.
It's not the end of the sentence.
Like the easier way to go and the more common way is that each line where it ends on a rhyme is just its own
sentence or at least its own part of a sentence.
And so having these longer sentences that have, it's not really an internal rhyme at that point.
It is just the end of the line.
Like if it were poetry, that would be the end of the line where you have the little slash.
But it continues seamlessly into the next sentence, allowing her to express her intelligence that she is not
just like coming up with cute little couplets.
She is having these long sentences that are still all very smart.
One of the things that we often talk about on this show and that I think of as a songwriter is the title.
Are you going to rhyme the title or you're not going to run the title?
Because once you start to run the title, basically every verse or chorus or wherever it happens, you've got to
come up with a new rhyme.
And so at some point it can make the audience be sort of anticipating it.
And then you're like, all right, what are you going to do next?
What are you going to do next?
Which takes you out of the moment a little bit.
So this song does not rhyme the title in the chorus at the beginning when it says popular.
You're going to be popular.
It's not like something at the end says is like copular or something.
And then you have to come up with a new one each time.
But it does rhyme at the end of a verse one time in like probably the most ingenious way I've ever seen a title
rhymed.
If you know the song, you probably know where I am going.
Popular.
I know about popular and with an assist from me to be who you'll be instead of dreary, who you were.
Well, are there's nothing that can stop you from becoming popular.
La.
Like that is like four dimensional chess.
Like that basically would probably be in the hall of fame that any lyricist would come up with of like unbelievably clever rhymes.
So he's rhyming the title in two different ways of pronouncing it that makes sense with were and are because she's correcting herself.
She's saying that's how it used to be.
Well, you still are like that.
And then popular and popular can be said either way, basically.
So she's sort of slightly modifying how she would say popular to make it work with the adjustment that she just made 10 seconds before in correcting how
Alphabet is at the moment.
And then also the internal rhyme of stop you from becoming pop you.
Right.
Stop you pop you.
Ler.
La.
All happens right in the same place.
That is absolutely like world record amazing at maybe the best rhymed title in musical theater.
Maybe.
And while we are on amazing rhymes, so there's masculine rhymes, which is one syllable on the stress.
So like cat and hat.
There are feminine rhymes, which is two syllables with the first syllable stressed.
So like matter and pattern.
And then there's triple rhymes, which is where it's a three syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, which is, you know, each one gets a little bit harder.
And once you get into triple rhyme, it gets harder, but it's really fun.
And you can go four, five, six, however many syllables you want.
But triple rhymes are harder than masculine or feminine rhymes.
And so like analysis and dialysis, because it only matters what the last stress is.
So analysis, analysis, dialysis, analysis, right.
So those two are rhymes, those are not like the best rhymes in the world, just because they're both kind of the same parts of speech.
But in this context, there's a third one coming up.
Don't be offended by my frank analysis.
Think of it as personality dialysis.
Now that I've chosen to become a pal, a sister and advisor, pal, a sis is the
rhyme, analysis, pal, a sis.
Amazing.
And then also it's enjambment again, because it continues a pal, a sister and advisor.
There's nobody wiser.
Like that is really, really smart and clever, Sondheim level rhyming.
And again, it expresses Galinda's character that she is much more clever than we had previously thought.
All right.
So now let's talk about the performance of this song.
So my experience with Wicked, I was going through like a period in my life, like about a seven or eight year period where like I was too cool for school for musicals.
So I kind of, I'd been into musicals before that, into them afterwards, but there was like a time I lived in LA and I was just like, Hey, I'm too cool for that.
During that time, I saw Wicked, but I had no knowledge of anything about it going into it.
So like I came in knowing like it was something about like a prequel to The Wizard of Oz about the Wicked Witch, but that was literally all I knew going into it.
I was walking home from work from the subway, which they do have in LA.
And it happened to be going right by the Pantheon's Theater where Wicked was playing.
And they had like a lottery, like an in-person lottery for the first two rows for $25.
And I just happened to be walking by when they were doing that.
And I was like, Yeah, all right, I keep hearing about this Wicked thing.
