"During the San Francisco run, University of Southern California film student Jon M. Chu happened to be home for the weekend visiting his parents, who owned a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu's in Los Altos, California, just outside Silicon Valley. Chu was the youngest of five children growing up in a family that spent their free time playing instruments or going to the ballet, the opera, musicals, and the movies."
""It was the time of Michael Jordan on TV, and Steven Spielberg movies," Chu recalls. "Michael Jackson videos were like mini musicals." Chu was raised on what he calls "this beautiful idea of story," and went to film school with an inner theater geek driving his desire to learn the craft. So it wasn't a surprise when his mom, Ruth, suggested they catch the show at the Curran."
The production team staged an out-of-town tryout of Wicked at San Francisco's Curran Theatre to refine the show before Broadway. During that run, USC film student Jon M. Chu visited his parents' restaurant in Los Altos and attended the performance. Chu grew up in a musical and theatrical family and cultivated a passion for storytelling and film. Producer Marc Platt spent the Curran engagement finishing the stage production. Nearly twenty years later Platt and Chu reunited to adapt Wicked for the screen, producing a blockbuster with a $114 million opening weekend and nearly $750 million gross.
Read at Fast Company
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