by Jeffrey Brown and Simon Epstein
[The PBS News Hour segment on Oscar-nominated Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell aired on 3 February 2025, part of News Hour’s regular arts feature “CANVAS.” (PBS warns readers, “Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.” I do my best to correct these as I identify them, based on reviewing the audio recording of the segment.)]
“Wicked” is the latest version of an enduring American fairy tale. Among its 10 Oscar nominations, one is for costume designer Paul Tazewell. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown starts our coverage of Oscar nominees this year with this report for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Geoff Bennett, Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour: The movie version of the hit [stage] musical “Wicked” soared at the box office this winter, and among its 10 nominations, one is for costume designer Paul Tazewell [b. 1964; pronounced TAZZ-well]. [This year’s Academy Awards ceremony will be televised on 2 March.]
[The stage musical Wicked, a loose adaptation of the 1995 Gregory Maguire (b. 1954) novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which in turn is based on L. Frank Baum’s (1856-1919) 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation, was produced by Universal Stage Productions.
[After an extensive workshop development in New York City and Los Angeles between 2000 and 2003, the show, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (b. 1948) and a book by Winnie Holzman (b. 1954), began previews for try-outs at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre on 28 May 2003, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Wayne Cilento, with the production’s set and visual style by Eugene Lee (1939-2023; see “Making a Scene, Onstage and Off” by Sandy Keenan, in “Two (Back) Stage Pros,” 30 June 2014). The try-out opened on 10 June and closed on 29 June.
[After extensive revising, Wicked began previews at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre on 8 October 2003, making its official première on 30 October. It’s still running at the same theater after 25 previews and 8,249 performances (as of 2 February 2025; the show suspended performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic from 12 March 2020 to 14 September 2021), currently the fourth longest-running Broadway production.
[At the 2004 Tony Awards, Wicked won three awards and was nominated for seven others, including Best Musical. The production also won six 2004 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding New Musical, and four additional nominations.]
Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown starts our coverage of Oscar nominees this year with this report. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown: It’s a visually spectacular world, intended to feel both familiar and fresh.
Ariana Grande, Actress (as “Galinda/Glinda” in a movie clip): The Wicked Witch of the West is dead.
(Cheering)
[The 2024 film adaptation of Wicked (titled on screen as Wicked: Part I) was produced by Universal Pictures and Marc Platt Productions (both producers of the stage musical) and released on 22 November 2024 in the United States, after premièring in Sydney, Australia, on 3 November. The current film covers only act 1 of the stage musical; the second part, Wicked: For Good, is scheduled for release on 21 November 2025.
[Directed by Jon M. Chu and written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, the film received 10 nominations for the 97th Academy Awards, including, in addition to Tazewell’s Best Costume Design recognition, Best Picture, Best Actress for Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Grande as Galinda/Glinda. The film has received numerous other awards and nominations.
[As of 4 February 2025, Wicked has grossed $471.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $251.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $722.2 million. That makes it the third highest-grossing film of 2024 in the United States, and the sixth highest-grossing film of 2024 worldwide. It’s also the all-time highest-grossing movie based on a Broadway play.]
Jeffrey Brown: For costume designer Paul Tazewell, “Wicked” is an enormous canvas of characters and colors, materials in motion, and it’s the biggest thing he’s ever been involved in.
Paul Tazewell, Costume Designer: It’s a blast, one, and it is my life. It is the way that I communicate, I mean, as a painter would. It is my language, and it is my means of being creative.
Jeffrey Brown: We met recently at Steiner Studios, a film production complex in Brooklyn, New York. And he told us that, for all the huge scale, the key is still through his designs and working with director Jon Chu [b. 1979] and actors, most of all Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, to help create characters, not only their outer clothing, but their inner emotional life.
Paul Tazewell: My focus is who these characters are and how they dress themselves and how to create a world that makes sense within itself and provides a magical environment for this story to exist within.
I mean, so I’m stepping into their shoes. If I’m working adjacent to . . .
Jeffrey Brown: Actually, they’re stepping into your shoes.
Paul Tazewell: Well, there is that. Both.
(Laughter)
Jeffrey Brown: When it comes to American cultural history, these are very big shoes to fill, beginning with the books, the first in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. [Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz between 1910 and 1920, as well as a spin-off series of six short stories written for young children (1913/1914.]
