The Schwartz Scene Blog

This podcast with Stephen Schwartz is about his lyrics for the songs from Disney’s Enchanted, and is part of the 30th issue of The Schwartz Scene newsletter. It was recorded on February 15, 2008

Listen to the podcast by clicking the arrow button immediately below (Internet Explorer and Opera browser users click the button twice):

Order the Enchanted DVD or Sheet music: Enchanted info.

TRANSCRIPT

Carol de Giere: Welcome to this podcast about Disney’s Enchanted. I’m Carol de Giere and with me is songwriter Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics for the songs of this movie. We’re recording this for The Schwartz Scene from www.theschwartzscene.com.

Stephen, I’m hoping you can share a few comments for our listeners who may either be songwriters themselves or who are interested in the craft of writing songs.

First of all, let’s talk about the assignment you and Alan Menken were given and how you conceptually approach writing songs for movies. Was it up to you to discover the ways that songs might advance the story?

Stephen Schwartz: In the case of Enchanted, a screenplay existed, a screenplay that had been worked on for many, many drafts and through many, many writers until they finally came back to the original conceiver and original writer Bill Kelly. The screenplay that we received and that I read was not only terrific, but very, very close to the screenplay that was actually shot. This wasn’t one of those cases where a great deal changed during the writing and filming process, because that screenplay had been gone over and worked over by Kevin Lima, the director, with Bill, so it was more of a shooting script, in a way, than perhaps other cases might be.

And there were places for songs already built into the screenplay. They knew that they wanted to open in the whole animated world with a song [”True Love’s Kiss”]. The idea of Giselle cleaning up the apartment and having the vermin come and help her was already in the screenplay [”Happy Working Song”]. I’m not really sure whether they knew that was going to be a song or not. I don’t really remember if it said “song here” or just a scene and Alan and I decided that should be a song.

Definitely [with] “So Close,” the idea for it was not only already in the script, but the title was in the script. Kevin suggested the title, “So Close,” which I really liked.

We added “That’s How You Know.” That scene was in the script, and maybe there was an idea that it was a musical number, but we added the whole idea of her singing, and Robert being embarrassed about it and asking her not to sing, and gradually all the different people in the park joining in. We added the idea of the steel drum guy who would play along with her, etc. That was all something that Alan and I came up with. But I think that spot for a song already existed in the script.

And then the last number, “Ever Ever After,” which is the voiceover, that was something that I felt very strongly about. That was not in the script and I kept saying to the director, to Kevin, “Look, you have to close this movie musically. You cannot just close in a scene.” And ultimately, after a few false starts and cul-de-sacs, we discovered a way to do that.

Carol de Giere: I guess there’s this whole evolution that you’ve talked about before about how it begins with the old Disney.

Stephen Schwartz: Classic Disney.

Carol de Giere: Could you explain that?

Stephen Schwartz: One of the ideas which sort of emerged a little bit, it wasn’t something that was that conscious from the very beginning, but we knew that we wanted to start in really Classic Disney. This was something that I felt strongly about and sort of pushed towards, because for a while there was a discussion of, should the opening number that became “True Love’s Kiss” -Oh that was also Kevin’s title, which I liked and wanted to keep, and kept through several versions, and Alan kept saying, “Maybe we should have a different title” as we were struggling to solve the song, and I kept saying, “No, no, no, I really like the title, we just have to figure out how to do it better”-there was some talk about whether or not that should be more of an “Alan Menken style” number, like “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast.

I felt very strongly that we wanted to be in the world of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. And so Alan and I watched those movies and looked at the opening numbers, or first couple of numbers, and really tried to be in that sensibility, both musically and lyrically. I mean I made fun of it a little bit. But basically the idea was to both honor and send up the songs for Sleeping Beauty, well, not Sleeping Beauty so much as Cinderella and particularly Snow White.

Carol de Giere: And then you moved forward.