I don't know what it is.
I signed up for it right then and there.
And then you like wait like 10 minutes and they pulled a couple of names out of a hat and I won.
And I was like, Oh, cool.
Okay, great.
And so I went and saw it again, knowing absolutely nothing about it.
Absolutely loved it.
But I remember coming away from it.
My three big takeaways from it were I really enjoyed the book.
Like I was really surprised because I'm not going to spoil anything if you I don't know if you're listening to this,
but haven't seen the movie yet or about to see the movie or the show.
I assumed it was a prequel and you sort of think it's a prequel.
And then Dorothy shows up a little bit tangentially.
And then you realize that, Oh, it's actually not just a prequel.
It's a during the Wizard of Oz and actually a little bit after the Wizard of Oz,
which I thought was really clever and the way that it tied all that together.
I thought it was just really, really smart and a really fun book that was just really inventive.
And then obviously Defying Gravity is just like an amazing, you know, one of the great end of act one songs of all time.
Just the theatricality of it, the music, the everything, the singing was amazing.
And Eden Espinosa was alphabet.
She was unbelievable, just like blew the roof off the theater with her voice and her acting was great too.
It was really funny.
But then the other thing that blew me away was this song popular.
And Megan Hilty was who I saw as Galinda, who's one of the greats.
But I just remember because I studied musical theater in college and a lot of my friends are actors and in college,
actor singers and I've worked with different kinds of singers and had auditions with lots and lots of different actor singers.
And funny operatic soprano is sorry, but it's not like a category that really existed back then.
Like if you've seen like comedy operas, like it's just it's rough all around.
If you're like a comedy person, more than an opera person, it's just like, this is this is a tough look.
And like in college, we would see like the music majors voice recitals and sometimes they do a comedy song.
And it's just like, it's not great.
Like it is real hard.
I mean, I would say probably sopranos and tenors are less funny than Althos and Baratone.
Sorry, everybody, not musical theater performers and not now.
But back then, and especially when you're looking at like legit singers,
sopranos and tenors are generally not funny.
And when they try to be funny, like in an opera, it is just really painful as like a comedy person to watch that.
So seeing Megan Hilty, who had this like totally legitimate opera voice,
like, you know, I'm not an expert, but it sounds like she could sing opera if she wanted to.
And B, you know, who's like this young, cute person who's like a good actress,
but then can take a song like this and the Pentage is a huge theater, much bigger than the Gershwin on Broadway.
And just have the audience eating out of the palm of her hand, taking all these pauses and doing little bits
and just playing with how the audience was responding to what she was doing.
I was just like, what am I watching?
Like, how is this legit soprano person handling this so well?
Like, I've never seen anything like it.
And then I was like, wait a minute, but she has like a standby and an understudy.
And this is the LA production.
So the Broadway production is still going strong.
There's one or two national tours going on.
And all of those have standbys and understudies.
Like, how are they finding 10 people even in this country who are comedic, alpha performer, legit sopranos?
And I think it probably was pretty hard at first because usually, you know, if you're like a comedy girl,
even with that same voice, you're probably going to be like a belter more, not like making a healthy dozen belt.
But just having that many people who could really do that, that well, was really, really exciting and just kind of blew my mind.
And so that brings us to the Christian Chenoweth of it all.
So this, obviously the person who originated the role on Broadway was Christian Chenoweth, who's a very sort of singular special performer.
She's like a legitimate, legitimate opera soprano who is adorable and charming and funny and can carry a show and can command an audience in a way that was kind of new.
Like even like past great Broadway sopranos are not like comedian comedians.
You know, like usually if you have somebody who's really funny, they're probably in like the Mezzo Belter role.
Whereas like, you know, soprano, Angenous or like older sopranos are singing like, I think like in Carousel, the song, you'll never walk alone.
Like, you know, not a, not known for being one of the funnier songs in a musical.
And so to have Christian Chenoweth, who's this very, very special performer at kind of like tour, like she was really kind of starting to peek.
Like you're starting to realize, oh, like she already won a Tony Award.
