’Wicked’s’ Wonderful Wizard Of Sound For Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande

EXCLUSIVE: Wicked production sound mixer Simon Hayes says Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba opposite Ariana Grande’s Glinda in the musical extravaganza, has the prowess of an Olympian, which enabled his team to achieve vastly more than they’d expected.

When Hayes and his unit were setting up microphones for the dynamic tour de force number “Defying Gravity” that sees Erivo soar away on a broomstick, they figured that the star would have to stop to catch her breath while doing somersaults for Universal’s hit picture.

Erivo had three microphones on her: a personal mic on the center of her forehead, another fixed on the brim of her hat and one placed on her costume.

“What we didn’t realize was that Cynthia would be able to do these gymnastic movements and still sing perfectly. It didn’t faze her in any way,” he marvels.

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They didn’t know at the time that before she’d arrive on set at the crack of dawn, she was running “10 kilometers every morning to keep her cardio system basically at the level of an Olympic athlete.”

In fact, this was something I was well aware of. Back in 2018, I was on the Chicago set of Steve McQueen’s movie Widows. Early one morning, I was being ferried to the location and I witnessed Erivo whiz past us, an incredible sight.

But Hayes was unaware of her athletic capabilities. 

“I would say to her, ‘Look, I’ve recorded live vocals with people doing action many times before, and normally they’re out of breath at the end of a take. You don’t seem to have that problem.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ve been training for this.’ She’d been training to the extent that she didn’t need a recovery time — not only was she singing perfectly, but she could do it again and again and again because she was so athletically fit. She was running every morning before a whole day of work on Wicked,” says Hayes, still stunned by the memory of watching her do the acrobatics on “Defying Gravity” and sing like a diva at the same time.

RELATED: Breaking Down “Defying Gravity”: ‘Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo, Jon M. Chu & Crafts Team On Stunts, Singing Live & Finding Elphaba’s Iconic Note

Hayes says it was “something extraordinary” to observe.

“The word I’m looking for is unprecedented,” the Oscar-winning craftsman declares. “I’ve never seen anything like that before in 65 movies.”

Hayes says that working with director Jon M. Chu, Erivo, Grande, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, department heads and the sound and music experts on Wicked was one of the most “satisfying” experiences of his career.

And I’ve known Hayes long enough to know that he wasn’t just offering up the usual “oh, everything was wonderful, darling” bullshit.

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Way back, in the midst of time in the 1980s, Mrs. Carlisle, a teacher who happened to be the mother of a close friend, invited me to give a talk to a class of spotty youths at Sheen Comprehensive school, near Richmond in Surrey. I spoke about being an entertainment reporter, living in New York, traveling to Hollywood and all of that glamorous stuff. One young chap constantly asked intelligent questions. 

Years later, I met him again on the set of Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where he was engaged as the sound recordist, and I learned that his name was Simon Hayes — or Simon “Purple” Hayes, as he preferred to be called. 

Prince’s Purple Rain was all the rage at the time.

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It was a bonkers shoot, but I noticed that it was Hayes who kept order because he wanted to hear, and to capture, what was being said.  

Funnily enough, I’d also covered movies Simon’s father, the sound recordist John Hayes, worked on but, obviously, didn’t make the connection until years later.

The young Simon Hayes gravitated toward the sound department because he was really into music; he loved hip-hop, scratching and mixing tracks in his bedroom and deejaying at parties. “What I realized was that music creates an energy and it pulls the heartstrings and that, as human beings, we all love music. And that really was part of my love of sound right from the beginning, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve sort of gravitated towards musical films,” he tells me during our long session together.

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“I love all films, but if I’m given a choice between a musical and something else, I’ll always choose the musical,” he says.

Over time, Hayes has become something of a sound pioneer, forever seeking to capture emotional vibrancy — the nuances of live singing.

His breakthrough came, he says, when working on Mamma Mia! directed by Phyllida Lloyd and produced by Mamma Mia! supremo Judy Craymer and Gary Goetzman. The cast included, famously, the marvelous Meryl Streep.

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Most of the numbers in that movie were lip-synched, Hayes recalls: “Meryl said during the pre-records that she hadn’t realized that for one number she’d be clambering onto the cow shed roof and that she’d rather not sing “The Winner Takes It All” to a pre-record because it won’t have the efforts of her climbing and she said that the audience won’t buy it.’ Is there any way we could go live?’ she said. And so out of the blue, Meryl asked to go live on that particular section as she was climbing.”

Hayes adds that as Streep was clamoring around on the roof, “you could hear the effort and the breathing patterns in her voice, and it worked and it was fantastic.”