Stephen Schwartz: Then we moved forward so the second song is also [a send-up from] Snow White. “Happy Working Song” is basically the sensibility of Snow White transported to modern day New York, and that’s what’s funny about it. She’s dealing with rats and pigeons and cockroaches, but she’s still singing as if they were adorable furry bunnies and little fluffy rabbits and elves and birds, etc.

But then we started moving forward in time, in a way. As the character Giselle develops as a character and becomes more of a contemporary young woman, the score becomes increasingly contemporary. So “That’s How You Know,” which is kind of the centerpiece, that is an Alan Menken number. That’s meant to send up “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” [from The Little Mermaid] and to some extent send up “Topsy-Turvy” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and all the sort of big Disney production numbers that came in with the new golden age of animation that Alan started with Howard Ashman. And I think the idea of the Caribbean quality, or in this case, Jamaican, that starts “That’s How You Know” was directly related to the fact that we wanted to send up “Under the Sea” a little bit.

So by that time, therefore, we’re sort of in the 90s Disney. And then “So Close” is deliberately meant to refer to the title song of Beauty and the Beast. And, in fact, Kevin Lima always planned to have the famous camera move that was built into Beauty and the Beast where they are dancing and the fake camera in animation, or the digital camera, swirls around them; he wanted to recreate that camera move live. So part of the assignment was to build in a dance section where that camera move could take place.

Finally, at the very end, the solution to “Ever Ever After” was to do it like real contemporary animation where the characters aren’t even singing on screen-it’s a voice over and the action is happening while you’re hearing the voice over, so you’ve come all the way to our contemporary sensibility.

Carol de Giere: You’ve talked before about starting with titles and you’ve mentioned that a couple were provided. So I’m curious about the advantage that it gives you to start with a title, and also, for the ones we don’t know, like “Happy Working Song,” did you start with that first before you wrote the song? And for “That’s How You Know?”

Stephen Schwartz: “That’s How You Know?”-definitely I had the title, without question. “Happy Working Song” I’m not sure whether I had the title or more the idea that it was going to be “Whistle While You Work”-that kind of song-so I knew it would have work in it, and then Alan had that tune, and it sort of suggested, “…happy little working song” was just built into the music.

For me, the advantage of starting with a title-and I want to emphasize that it’s not arbitrary, that I don’t just say, “Oh, I’m looking at a vase of flowers, so let’s call the song “A Vase of Flowers,” a lot of thought goes into what is the title- but that thought and then the ultimate decision of what the title is going to be, focuses what the song is about. It helps to define for me what the content of the song is, so the lyrics aren’t all over the map. I’ve just found over the years that as I’ve gained experience as a songwriter, knowing the title is very helpful for me in focusing the song.

Carol de Giere: I’m curious, we know that journalists are taught to look for the who, what, when, where, and why of their story. I wonder if songwriters do that. And I was thinking about like with “Happy Working Song,” okay, who: my little friends-”Come my little friends,” and the what is clean the crud up and the where is the kitchen. Do you ever consciously do that?

Stephen Schwartz: Not at all. No. Until you said it this second it never entered my mind. I see now that you point out in “Happy Working Song” that that exists. But it’s news to me. I never thought about that at all.

Carol de Giere: It just happens.

Stephen Schwartz: It just was accident.

Carol de Giere: It helps to establish a place.

Stephen Schwartz: Sometimes a song demands that. With “Happy Working Song” that sort of demands it. “That’s How You Know” doesn’t really refer to the place, it doesn’t say here I am in the park singing this song.

I think the content of the song and what it’s about will make its demands. You’re really not writing a newspaper article. Sometimes that aspect of it is important to the story. In Sweeney Todd it’s important that when Anthony and Sweeney are singing about London at the beginning that they are referring to London. I mean, that’s part of the story and it’s important for Sondheim to establish that. But then in other songs, that doesn’t necessarily occur.

Carol de Giere: But in “That’s How You Know” it’s kind of interesting because you start out with “How does she know you love her?” and then after a chorus or a bridge or something it becomes “That’s how you know.” Do you remember consciously working with this?

