This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on various 2024 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139267
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.

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Director Jon Chu’s feature film adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s massively successful stage musical (eventually revealed in 2022 to be a Dune-like two-part movie) required a lot of musical contributors. Dominick Amendum, who’d conducted the stage show in New York and on tour from 2006-2017, did vocal rehearsals with the cast for nearly a year and also some arranging. Much of the arranging was done by longtime orchestrator Jeff Atmajian, known to score fans for orchestrating many of James Newton Howard’s scores; his role here was to beef up the rock band & orchestra pit feel of the stage show into large-scale orchestral fare. “Jon told me he wanted it cinematic, so I knew it needed to be full and glorious.” But before they even got to that point, original stage show arranger Stephen Oremus advised record producer Greg Wells (a key part of the recent film musical The Greatest Showman) as he pulled together early MIDI demos for rehearsals, with Greg later commenting on how atypical a film assignment this was for him. “Typically I’ll come in for the last half-year of [production]. This one, I was on it six months before they began shooting. We had to construct all the tracks in a malleable way where we could pivot with tempo and transposition of keys, because we didn’t know who was going to play [most of the roles]. And then I wound up going to London in the fall of 2022, working hands-on with both [leading] ladies.”

Adapting the stage musical into what would in aggregate be a five-hour cinematic experience necessitated a lot of trial and error. Intros and tempos (and key, in one song’s case) were changed as “the Stephens” adapted their material from being for Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth to being for Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Stephen Schwartz even copped to some early errors, talking about he and Jeff Atmajian came up with something they really liked for The Wizard and I before watching the film only to discover, “Oh no, we don’t have it at all.” Laughing at how “the word iterative has never been used more in my life than in the last two and a half years,” Greg Wells mentioned plenty of instances during principal photography in 2023 where Jon Chu would realize things like, “Well, we actually need another 30 seconds of music here. We need another minute of music here. We need to chop this music out. It doesn’t work anymore. We need a different approach for this one musically.” Greg also created rhythm section arrangements (drums, guitars, bass, keyboards) and then to his great surprise ended up playing most of the parts he wrote after Schwartz gave him the assignment on a Zoom call. “It wasn’t my idea. I was hired to play nothing. But when [Stephen] said that, my workload quadrupled.”

And at some point, as is inevitable with most film adaptations of stage musicals, the realization that new incidental scoring was needed had to hit the team. John Powell’s involvement was made public in September 2024, and he suggested he was on the project much earlier than usual for him, the composer typically preferring to come in later on scoring assignments when the film’s structure is more stable and its subtext more clear but acknowledging that such delays weren’t feasible with this kind of production. Score fans with long memories will recall that one of John’s first gigs when he came over to Media Ventures was arranging Schwartz’s songs for The Prince of Egypt, even if the lion’s share of that work was for songs that didn’t make the final cut. Schwartz even said that John was his choice to write the score “all along,” something that almost didn’t happen when he and the studio learned John was only “sort of available. [But] he made himself available.” John spent a few days sitting with Schwartz - “I basically interrogated him, interrogated the musical” - and watched a rough cut of both parts with as little music as possible before validating his plans with producer Mark Platt and proceeding with actual scoring work.

For someone who still hadn’t seen the stage musical and claimed only to “know some of the songs” at the start of the scoring process, John proved remarkably adept at adapting himself to Schwartz’s style of writing and later speculated that being an outsider may have been an asset. “Changing it from [stage] to [screen] could [make] do with someone who could see it another way.” Nearly every thematic element in his score was either part of the stage show or evolved from an element of the songs, with John once framing his job as reinterpreting the musical “into what Jon [Chu] wanted to make,” meaning that even though the score and songs were worked on separately there’s an amazing degree of melodic and stylistic cohesion throughout the work. John even overlapped some of Greg’s rhythm section with his material, and a few orchestral flourishes in the songs are also his work (one of the music editors on the film would refer to blending John’s score, Jeff’s song arrangements, Greg’s rhythm work, vocals performed live on set, and studio-recorded vocals as the most complicated project they’d ever worked on, even with the song and score orchestras recorded in the same studio and largely made up of the same players). Schwartz later had nothing but praise for his scoring partner in crime for “in addition to his talent and musicality, his generosity in trying to make sure that the aspects of the score that he did were part of a whole and not, you know, a neon sign flashing his name.”