Judy Garland, Actress (as “Dorothy” in a clip): But, if you please, what are Munchkins?
Jeffrey Brown: The classic 1939 film that’s taken generations over the rainbow.
[The Wizard of Oz (1939) was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and directed by Victor Fleming (1889-1949); Noel Langley (1911-80), Florence Ryerson (1892-1965), and Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) are credited with the screenplay, though other, uncredited writers contributed to the script. The music was composed by Harold Arlen (1905-86) and adapted by Herbert Stothart (1885-1946), with lyrics by Edgar “Yip” Harburg (1896-1981).
[The classic movie fantasy famously starred Judy Garland (Dorothy), Frank Morgan (the Wizard), Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), Jack Haley (the Tin Man), Billie Burke (Glinda), and Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West [Elphaba in Wicked]).
[The Wizard of Oz was nominated for five Academy Awards in 1940, including Best Picture, winning Best Original Song for “Over the Rainbow” by Arlen and Harburg and Best Original Score for Herbert Stothart; an honorary Academy Juvenile Award was presented to Judy Garland (who was just 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz). The Library of Congress deems The Wizard of Oz the most-watched movie of all time.]
Michael Jackson, Actor (as “Scarecrow” in a clip): Okay, Dorothy and Toto, seems like we’re gonna have to find our own yellow brick road.
Jeffrey Brown: And “The Wiz,” a 1970s retelling on stage and film through the contemporary Black experience.
[The film version of The Wiz was adapted from the all-African American Broadway musical that ran at the Majestic Theatre from 5 January 1975 to 25 May 1977 and the at the Broadway Theatre from 25 May 1977 to 28 January 1979, for 15 previews and 1,672 regular performances. (The play had tried out in 1974 in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.)
[After recasting and bringing in a new director, the première was staged by Geoffrey Holder (who also designed the costumes) and choreographed by George Faison. The music was composed by Charlie Smalls, who also wrote the lyrics; the book was by William F. Brown.
[The first stage production received eight 1975 Tony nominations and won seven, including Best Musical, Best Original Score (Smalls), Best Choreography, and Best Direction of a Musical. (The musical was revived on Broadway twice, in 1974 and 2024. On 3 December 2015, The Wiz Live!, which combined aspects of the Broadway play and its 1978 film adaptation [see below], was aired on NBC as a live television special.)
[The film adaptation was produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions and directed by Sidney Lumet from a screenplay by Joel Schumacher, who reworked the story from William F. Brown’s Broadway book. Quincy Jones supervised the adaptation of songs by Charlie Smalls and Luther Vandross, and wrote new ones with the songwriting team Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson.
[The star-studded cast included Diana Ross (Dorothy), Michael Jackson (Scarecrow; his feature film début), Nipsey Russell (Tinman), Ted Ross (Cowardly Lion), Mabel King (Evillene, The Wicked Witch of the West), Lena Horne (Glinda, The Good Witch of the South), and Richard Pryor (The Wiz).
[The film was released on 24 October 1978 in New York to critical and commercial failure. The Wiz received largely negative reviews, with many reviewers comparing the film unfavorably to the Broadway version. In recent years, criticism has become more favorable, and the movie’s become a cult classic among fans of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and the Oz books.]
Starting in 1995, a new series of books by Gregory Maguire conjured a kind of backstory and revisionist history. It turns out we didn’t really know the Wicked Witch, or Elphaba, after all.
That spawned the amazingly successful Broadway musical running 21 years and counting and now the new film.
Paul Tazewell: I acknowledge all of those as I’m designing it, but with the intent of creating new images, new icons, new ways of seeing who these characters are, and a new way of telling the story. And I delight in it.
Jeffrey Brown: In fact, “The Wiz” was the first show Tazewell designed. He also acted in it as a high school student in Akron, Ohio, where his mother taught him to sew. [Tazewell is a 1982 Buchtel High School graduate; he designed the costumes and played The Wiz in the production during his junior year, when he was 16.]
He went on to a hugely successful career in theater design, notably including “Hamilton,” for which he won a Tony and, most recently, “Suffs,” which brought another Tony nomination. He won a television Emmy for NBC’s 2015 “The Wiz Live” and the first Oscar nomination for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version of “West Side Story.”