Stephen Schwartz: I remember worrying about it. Because I had the title “That’s How You Know” but when we started it because of the scene that it was coming out of, the first question had to be “How does she know?” And I thought about changing the title to “That’s How She Knows” but it’s just not a good title. “That’s How You Know” is just a better title. So I tried to structure the lyrics so it could go to the real title, “That’s How You Know,” without it being too big a glitch or a speed bump, and I think I was pretty successful in doing that.

Carol de Giere: It kind of becomes a song that, she is singing it to all of us.

Stephen Schwartz: Yeah. It just seemed it needed to be more of a general statement than “That’s How She Knows” so I really didn’t want to change the title.

Carol de Giere: You’ve said before that you don’t love to write love songs.

Stephen Schwartz: No I don’t.

Carol de Giere: So how did “So Close” come out for you. It’s not exactly a love song. It’s a discovery of love, isn’t it?

Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I think it’s definitely a love song. I mean, well, I had the title, and Kevin really wanted the last line to be “So close and still so far.” Which in a way, I mean, that song, which I think works really well in the movie, I think has little bit of a problem as a stand-alone song because it shifts gears in the middle of the song. Like the whole first part of the song, which ends with “So far we are so close,” is one idea. And then at the end of the song, which accompanies a scene where she’s now leaving, the idea changes to “So close and still so far,” which works for the movie but makes the song just a little bit of a split personality.

But anyway, the title “So Close” and where we were going with it, helped to define what the words of the song would be. And then it was such a specific situation that they were going to be physically in contact for the first time. And I had the idea, which I really had to fight for at one point-not with Kevin but because Patrick Dempsey didn’t want to sing-I had the idea that it was imperative that Robert sing along at a certain point, and so part of the song was written so the words would reflect exactly what Robert was feeling at that time, the Patrick Demsey character, and would sing that into her ear.

That was a bit of a war to get Patrick to do that. And then later on, when I saw Patrick after the movie came out, he said to me, “Why didn’t I have a song,” and I said, “Patrick, it was all we could do to get you to sing those two lines!”

Carol de Giere: Interesting. I wonder if you could talk about “bridge.” I don’t remember if you’ve talked about what a bridge in a song does. So let’s look at with “Happy Working Song” I suppose we would say it’s

Oh, how strange a place to be
Till Edward comes for me
My heart is sighing

Stephen Schwartz: Definitely. That whole section.

Carol de Giere: What’s the role of that?

Stephen Schwartz: A bridge in general, just to talk in general terms, the other term for bridge is the release. And I think that’s the more accurate term. It sort of refreshes the ear. It takes you somewhere different musically and therefore slightly different lyrically usually before you return to the tune. That’s the AABA structure. The reason for the B is that AAA can be kind of dull, though if it’s “Both Sides Now” it’s not so dull. It’s different from a verse/chorus structure which is what “Both Sides Now” or “Corner of the Sky,” for instance, is, but many, many classic songs are first verse, second verse which is musically identical to the first verse, then a release that takes you somewhere else, and then a last verse that’s an A again.

So that’s the first thing about it. And then when the music changes, then you want to go someplace lyrically that supports the change of music. In the case of “Happy Working Song” we wanted to catch up with her story. And so there’s a little storytelling element to it. And, of course, it’s also satirical of Beauty and the Beast because musically it suggests “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.” It has that moment that occurs in “Belle”-it’s a similar structure, so we were sort of spoofing a little bit.

And then in “So Close” that’s really a musical choice. I basically said to Alan, “We just need to go somewhere else here. And he felt it too. It wasn’t like I was there telling him something he didn’t already know. And then he wrote that really beautiful little music, and because it was more melancholy, it suggested the lyrics that ultimately wound up there:

How could I face the faceless days
If I should lose you now?

And that was just really based on my emotional response to the music Alan wrote.

Carol de Giere: Great line. It’s a great line.

Stephen Schwartz: Thank you.

