When it comes to Broadway musicals, the actual music team is larger than most people realize. Beyond the composer, lyricist and orchestrator, the team typically includes a music supervisor, music director, music contractor (to hire the pit musicians), conductor (who may double as a music director or musician), vocal arranger (to write harmonies and broken out vocal parts based on the composer’s melody), dance arranger (to write instrumental music tailored to choreography for dance breaks, etc.), copyist and keyboard programmer — not to mention the laborers in the sound department who collaborate with them. But the music team is equally complex, perhaps even more so due to scale, when it comes to movie musicals.
As with the theater, there is a composer of the songs and composer of the traditional cinema score (aka underscoring), lyricist, orchestrator and arranger. But there are also film-only roles like music producers and editors. Jack Dolman is one such professional. Dolman served as supervising music editor on “Wicked: Part 1” and “Wicked: For Good,” earning an Oscar nomination in the category of Best Sound for the former. Prior to the “Wicked” films, Dolman’s music editing credits have included screen musicals and nonmusicals alike — from multiple “Captain America” films to the animated “How to Train Your Dragon” to Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.”
Like many in the music field, Dolman started out as a composer. After studying music and mathematics during his undergrad, Dolman entered the world of business before pivoting, at the age of 26, to music. He interned for renowned Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer, hoping to learn about writing music for the movies. As Dolman recalled, “The different roles that exist in film music were a mystery to me.”
“What I learned pretty quickly is that my personality — and what I try to bring to the project — is a lot more collaborative,” Dolman said, noting that writing is often solitary. He learned that music editors, as he described, are “the cartilage between the bones of all of these different parts of the machination of putting music together for a film.” No matter the film genre, Dolman likes being the center of the musical wheel connected to each of its spokes.
Still, musicals — and “Wicked,” in particular — are dream projects for Dolman, who grew up around the theater. His mother is two-time Tony Award-winning performer Andrea Martin. Not only did Dolman spend much of his childhood backstage, he and Martin saw “Wicked,” which features a Tony-nominated score by Stephen Schwartz, within a month of its Broadway opening. “I remember thinking, even back then, that Stephen’s music was and is very cinematic,” Dolman said. The chance to realize Schwartz’s score for the actual cinema, while protecting its stage roots, motivated Dolman’s perspective on the film adaptations.
“He doesn’t just write songs,” Dolman said of Schwartz. “He writes a rich, beautiful glossary of themes and motifs that recur throughout the original Broadway show. … I really hope that [through the films] we could honor and celebrate the way that Stephen’s themes can be used as narrative devices.”
There are clear examples Dolman pointed to in “Wicked: For Good.” Here, the supervising music editor delves into the details of his role, secrets embedded in the score of the second movie and keys to organic singing on screen.
What a music supervising editor does
“We are really the mission control for where music of all forms should go in a film and what role it should play. The music editor liaises between the composer and the director, the picture editor and the producers, in order to sort of create communication between all of the camps. [That] allow[s] people to explain the vision they have at any given moment and translate that vision into the language of music in a way that helps composers sort out the narrative requirements, the emotional requirements.”
“When I was starting out at Hans’ place, I was mostly on the side of the composer, which gave me an incredible background in understanding how they think about the role that music plays in a movie. [But] I love to sit in a room and try to work through a director’s ideas and their vision and translate those essentially emotional ideas into music. Music editing is a way for me to do that. I’m constantly working with musical material in order to try to tell a story. In the same way that a costume designer is working with sketches and fabric and color, for me, it’s just pieces of audio.”
Starting on “Wicked”
“On a musical, the music editor can and probably should be brought on as early as possible. I was actually [editor] Myron Kerstein’s first requested hire on the film. He knew that the interplay between picture and music had to be nailed from the very beginning. So I was brought on in March of 2023. I was getting the initial dailies from these scenes. This was the first time that anyone saw them, even before [director] Jon Chu had seen the [footage] and was posed the question, ‘What is the role that music should play here?’”