And yet you could never fool yourself into thinking this was anything other than a John Powell creation, the composer thrillingly translating this material into the kind of large-scale fantastical adventure sound he’d proven the master of since How To Train Your Dragon with a dash of the zaniness of some of his earlier animated fare, the latter element arguably a necessity of working on a musical. “Getting that - the amount of Stalling number, that Bugs Bunny stuff incredibly tied to picture - quite right was hard.” The score elements independent of the songs that truly shone were legion, though special mention is owed to John’s boisterous adaptation of the stage show’s Unlimited theme for the title card reveal, the five minutes of bustling and emotive highlights for the midfilm train departure sequence, and the way that the composer evolved a song element for the Madame Morrible character into a grand villain theme by the film’s climax. With the song elements proving equally sensational, ranging from Erivio and Grande knocking their parts out of the park to stage stars Menzel and Chenowith appearing in some truly delightful cameos, the entire musical package stood as nothing less than the finest cinematic evolution of a stage show’s music since John Williams’ adaptation work for the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof. Maybe ever. Bring on part 2.

You’d think Wicked would be enough for any one person to handle, but two other Netflix animated scores also bore his name in the same year. Thelma and the Unicorn had the composer writing a number of short cues to navigate around various songs, resulting in a rare score for John that was a tad divisive as some listeners found the extension of his style extremely entertaining while others found the thematic elements decidedly less distinctive than his best work (not helping matters was that he put less than half of his score on the corresponding album). Meanwhile, That Christmas found the composer mixing his penchant for heartfelt character storytelling, energetic and extroverted passages, and grand thematic outbursts, with the family-friendly holiday film sounding remarkably Christmas-like in its score orchestrations despite John avoiding the standard tactic of explicitly quoting public domain Christmas tunes (save perhaps for one of his two main theme sounding like a derivation of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen). Folks well-versed with his output in the animated genre will hear plenty of familiar elements, whether in little instrumental flourishes or common melodic phrases, but perhaps that’s what good holiday music is supposed to do: wrap you in a warm blanket of comfort and cheer.

And if John Powell seemed super busy, just imagine what life was like for his assistant Batu Sener, who didn’t just write additional music for all three aforementioned entries but also in 2024 had three of his own scores debut. There was music for the second half of Turkey’s Atatürk 1881-1919 miniseries. There was his work on the Robbie Williams musical biopic Better Man, though none of that made the film’s song-centric soundtrack album. And there was his capable continuation of his mentor’s sound for the live action adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon for onetime Blue Sky Studios director Carlos Saldanha. The latter film bombed at the box office and was arguably overshadowed by star Zachary Levi’s noxious anti-vaccine stances, but its dense, virtuosic score - those piano parts! - showed that Batu has a promising future in Hollywood if he can just get better assignments (one such gig, Ice Age 6, is set to come out in 2026).


Wicked - ***** - John Powell & Stephen Schwartz; add’l music & arrangements by Batu
Sener & Markus Siegel; score orchestrated by Jonathan Beard, Edward Trybek & Henri Wilkinson;
add’l score orchestrations by Sean Barrett, Jennifer Dirkes, Benjamin Hoff, Steven Rader, Jacob
Shrum & Jamie Thierman; score orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway; score choir conducted
by John Powell; songs by Stephen Schwartz; songs arranged by Jeff Atmajian; add’l arranging,
music production, and rhythm section arranging & performing by Greg Wells; executive music producer
Stephen Oremus; music production supervisor Dominick Amendum; add’l keyboard performing by
Stephen Oremus & Dominick Amendum; original stage arrangements by Stephen Oremus

That Christmas - ****½ - John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener,
Anthony Willis & Markus Siegel; orchestrated by Tracie Turnbull & Peter Michael Davison;
add’l orchestrations by Shaun Crawford & Daniel Keane; conducted by Gavin Greenaway

Harold and the Purple Crayon - **** - Batu Sener; add’l music & arrangements
by Markus Siegel; orchestrated by Mark Graham & Tracie Turnbull; conducted by Jeff Kryka

Atatürk 1881-1919 Part 2 - ***½ - Batu Sener; add’l music by Markus Siegel;
orchestrated by Shaun Dale Crawford; conducted by Péter Illényi; vocals Holly Sedillos

Thelma the Unicorn - *** - John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by
Batu Sener; orchestrated by Mark Graham; conducted by Gavin Greenaway;
songs by Bret McKenzie, Brittany Howard & others

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Next time:
- “Sonic connection to that time.”
- “It would be insane if I started changing the thematic material.”
- “That cannot be identified as ancient or modern nor specifically Eastern or Western.”