
Age: 46
male
Jonathan Murray Chu (born November 2, 1979) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is known for directing the romantic comedy "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018) and the musical fantasy "Wicked" (2024), the former being one of the first films by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Asian descent. For his direction for "Wicked," Chu won the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and Critics’ Choice Award for Best Director. An alumnus of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, other films he has directed often include musical elements, including the dance films "Step Up 2: The Streets" (2008) and "Step Up 3D" (2010), the musicals "Jem and the Holograms" (2015) and "In the Heights" (2021), as well as the live concert films "Justin Bieber: Never Say Never" (2011) and "Justin Bieber's Believe" (2013). Description above from the Wikipedia article Jon M. Chu, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Wicked is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and a book by Winnie Holzman. It is based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is based on the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film The Wizard of Oz. The show is told from the perspective of, and focuses on, the witches of the Land of Oz; its plot begins before and continues after Dorothy Gale arrives in Oz from Kansas. Wicked tells the story of two unlikely friends, Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) and Galinda (whose name later changes to Glinda the Good), whose relationship struggles through their opposing personalities and viewpoints, same love-interest, reactions to the Wizard's corrupt government, and, ultimately, Elphaba's private fall from grace.