Carol de Giere: Lastly, let’s talk about writing comic songs in general and specifically the “Happy Working Song.” That’s like a “wink,” I guess, so it’s a funny situation?

Stephen Schwartz: Well it’s a really funny idea. And full marks to Kevin Lima because it was his conception. Once you have the idea that you’re going to do “Whistle While You Work” or whatever they sing in Snow White where they’re washing the dishes, once you have the idea that you’re going to do that with rats, and, pigeons, etc., then it’s just a matter of sort of thinking of that situation.

One of the things I did for that song that inspired it was, many, many years ago there was a television special with Julia Andrews and Carol Burnett, called Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, and one of the things they did in it was they made fun of The Sound of Music and they sang a song that satirized “My Favorite Things.” And it was called “Pigs Feet and Cheese.” And again, it was a very similar sensibility to “Happy Working Song” in that, particularly Julie Andrews just sang everything so sweetly and she would sing lines like “Knitting and tatting and cleaning the barn” and I just found that song so hilarious that I remembered it for thirty years, or however long it’s been, since that television show. And so I thought a funny thing to do would be to do exactly what they did in that-to take the Snow White super sweet sensibility and put a lot of words in there like “toilet” and “vermin” and, you know, I just tried to think of a lot of ugly words and then just put them into the song, so she could be singing about these smelly socks and things, but with her incredibly sweet attitude. That just seemed really funny to me. But it’s all contained in the conception of the song.

That really was an easy song to write because the idea is so funny and it’s much, much easier to be funny if the idea is funny to begin with.

Carol de Giere: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Stephen Schwartz: You’re very welcome.

Order the Enchanted DVD or Sheet music: Enchanted info.

A Blog/Podcast by Carol de Giere, including an interview with Stephen Schwartz

Introduction: Stephen Schwartz’s touching ballad, “Fathers and Sons,” is a favorite song among his fans, and was included on The Stephen Schwartz Album compilation as well as on the Working cast album. The song poetically describes parent/child relationships in a way that is both deeply personal and universal. When Stephen wrote the piece in 1977, his son Scott was three-and-a-half years old, as the lyrics mention.

Stephen Schwartz and his son Scott Schwartz –Photo by Terence de Giere

Thirty years later, father and son shared ideas and plans as Scott directed the workshop production of Stephen’s opera-in-progress. (Scott will also direct the final production of the opera in Santa Barbara in 2009.) When my husband and I drove up to see the workshop performance, we interviewed Stephen for this podcast. Terry also captured the father/son portrait that you see here.

“Fathers and Sons” also reflects Stephen’s relationship with his father. Stephen grew up in the suburbs of New York City in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, where he lived with his parents and younger sister. As a teenager in the early 1960s, he experienced the usual alienation of youth for the older generation. Later, he and his parents developed a close and cordial relationship.

In 1996, someone snapped this candid photo of Stephen’s father, “Stan” (Stanley), Stephen, and his mother, Sheila Schwartz, attending the Academy Award ceremony when Stephen received Oscars for writing lyrics for Pocahontas. (How many parents get to say they walked the red carpet? They must have been glad they paid for their son’s piano lessons and four years of weekend studies at Juilliard Preparatory Division.)

As a composer-lyricist for stage and film musicals, Stephen didn’t originally write “Fathers and Sons” just to express something about his family life. He wrote it to fit into Working. Some of the people interviewed by Studs Terkel in his book Working (the source material for the musical) touched upon similar sentiments, and Terkel organized a set of eight father/son interviews under the heading FATHERS AND SONS. At one point, though, Stephen doubted that it really fit in the musical, but his co-adaptor, Nina Faso, and music director, Stephen Reindhardt, talked him into keeping it in the show.

