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Sunday Morning's Moracca Talks with Stephen Schwartz, the Wizard of Musicals. Why does the Oz story mean so much to so many people? I mean, I can only speak for myself about why the Oz story is so meaningful. I think it's our classic American myth, you know, the story of. Um Speaking truth to power and having brains and heart and courage when you don't think you do.
And the least of us being able to overcome the most powerful wickedness, etc. I mean that's it's all the stuff of myth. It's just very cleverly American, thanks to L. Frank Baum. You know, I try to find what sounds like the character, what feels like You know, if I just heard the music, if I didn't speak English, What would that be telling me?
So, when I was first starting to work on WICED, since we're talking about Wicked, and I was thinking about. Alphaba and like the character of the Wicked Witch and knowing that at some point she was gonna come into her power. What sounds like power? And I came up with this. Because it just that just felt like Power to me, like coming up.
It still feels that way to me to play those chords and I just feel it coming up through my feet. You know, whereas Glinda was, you know, kind of. a bubblegum character at the beginning, you know, so it was all like Um You know, and I feel as if. If you hear those two things, you can describe those two girls. And why does it need to be two parts?
There's so much story. We tried for a long time. To figure out how to get the movie into being a workable length and still be one part. And we were just gonna wind up having to cut things or compress story or be superficial in certain places. And we didn't want to be.
And we thought of the idea of having an intermission. You know, like an old-fashioned movie, or actually, this year the Brutalists did it. But yeah, but ultimately, it just was felt: well, let's just do two movies. There's such a precedent for that now with great. Trilogies like The Lord of the Rings, et cetera.
And the second one's darker, yeah?
Well, it's emotional. I think that's more emotional, I suppose. Though the first one's pretty emotional, too. You know, bad things happen in the story.
So some of somewhere over the rainbow from Wizard of Oz shows up in Wicked? Yes, there are several Homages or Easter eggs in Wicked. The one that's It's the first one I decided to do and the one that's maybe best known is that the big motif in Wicked, which is the unlimited motif, where Elphaba sings and it occurs several times in the show, she does, unlimited. My future is unlimited. But that's actually Where over the rain?
But it has different chords, different rhythm, but very deliberately, because of my. love for the movie and my um Fan adoration of Arlen and Harbourg. I was like, well, I have to, if this is going to be the motif. Can it reflect over the rainbow in a way where I don't get sued? What kind of music did your parents play around the house when you were growing up?
My parents, neither of whom were inherently musical, were great fans of music.
So there was classical music, there was a lot of what we would now call world music and folk music. They were theatergoers because I grew up on Long Island, very close to New York.
So cast albums like The King and I, I remember very well, and My Fair Lady, you know, having those albums playing in my house, opera, there was, yeah. There was a lot of music there. And when you were allowed to touch the record player, what were you putting on? Um I think I listen to cast albums a lot. And I liked folk music.
You liked folk music. Yeah. And I still do. We were also talking about Laura Nero before, who was very.
So, Laura Nero, among other things, The first time I heard her, she would do chords like this.
So like Loriniro's, you know, um So normally everyone else would have written She stuck, this is an F chord, F A C, she stuck this G in the bass.
So When I heard that the first time. It was like Oh, you can do that? You can and and and so you know I'm always doing um Um That's very people would say, like, oh, Stephen Schwartz passage. To do rather than do To do. That rub, again, it's a yearning.
Yeah, yeah. That's because Laura Nero told me I could do that. Jeez, and it is not the right word, almost consternation. But when I hear that, it's it. It's a rubbing.
It's a rubbing. There's a rub to it, but but. Yes, there's a longing for resolution, but um But it but but being in touch with with true emotions or there's like a depth to it. I don't know why I mean music is so mysterious. I started taking piano lessons and particularly that my inclinations went towards musical theater.
And you ended up at Juilliard as a high schooler? Yeah, Juilliard has a preparatory division. And so I used to go on Saturdays, I would take two trains into New York City by myself in those days at 12 and then take the subway up to 125th Street, which is where Juilliard was at the time, and take theory and composition and obviously piano and a bunch of other Excellent courses. And yeah, it was great training. It was pretty hardcore.
It was very hardcore, but it was great.
Okay, so it's the ache of it. When I was a kid and playing my Beethoven, you know, and came to that, I would play that bar over and over again. It was in cry, it's very embarrassing. And what was the goal at that point?
Well, I knew that I wanted to be a professional composer. In musical theater? In musical theater. And that classical training was part of that or for me it was, yeah. And before that, I had had a private piano teacher who it was all classical and a lot of theory.
which was very helpful to me. Almost always I would go to my classes at Juilliard, but every now and then I would play hookie and I would go to a matinee, unbeknownst to my parents. And I particularly remember that I saw Barbara Streisand sing Happy Days Are Here Again on the Tonight Show. And the next day, I was supposed to go to Juilliard, and instead I went to the Broadway Theater and I bought a ticket for I Can Get Her For You on Sale to see her. And how did God spell happen?