She was this very special performer, but she was in kind of the second banana role.
So then they gave her this song that she could handle.
I went down like a rabbit hole recently of watching different versions of popular on YouTube.
Don't watch Bootlegs.
You shouldn't do that.
But I was anyways.
And like there's a lot of very talented people who have come through that role.
But like Christian Chenoweth is where it all started.
And I would assume that during the rehearsal process, this song, all of the space in here and for the extra little bits and things that they're doing, you normally don't have that in like a comedy song or a powder song.
But I bet you because Christian Chenoweth and Edina Manzell and the director were having so much fun just like working, you know, like in rehearsals, you're often working something.
You try little bits.
People try, hey, what if you try this?
Hey, what if I try this?
And then most of those things get removed by the director.
But you still, it's still the rehearsal process.
Like that's how you work a scene, especially a comedy scene.
And like I've had this experience, you know, where you're working something and all of a sudden just little bits of magic start happening that were not in the script.
That just the actors and the director and everybody sort of, it gets really inventive and creative.
And so, you know, you edit them as the director, but you still have a lot of them in here.
I would imagine that this scene, when they were rehearsing it, just kept on having more and more funny, adorable things because of Christian Chenoweth and also how Edina Manzell is reacting to it.
And so I bet you that a lot of the space that was opened up in this song, instead of just being like, here's my song, I'm going to sing it.
Now we're going to move on to the scene.
The fact that there's so much room in here for them to play and do bits.
And even when people are doing new bits, just the idea that there would be bits in the middle of this song, I would imagine a lot of that came from the rehearsal process.
And Christian Chenoweth's brain, Edina Manzell's reactions and the director's cleverness.
It reminds me a little bit of how before Evita, there weren't that many musical theater girls who were like, belt mixing, you know, E's and F's and G's, like crazy, crazy, crazy high notes.
And even Patti Lepone apparently, when she was rehearsing Evita, was like, nobody can sing like this.
Why are you asking me to sing like this?
She figured it out.
But then after that, there are a whole bunch of people who are coming up who are training who are like, no, no, I want to train like, in fact, I had friends who were
musical theater women who had really good voices, but would like take in stuff from Evita and Meadowlark to their voice teachers and be like, how is she doing this?
Teach me how to do this.
And at the time, some of those voice teachers were like, I don't know, you shouldn't do that.
It's too high.
But then now as that sort of high, high belter main character roles like in Miss Igon and, you know, a ton, a ton of shows right now and Wicked.
I mean, with, without Evita and Patti Lepone and that sort of new kind of vocal technique being incorporated into musical theater, you probably wouldn't have a role like Alphaba in Wicked.
And so in the way that Evita and Patti Lepone and people like that created a new category of belting ladies, Kristen Chenoweth and Galinda in Wicked created a new generation of funny sopranos.
The idea that you have a whole category of people who are singing in like a legit soprano operatic sort of way, but who are acting like they're Kate McKinnon or like Robin Williams or like especially Gilda Radner.
So I think of when I watch performance of the song, I'm like, oh my God, that's so Gilda Radner.
And that's just a new way of training and a new thing to aspire to.
Like it gives people who are becoming musical theater performers a whole different category of performance to aspire to, which is awesome.
It's a great song for performance, music, lyrics, how it helps tell the story and how it helps to expand the world of the show so that it is an exciting thing to watch from moment to moment because all of a sudden you realize, oh, Alphaba has somebody who is a peer.
It's not just like she's going to be the jerk and Alphaba is going to be the strong one and come to power.
It's like, no, these are two Titans who are going to watch sort of work it out.
And that's exactly what happens in the show in really exciting and surprising ways.
All right.
So that was popular by Stephen Schwartz from Wicked.
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Now let's listen to a little bit of popular by Stephen Schwartz from Wicked performed by Kristen Chenoweth in the original Broadway cast.
I mean, laugh.
They were popular.
Please.
It's all about popular.
It's not about aptitude.
It's the way you're viewed.
So it's very true to be very, very popular.
Like me.