Wicked songs in Cantonese? New online series champions Hong Kong talent

Coinciding with the recent release of Wicked: For Good, a Hong Kong creative team has also brought Oz to life – in Cantonese.\n“Wicked in Canto”, a series of videos featuring songs from the global musical phenomenon performed in the city’s mother tongue, is making waves on YouTube and Instagram, with tracks dropping weekly.\nThe project champions Hong Kong talent while highlighting the potential of international musical theatre productions performed in Cantonese.\nOfficially leading the project’s adaptation of the lyrics is Jason Lung, a University of Hong Kong graduate in Chinese literature and translation, who was inspired while listening to the soundtrack of the first Wicked film.\n“I just kept thinking, these songs sound like they would be really good in Cantonese,” he recalls. “There’s a certain musicality and emotional depth in our language that felt like a perfect match.”\n\n\nLung reached out to Marco Tang, a seasoned performer from New Gen, a Hong Kong troupe of rising young performers, and the project quickly took flight.\n“Energy flows both ways,” Tang says. “By giving these incredible new artists this platform, we’re not only promoting musical theatre in Hong Kong but also giving back to the creative community.\n“They lift the art form, and the art form lifts them.”\nWhat followed was the formation of a 17-person troupe comprising fellow industry experts and friends, including a coalition of performers, vocal coaches and even a make-up artist, all united by a common goal.\n“This isn’t just about covering songs – it’s about building something for Hong Kong,” Lung explains. “The professional musical scene here is relatively small. We have the talent, but we often lack the large-scale, visible platforms. ‘Wicked in Canto’ is that opportunity to push musical theatre here.”\n\nThe project is a remarkable act of artistic devotion, funded entirely from the team’s own pockets.\n“We are completely non-profit,” Lung says. “Every hour in the recording studio, every bit of filming – it’s all come from us.”\nHe adds that the team reached out to Music Theatre International in New York, which licenses the musical, for permission to riff on the works.\n“I wasn’t even really expecting a reply, but they gave us the green light almost as soon as we sent the email,” he says.\nWith an ensemble of eight performers playing the main characters – Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, Boq, Madame Morrible, the Wizard and Doctor Dillamond – the casting process was an exercise in precision.\n“It was crucial to match people to their singing styles and personalities,” vocal coach Alex Kwok says. “Glinda’s songs are sometimes basically what you would hear in opera, whereas Elphaba needs that tiny little bit of rock-genre edge in her voice.”\n\nTang adds that they paired performers with roles based on more than just vocal range or technique, sharing that they cast actress and singing coach Hailey Mak Hiu-lam – “someone who is very sweet and bubbly in real life” – to play the role of Glinda, for example.\n“We didn’t just want singers – we wanted embodiments,” he says.\nHong Kong Drama Awards nominee Chloe Wong, who plays Elphaba in the series, emphasises the significance of the original Wicked stage musical when it debuted in the US in 2003, saying it was the first of its kind to incorporate such a wide variety of musical styles in a single production.\n“[Wicked] wasn’t just ‘songs’; it was a complete, genre-blending universe that gave each character a distinct musical soul and mirrored the clash of their worlds,” Wong says. “That revolutionary approach is a big part of why it has endured and why it translates so powerfully.”\nWith such strong source material, the linguistic journey was one of the project’s greatest challenges. Starting in January this year – two months after the release of the first Wicked film – and working tirelessly to finish the translations by September, Lung wrestled for months with Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics.\n\nNot only did he translate the specific vowels in each song to match the rhymes used melodically, but he also had to somehow carry over culturally specific idioms, humour and Oz-specific wordplay for a Cantonese-speaking audience.\nLung says that creative compromise was the key, highlighting the example of one simple word: blonde.\n“That word in ‘What Is This Feeling’ was extremely hard to translate for me. You see, in the original, ‘blonde’ is this loaded cultural insult. It’s not just a hair colour; it’s a stereotype. It’s basically calling someone dumb in a Western way, right?\n“But, in Cantonese, and in our cultural context, that specific meaning simply doesn’t exist. We don’t have that same historical or social baggage attached to hair colour. If I just translated it literally as ‘golden hair’, it would be meaningless and confusing.\n“So, I had to deconstruct the word to its core function in the song. It’s not about the hair; it’s about what the hair represents to Elphaba at that moment. I had to find a Cantonese concept that could land with the same ironic punch. That is the approach I took when I translated the soundtrack.\n“I guess you’ll have to watch our video to find out what we ended up going with!”\n\nLooking beyond Broadway for inspiration, the team found a blueprint in East Asia, specifically in Korea.\n“We are incredibly inspired by Korean musical productions, which really took off recently,” Kwok says.\n“Their advances in musical theatre, the professionalism of their adaptations and translations – they show that localised musicals can be world-class. They prove this model can work and thrive culturally, and I really hope that the same can happen in Hong Kong.”\n