Godspell kind of fell into my lap. I had, although it began at Carnegie Mellon, I was graduated already. And I had come to New York and I was kind of trying to interest producers in Pippin, which was the show that I brought with me from Carnegie Mellon. And I acquired an agent, Shirley Bernstein, who was Leonard Bernstein's sister. And she took me around to play for all these different producers.
Among them were Edgar Lansberry and Joe Baru. And I played the score for Pippin for them, and they were not interested in Pippin at all. But several months later, I got a call from them, and they said, We've seen this show at the Cafe La Mama. Called Godspell, and we think it has commercial potential, but we think it needs a score. Would you go and see it and see if you're interested?
Okay, it's a musical. With Jesus as a central character, You're a Jewish guy. Did you think, well, all right, I'll give it a go? I mean, I think one of the things that made Godspell work was the fact that I didn't know a lot of those stories. I mean, everyone knows the passion of the Christ.
We all know that story because it's part of American culture. But I didn't know the, I mean, I'd heard the term prodigal son.
So I think I came to it with a kind of fresh eye about not. Preaching to the converted, so to speak. You were 23 when God's 23 premiered. I mean, that success that it gave. Catch you off guard?
Very much so, yeah. That whole beginning of. for want of a better word, my career. with Godspell and then Pippin following on it and the Bernstein Mass and Magic Show all within the space of a a couple of years was very dizzying and um Not that easy to cope with. I mean, listen, no one wants to hear anyone complain about how difficult it is to be successful.
And the truth is, when you are very young and unprepared for success, it can be difficult to handle. It was difficult. for me to handle. I think I got very quite full of myself. I got kind of difficult to deal with.
I kept thinking. you know, as I was working on other projects, well, why isn't everybody just doing exactly what I say? You know, I just didn't I I sort of lost The ability to in some ways, not entirely, but I lost somewhat the ability to collaborate. And again, I lost the ability to see through other people's eyes and hear other points of view. And You know, it took some failures and really being brought down to earth to kind of return to the to that and also learn.
Better, how to deal with both success and failure. On Pippin, the collaboration with Bob Fossey. That was a very challenging collaboration for me and Bob. We were very strong personalities. Um He was not the best at Communicating verbally.
He wasn't incredibly articulate. Um guy. He communicated much better with his designers and his actors than with his writers. And I wasn't great about Seeing through his eyes, and so there were a lot of clashes. Is it true that he tossed you out of rehearsal once?
Probably. I don't remember anymore because it was so long ago, but I wouldn't be surprised. Um The ironic thing All these years later, is that there are two ironic things, I think. One is that I think the show. is much better.
because of that conflict, because Bob's Kind of dark cynical point of view and my at that time quite youthful idealism are clashing in the show and that's what makes the show work. And the other thing that is funny to me is that I've now become kind of the guardian of Bob's vision. And so, if I see productions of the show and there are certain things that Bob had brought into it that they've missed, I will say, No, no, no, you have to have him come in and interrupt here, etc.
So, I'm now like seeing through Bob's eyes in a way and bringing that to it. And my joke about it is that somewhere Bob is looking up and laughing. There was the this little opening thing that um So that just doesn't that just feel like optimism and I'm gonna do it and yeah it just that just felt and it's in C major you know very bright and very uncomplicated and then the button and then this It just is again about optimism and determination and I don't know what's going to happen when I sit down. I don't know. I just, I come with like an emotion and I start doing things and then, you know.
I'm like, oh, that's, I'm going to do that. It's this magical. Process where I don't know what's going to come out of my fingers.
So, when you're 26, you have Godspell Pippin and The Magic Show running simultaneously. I mean, that had to do something to your ego. How could it not? It did. I mean, as I've said, that whole period was.
Turned out to be challenging for me just in relating to other people and. And there was At least I imagined there was a lot of resentment towards me in the More established theater community because here was this kid who had come sort of from nowhere and now had three shows running on Broadway. I don't know if there was resentment or not, but it felt to me as if there was. But you know, that's interesting because the shows were successful.
So for there to be, I mean, that's, in other words, jealousy. I felt that. I can't say that it was real, but it felt to me as if I was an outsider and And the sort of establishment would just as soon I go away. I mean, part of it was I tend not to get good reviews, and so I think I. put that as part of um you know, the judgment of the theater community, which I wanted to be a part of and didn't really feel myself to be a part of.
But in retrospect, that was just probably my own. Um You know misunderstandings and and the and the sort of like Lack of perception that had developed by having these sort of three big hits in a row.
Well, okay, but you haven't always been critics' choice. I'm almost never a critic's choice. What is that about? I have no idea. I just do the best I can, you know.