It was so successful that they also recorded the beautiful ballad “Slipping Through My Fingers,” performed by Streep and Amanda Seyfried, live on set. 

“So those two tracks were the tracks that gave me the confidence that when Tom Hooper said, ’Do you think we should do Les Miserables a 100 percent live?’, that’s because of those two tracks. It gave me the confidence to say, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”

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He smiles and says: “And wouldn’t it be Meryl. And of course she made the right calls because had she been climbing and stretching, pulling herself up onto that cow shed but then standing still in a vocal booth during a pre-record, the audience wouldn’t have connected with it. And I think that in those old-school musicals — although we love them and we respect them, and they were great movies — we all know that they’re lip-synching.

“And that’s what is different about Wicked. You can feel that this is the real performance,” he says passionately.

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I covered Les Misérables when it was shooting in London, and Cameron Mackintosh and Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Debra Hayward from Working Title invited be back several times. Because you have to remember what a huge deal that movie was, with Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter, Amanda Seyfried, Aaron Tveit, Samantha Barks and all the rest filming that epic production. I would pop in to see Hayes, beavering away in his little sound-proofed hideaway, ensuring live singing was being captured.

Hayes won the Oscar for Best Achievement in Sound Mixing for Les Misérables.

The producer, Marc Platt, certainly was paying attention from afar, and he later signed Hayes for Mary Poppins Returns, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Snow White and Wicked and its second part Wicked: For Good.

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Hayes is keen to point out that “we didn’t shoot Wicked: Part One and Wicked: For Good as two separate movies. We shot them as one big movie. And we didn’t shoot them in story order. We shot them as we would one huge movie.”

And “Defying Gravity” was one of the last scenes that was shot.

Also, filming Wicked brought out the true meaning of cinema as a collaborative art form.

“There’s a nuance within these live performances that you just don’t get from a pre-record, and I think that’s why Jon [Chu] sought me out,” Hayes tells me.

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“If we go live, these actors are making hundreds of tiny creative decisions every moment,” Hayes explains. “And those creative decisions are what we hear. There are patterns within these breathing. There’s patterns within the effort within the voice that match what we’re seeing on the screen. And it means that, as a cinema audience we buy it, we believe it. And when actors are singing to a pre-record, I don’t think it’s as easy for us to believe their emotions.”

Another factor, he continues, is the closeups. “And that’s what Jon and Cynthia and Ari [Arianna] were so skilled at was when they’re singing live, we can hear the breathing patterns, the emotion … so we’re getting a double whammy. We’re seeing their facial expressions in closeups, and we can absolutely hear that the performance in the cinema matches completely with their facial expressions. … And that, I think, is a real factor in why audiences have connected with Wicked,” Hayes asserts with wicked enthusiasm. 

Many conversations about the sound design were had well in advance with production designer Nathan Crowley and cinematographer Alice Brooks.

Four months before the shoot, boom operator Arthur Fenn started collaborating with costume designer Paul Tazewell. None of the costumes had been made by that point, but Tazewell shared his sketches. “It was really very early, but we started planning on how to mic these costumes,” he adds.

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It was, however, tricky to rig a mic onto Erivo’s ornate outfits and onto Grande’s more frilly concoctions. “What we actually did was we went to Pablo Helman, our VFX supervisor, and said, ‘Pablo, we’ve tried with this costume, and unfortunately if we don’t put the microphone on the outside, it’s going to result in the performance being re-recorded in post.”

Helman took it in stride and offered to paint out those microphones in post.

Hayes and his team also used concert-level in-ear monitors [IEMs] for Erivo and Grande to hear the 100-strong orchestra playing as they sang. Again, Helman, along with the make-up department, worked together to ensure that for close-ups the IEMs would be painted ot, and for other shots the IEMs matched the coloring of the make-up that would be used.

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Every single element was gone over and over in preproduction to ensure, that there was a “support network”  to overcome any technical limitation, Hayes says. 

He had three boom operators on set at all times when Erivo and Grande sang. 

For “The Wizard and I” number — which I absolutely love because,for me, it’s when the film comes alive — Erivo is in constant motion as she sings. “We had three booms operating, and it just meant that Cynthia had complete and utter freedom. When one boom reached the end of where they could follow her on a long walk and sing, the second boom would suddenly take over, and then she’d walk through some bushes and she’d be on a third boom,” Hayes explains.

And when Erivo wore a hat, the mic fixed to the brim was of such quality that it would act as another boom.

Hayes had the whole crew wear special velvet covers over their shoes to keep noise levels down. “And I’m talking about big grip teams on three cranes, veteran grips agreeing to out on these velvet covers over their travers to help the endeavor of capturing these live performances.”