[Hamilton, with book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, opened at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre on 6 August 2015 and is still running after 26 previews and 3,317 regular performances (as of 2 February 2025). Shaina Taub’s (book, music, and lyrics) Suffs ran at the Music Box Theatre from 18 April 2024 to 5 January 2025 (24 previews and 301 regular performances).
[Spielberg’s film remake of West Side Story (Tony Kushner, screenplay; Arthur Laurents, original stage book), produced by 20th Century Studios, Amblin Entertainment, and TSG Entertainment, was released in the United States on 29 November 2021. (The film is an adaptation of the 1957 stage musical [conceived by Jerome Robbins, book by Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed by Robbins; choreographed by Robbins and Peter Gennaro], itself inspired by William Shakespeare’s 1597 play Romeo and Juliet.)]
So, you’re grabbing images just on the Internet, whatever?
Paul Tazewell: That’s right, that viscerally speak to me. They could be abstract. They could be random. But, collectively, they start to create a world.
Jeffrey Brown: For “Wicked,” Tazewell has taken past icons, the witch’s hat, for example, and made them his own. He created a mash-up of old and new fashions, looked to the art of one of history’s greatest graphic artists, M. C. Escher [Dutch graphic artist whose work features, among other phenomena, impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, and tessellations; 1898-1972], and incorporated patterns in nature, including the swirl of the tornado or twister so indelible in the 1939 film.
He showed me an early plastic 3-D model of a crystal slipper made for one of the characters, the swirl pattern appearing throughout. It’s a detail that required weeks for Tazewell and his team to experiment with, design, and make.
I, as the viewer, seeing the film, I wouldn’t know all that, right?
Paul Tazewell: Right. And my hope is that — and that was for all of the details of Oz and what we were creating for “Wicked,” was that it becomes immersive, that you believe it so much that you’re drawn into this world. And there’s a suspension of disbelief.
Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell says he’s always bringing his own personal connections to the story and characters he’s working on.
He brought up the example of Elphaba, an outsider in Munchkinland, a different color from the rest, uncertain of her own place, and shunned by others.
Paul Tazewell: What I bring to the event is my own life experience and how I walk through life as well.
I have a direct emotional relationship to that, being a Black man walking through life in America. So, decisions . . .
Jeffrey Brown: So, you connect in that sense.
Paul Tazewell: Absolutely. So, decisions around how she emotionally presents herself, what her intention is, I have to build some kind of connection in order to have an honest take on what a character might wear.
Jeffrey Brown: There’s also another kind of history at stake in Tazewell’s Oscar nomination. In 2019, Ruth Carter became the first Black costume designer to win an Oscar for her work in “Black Panther.” Tazewell would be the first Black man to win.
Paul Tazewell: The number of people of color that I experienced coming up in this business, there were just . . .
Jeffrey Brown: Was minimal.
Paul Tazewell: There were just very few, and which is why it’s so important for me to be a face that is visible and out there for other people to see me doing it.
Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell is also seeking to make a case for the role of the costume designer more broadly, something he says is often not well understood and has implications for such things as pay equity within his industry.
Paul Tazewell: What has become more of a priority is to be expansive in a way that is not only identified as a costume designer, but is identified as a creative artist.
And I have tried to turn up the volume on indeed what it is that we do, and the power that we have as costume designers to create character. Our contribution is huge towards that.
Jeffrey Brown: Paul Tazewell vies for an Oscar, one of 10 nominations overall for “Wicked,” on March 2.
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York.
Geoff Bennett: And Paul Tazewell is paying it forward. He established a scholarship at his alma mater for design students, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. [Tazewell got a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in costume design from NCSA in 1986. He went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in design for stage and film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1989.]
Amna Nawaz, Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour: It’s amazing, amazing work, and we wish him well at the Oscars.
(Laughter)
Geoff Bennett: That’s right.
[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.
[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.
[Simon Epstein is a multiple Emmy Award-winning producer. Simon’s long-form productions include three historical retrospectives on the District of Columbia for public television, and the public affairs specials American War Generals, and “The Last Days of Osama bin Laden” for the National Geographic Channel. Simon’s work also appears nationally on Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, A&E, and the History Channel, as well as a number of international broadcast outlets.]
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