But uh That's been something that's, I mean, I'll be frank about it. You know, I wish I got Steve Sondheim's reviews. What can I tell you? Though he would say he got, he would complain that he used to get bad reviews, too. But listen.
great as he was, his shows didn't run. The way yours have. Yeah, I mean, we all, I guess we all sort of want what the, you know, the grass is always greener. I I would Like to get better reviews than I tend to do for my work, but um. At this point in my life, I can't really worry about it.
And as you say, I've been fortunate enough that many of my shows have been very successful, despite what's been said about them and about me.
So then you have this rough patch. You have the baker's wife, you have baker's wife, working children of Eden, rags, you know, all of which didn't succeed initially. You know, I've been very lucky in that most of them have come back and had, you know, wonderful long lives. But when they first Appeared that was not the case. Did you worry that you were out of juice?
Totally, yeah. I mean, I felt like, okay, this is it. And I had a good run, and now it's over. And in the 90s, I actually went back to school and started, I was pursuing a degree in psychology. You're kidding.
Yeah, I was going to be, I'm still sort of sorry in some ways that I didn't do that because I would like to have been a therapist. You were going to become a therapist? I was going to become a therapist.
So where were you studying? NYU. I made a deal with NYU that I would do some musical theater classes if I could attend classes and get my master's. And then I would have had to go on from there in therapy, in psychotherapy. And was that pursuit therapeutic?
For you? Sure, yeah. I was always very interested in it. Interestingly enough, in one of my classes, I became friendly with a young woman who also had tried to kind of make it in as a songwriter and had gotten frustrated, named Lisa Loeb. And then we were both in the same class together.
And the same thing happened to each of us. I got a call from Disney. to would I like to work on animated features because Alan Manken's partner, writing partner, Howard Ashman, had passed away. And they were looking for someone to work with that one. And do you think that, that period of you Stepping away from songwriting, studying psychology.
Did it give you something that helped you when you got back in? Definitely. Yes, absolutely. I think it was. A lot of things were helpful to me.
Having a lot of failure, actually, oddly enough, was very helpful to me because it made me appreciate when I went back to work. Um How lucky I was to be doing it at all and to be much more focused on the process and much less focused on the outcome. Um I think the time away reminded me of how to behave myself and how to collaborate and how to deal with. Other people and not just come in like a bull in a china shop.
Well, when you say learn how to behave, were you throwing furniture before? What were you? No, but I was tough to collaborate with. You know, I would have little, I would have the equivalent of tantrums and, you know, um. That was, as we were talking earlier, that was the result of Sort of early success before I was really psychologically ready to deal with it.
And how significant is it that in this phase when you went to Hollywood to work on these movies, that in some cases you were only doing lyrics, you weren't doing music and lyrics, you weren't controlling the whole process? I don't think that was particularly significant because You know, I still was very involved with putting the stories together and working out the structure of it. It was very much the same, and also Alan and I are the way we worked together, we were such a good team that it didn't feel to me that I wasn't sort of central to the process. Um I just think I came in with a different way of collaborating. And I can't say I was 100% wonderful to deal with every single day, but I think I'm a lot better now at collaborating and working with the.
The very, very talented people that I've been fortunate enough to be able to collaborate with. Your parents were there to watch you win an Oscar. And What did I mean that's extraordinary? You know, I never thought I'd be in the movies. I wanted to be in the theater.
Right, well, I was going to say, but you're the elder statesman now. I know. I like it. I really like that. Being able to kind of try and pass on some things I've learned, and more than anything, be a cheerleader.
And just say to people, How do you do that?
Well, just hear early work, and if I recognize that it's talented, say so. Say you're really good, and you know, you could maybe work on this and that aspect of it, but You're for real. You should keep doing this. Or if someone has had a show that I admired that didn't succeed, Getting in touch with them and saying, hey, I don't know why this show didn't work, but that's a great score. And you should be very, very proud of it.
Um Just letting people know, you know, when you have a failure. or you lose an award or something. The silence is Deafening. Oof. Deafening.
And you feel like it. The phone does not ring. As I say, silence is deafening. I try to, if it's something I've admired, or a person I think really should be encouraged, I try to break that silence. Yeah, because you remember how it felt.
I know how that feels. Yeah, but at this point with your body of work, there's so many songs that. means so much to so many people over time, right? That that's got to feel great. It does.
I mean weddings and songs are play. I mean, just I feel so blessed. And so Fortunate that work I've done Has this ongoing life that I know is going to keep going when I'm not here on this planet anymore. And, um, that it means things to people and when I hear from people about I was feeling so down and then I listened to defying gravity and it gave me renewed energy or something like that when you know that you've communicated to others and that's why writers become writers because we want to communicate. And to know that I've been able to do that for a lot of years now.
Um is so I feel so lucky for that. Listen, I'm 77 years old and I've got a new show opening. in November. Queen of Versailles opening in November. They still let me do this.
I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app. or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the story of the one.
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