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There was no music played through speakers on set. “We basically had hundreds of sets of headphones so that anyone who was creatively involved in moving a camera, moving a crane, moving a dolly, queuing a light had to have their headphones on because that’s the only way that they would hear the music,” he says. “So for instance, if the crane had to start in the third bar of the intro, which is before Cynthia started singing, if the grips didn’t have their headphones on, they wouldn’t have their cue point because Cynthia hadn’t started singing at that point.

“So, effectively, we were making our own unplugged album as we were shooting ,” he says.

They also had Ben Holder, a music associate whose job, when there was very intricate cuing on the set, would be there to give hand signals “to people that didn’t quite know where the third bar was. And so he would be almost like the conduit of information between the musical score and the cue points for camera movements.”

As filming continued, it wasn’t known for sure whether Erivo would be able to perform “Defying Gravity” live, as I mentioned earlier on in this column. Hayes kinda had a hunch that she would and wanted to be fully prepared.

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For starters, the special effects department would want to put wind on Erivo as she sallied forth on a broomstick.

“Now, wind,” says Hayes, ”is the enemy of original performances. It is the enemy of production sound. And generally when you see wind on a movie set, it means that the vocals will be added.”

Hayes went to see Paul Corbould, Wicked’s legendary special effects supervisor. “I asked Paul, ’Can we please create silent wind?’ Paul’s team and my tram worked together, and what we basically did was we created this silent wind system where the fans blow the air outside the stage, then the wind is piped in through holes in the stage wall. Rather than huge fans on the set with a massive amount of electronic noise, those fans are outside the stage and they’re tubed in through on plastic flexible ducts. … And each position that Cynthia was flying in had a different special effects technician holding one of these plastic duct and pointing it at Cynthia.”

So on the day that the “Defying Gravity” scene was filmed and Chu asked Erivo is she was going to sing live, the crew held their breath. “And Cynthia looked at Jon and just said, ’Of course I’m going live.’ And I turned around and looked at the special effects team and the grips team and the stunt team who had all been so collaborative making this equipment quiet. And we all just had a knowing glance. And the glance was, ‘thank goodness we did this because otherwise we’d be here with Cynthia saying she wants to go live and us with a load of noisy wind and noisy wires.’”

After the scene was shot, Erivo told me, Hayes came out waving his arms “and doing a little dance. He was so happy that we’d all pulled it off.”

RELATED: ‘Wicked’ Editor Myron Kerstein On The “Human Moments” Between Elphaba And Glinda In New Editing Featurette

No wonder she calls him “the wonderful wizard of sound.”

It’s all-around movie magic, across all departments, that has turned Wicked into a work of great cinematic art that shouldn’t be belittled just because, as the song goes, it’s “Popular.”

I haven’t got space to mention every artist who worked on Wicked, but here are the people from the sound and music teams who worked closely with Hayes on the film:

Main Unit
Arthur Fenn, Key 1st AS
Robin Johnson, 1st AS
Josh Winslade, Pro Tools Music Editor
Taz Fairbanks,
2nd AS/Sound Coordinator
Harry King, 3rd AS
Emily Compton, 3rd AS

2nd Unit
Tom Barrow, Sound Mixer
Alan Hill, Additional Sound Mixer
Ben Jeffes, 1st AS
Ash Sinani, Pro Tools Music Editor
Billy Hayes, 2nd AS
Jamie Scott, 3rd AS

Splinter Unit
Simon Norman, Sound Mixer
Billy Hayes, 1st AS
Jake Hickey, 2nd AS
Zak Ferguson, 3rd AS
Jake Elliot, Pro Tools Music Editor
Dan Leigh, Pro Tools Music Playback

Music
Stephen Oremus,
Executive Music Producer
Dom Amendum, Music Producer
Greg Wells, Music Producer
Jack Dolman, Supervising Music Editor
Maggie Rodford, Music Supervisor
Ben Holder, Music Associate
Robin Baynton, Music Engineer

Sound Post
Andy Nelson, Re-recording Mixer
John Marquis, Re-recording Mixer.

And Supervising Sound Editor, and Supervising Sound Editor Nancy Nugent Title.

Hayes’s next film for release is Disney’s Snow White, due in April. Universal’s Wicked: For Good will be released in theaters on November 21.

Later this month, Hayes will join Guy Ritchie’s latest movie Wife and Dog starring Rosamund Pike, Anthony Hopkins and Benedict Cumberbatch. “It’s a dialogue story, so I’m going back to my roots with Guy on a dialogue-driven movie,” says Hayes, laughing.

You can be sure, however, that somewhere over the rainbow, there’s another musical being planned that will have Simon “Purple” Hayes’ name on the call sheet.