If you don’t know the song, you might want to read the lyrics (below) and listen to a brief clip of Stephen singing the song on The Stephen Schwartz Album at http://www.amazon.com/ - The Stephen Schwartz Album [opens new browser window]

Lyrics to “Fathers and Sons”

I heard a lotta songs say “Where you goin’ my son?”
Now I know they’re true
Boy, you never stop to think how fast the years run
Now they’ve taken you
I remember you was three ‘n’ a half
Your ma and me, we’d sit there after things got quieted
We’d laugh at some new word you said
How tough you were to get to bed
And we’d plan the night away
Planning for our kid …

I was your hero then
I couldn’t do no wrong, as far as you were concerned
You thought I was the best of men
The tables hadn’t turned
You hadn’t learned
How little time it takes
And daddies make mistakes …

Seems to be that lately I been thinkin’ a lot
I think about my dad
Lots of funny things come back I thought I’d forgot
Now they make me sad
High school and it used to be
I didn’t want him touchin’ me, and I shuddered if he did
Further back to summer nights
Baseball games beneath the lights
And sleepin’ in the car
My daddy and his kid …

He was my hero then
He couldn’t do no wrong, as far as I was concerned
I thought he was the wisest and the strongest
And the best of men
The tables hadn’t turned
I hadn’t learned
How little time it takes
And everybody breaks
And daddies make mistakes ……

I heard a lotta songs say: “where you goin’, my son?”
Now I know they’re for real
Boy, you never stop to think how fast the years run
And the things they steal
Now it seems I always knew
Why I do the things I do
And the things I never did
Why I work my whole damn life
So’s I could give a better life
Than the one my dad could give me
I give it
To my kid …

Podcast: Stephen Schwartz—Fathers and Sons

You’ll find the transcript for this six-minute podcast below. Listen to the podcast by clicking the arrow button immediately below (Internet Explorer and Opera browser users click the button twice):

Welcome to Podcast #3 from The Schwartz Scene at www.theschwartzscene.com. I’m Carol de Giere. Today we’ll focus on one aspect of songwriter Stephen Schwartz’s life and creative interests represented by his song, “Fathers and Sons,” from the musical Working. Stephen often writes about parenting concerns, especially the relationship of father to son, as in Pippin, Children of Eden, and Geppetto and Son. In Wicked, which deals more with father-daughter issues, the Wizard sings to Elphaba about how he always longed to be a father. And he says [Schwartz’s lyric:], “Helping you with your ascent allows me to feel so parental.”

Carol de Giere: We’ve noticed that one of your themes for writing is the parenting process, or the parenting experience. I suppose that comes out of your own life. Would you say that it comes from your experience?

Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I think so. I think that I tend to write a lot about parent/child relationships from both points of view. I think that I had a complicated relationship with my parents. It’s a very, very good one now. But there were challenging aspects to it when I was growing up.

I think all boys have father issues. Maybe not all boys, but it seems to me they do, and I had my share. Working out my relationship to and with my father was sort of central to my whole emotional and psychological development. And then becoming a father and how I related to my kids and the kind of parent I was, was also very important to me emotionally. It’s just always been a theme in my work. It was there before I was a father because I wasn’t a father when I wrote Pippin, which has a lot of father/son relationship issues in it. But, yeah, it’s just something that for whatever reason has been emotionally significant to me.

CD: When you wrote “Fathers and Sons” you included the concept of heroes. So the idealism and realism, which is another theme that you’ve talked about–do you think that just emerged as you were writing? Or was it there in Studs Terkel’s interviews?

SS: No, “Fathers and Sons” is an extremely personal song to the point that I wasn’t sure it should be included in the show. I’m sure either Nina or Steve Reinhardt have told you that I was not sure it should be in the show, and basically the two of them said, ‘No no no,’ this needs to be in the show. It took a while, actually, to find out how to make it work in the show. But it’s extremely personal, particularly about my relationship with my own dad.

CD: Well, how does the hero, there was a point in your life, then, that you looked up to him?

SS: Sure. I think that that’s a common, I mean Terry I don’t know if you would agree, I don’t know what your relationship with your dad was like, but I think that that may be a common pattern of son to father relationships that when you’re young you idealize your father and he’s your hero and then as you come into your teenage years and you become more realistic about who your father is, the fact that he has flaws is devastating in some way. And one has an unrealistic picture of him in the other way. I mean, he suddenly becomes this total failure or whatever, but the negatives completely take over.

