For weeks now, we’ve only heard the briefest of snippets, mere seconds in trailers, of the new songs coming to Wicked: For Good. We’ve known since 2022 that Wicked composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz would be penning two original songs for the sequel — he said so in a newsletter. It’s a smart move, considering that the Broadway musical’s second act doesn’t have nearly the bop density of the first (although its musical high points are very high.) Now, we know the songs’ titles — “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble” — and as of the November 6 broadcast of the (bonkers) Wicked: One Wonderful Night television special, we have enough lyrics and clips to put on our little Doctor Dillamond glasses and analyze.
“No Place Like Home,” Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba
Why do I love this place
That’s never loved me?
But there’s no place like home
There’s no place like home
Sonically, this song mostly sounds like an excuse for Cynthia Erivo to do some big impressive vocal runs on the words “nooooooo” and “hooooooome,” probably because we already know how hard she went singing “Fiyeroooooooooo” on “No Good Deed.” And of course, the title refrain riffs on Dorothy’s famous line from The Wizard of Oz. Act two is sort of all about Elphaba going on this parallel journey to Dorothy’s while the events of Dorothy’s journey are happening in the background. When Dorothy says “There’s no place like home” and clicks her heels, it’s because she’s homesick and misses her family back in Kansas. But when Elphaba sings these same lines in this, is she talking about her childhood home of Munchkinland, where she was miserable? Or Oz as a whole, which despises her?
On the broadcast, Grande says the song is about “Elphaba’s dedication to protecting Oz, even as she faces rejection from everyone around her.” The clip released the day after the broadcast is slightly different from the one that aired, but both show Elphaba in her forest hideout surrounded by animal friends, as well as flying on her broom with her monkeys, who at some point between the end of the first movie and this point in the second one have become her friends. On Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast last December, Erivo said the song “speaks to the heart of who Elphaba is” and had the film crew in tears, but how much of that is because of the song itself and how much of it is the way Erivo sings it remains to be seen.
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“The Girl in the Bubble,” Ariana Grande as Glinda
There’s that beautiful girl
With a beautiful life
Such a beautiful life
Built on lies
For the girl in the bubble
That big shiny bubble
Isn’t it high time for her bubble to pop
Okay, so what I’m hearing is that Glinda is going on an AI-type journey: That bubble is about to pop. Here, her famous floaty bubble is getting used not for transportation but as a metaphor, duh: She’s lived a sheltered life, on display behind a shiny surface, and now it’s time for her to make the choice, of her own volition, to be exposed to the elements, face reality, be a citizen of the world. In One Wonderful Night, Erivo says the song “captures the moment where Glinda decides not to just call herself good, but to truly become Glinda the Good.” The clip gives us a look at her fancy life in a tower in the Emerald City, and also shows a flashback to Young Galinda, staring at her reflection in a bubble wand. There are also shots of her Elle Woods–style closet, her hanging off Fiyero’s arm in front of a crowd, and some CGI critter friends such as ferrets and giraffes.
Of the two songs, I think I’m more excited for Glinda’s, if only because this is a part of her character transformation that we don’t see spelled out (or sung out) clearly in the show. Neither songs sound too interesting from these snippets alone, and the clips don’t incorporate any clockable motifs from the existing songs. But hey, any new crumbs are good crumbs.