Terry de Giere: I remember that it tended to get that way to a certain extent. Also your personalities, you’re becoming independent mentally at that point and your own ego is developing and that creates that gap between you two.

SS: And then one hopes, and what has happened between me and my dad, and I have a great relationship with him now, is that you come to a synthesis where it’s acceptable for your father to be a human being, you know, who has strengths and who has weaknesses and who has flaws but who also has aspects that are strong.

CD: I’m not a parent but I’ve been told that that’s also the process of parenting, that you want to be the perfect parent and at some point you admit that you aren’t and then you embrace that.

SS: Yeah, I mean I think everybody, I certainly knew I wasn’t going to be the perfect parent, but you just try to do the best job I can. I know the couple of places where I felt I really slipped up are places that I still have strong regrets about.

CD: And so perhaps that’s why the song touches people.

SS: I think the song touches people because, I mean, as always, this goes back to the truism that you and I have discussed before that the secret to me to songwriting is ‘tell the truth and make it rhyme.’ And the songs of mine that seem to have the most effect on people are the ones where I am being as honest as I possibly can. “Fathers and Sons” is just a completely honest song.

CD: Are the details true? Scott was 3 ½. That one was true.

SS: Yeah, the details are all true. The whole thing about the baseball games.

CD: Baseball game beneath the lights.

SS: Totally. My dad used to take me to ball games.

CD: It was the Mets, right?

SS: Yes, it was the Giants before that. That’s what I really remember, that when there was no National League team in the New York area that we would drive down to Philadelphia once a year and go to a Philly’s game. And that was always one of my favorite favorite things to do.

CD: And sleeping in the car.

SS: And sleeping in the car.

Hear Fathers and Sons on
The Stephen Schwartz Album

Hear Fathers and Sons on Working Cast Album

Sheet music Fathers and Sons: http://www.musicnotes.com/

Read about Working the musical

Listen to the podcast by clicking the arrow button immediately below (Internet Explorer and Opera browser users click the button twice):

Full Transcript of the Podcast:

Carol de Giere: Welcome to the 2^nd podcast from The Schwartz Scene website and blog at www.theschwartzscene.com. I’m Carol de Giere. Today you’ll hear from Wicked’s composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz as he discusses his discovery of the novel Wicked and the arrangements he needed to make to adapt it.

In the past Schwartz has been involved with such adaptations as Working, a musical based on Studs Terkel’s collection of interviews and Children of Eden, an adaptation of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. Back in 1996 when he first heard about the novel Wicked, he had just finished writing songs for The Prince of Egypt, a film adaptation of the biblical story of Moses, and had recently completed lyrics for Disney’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. So he was somewhat in the habit of watching out for stories that might be retold in musical form. Then he found a story that was truly wicked.

So now you’ll hear about the early moments of the adaptation process for Wicked the musical. About a year ago I attended a talk that Stephen Schwartz gave at a gathering in Connecticut. I taped the talk and my husband worked on the audio track so you can hear it a little better. Stephen approved this segment for me to share with you in the podcast. He describes a weekend vacation in December 1996. Picture him on a boating trip off the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Stephen Schwartz: I heard about the book Wicked [Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West] in a very random and serendipitous way, about 7 years ago, maybe eight years ago now. It was one of those completely unlooked for events. I actually was on a very last-minute and sort of capricious weekend vacation with some friends. It was unplanned and came up very quickly. The last day we went on a snorkeling trip because we were in Hawaii, and on the boat on the way back to the mainland after our little snorkel adventure, one of the people that I was with just making idle conversation said, I’m reading this really interesting book called Wicked and it’s by this guy named Gregory Maguire. It’s the Oz story from the Wicked Witch’s point of view.

As soon as I heard this I had one of those light bulb moments where something just said this is a really great idea. For many reasons it seemed particularly the kind of thing that I like to do. I’m very attracted to stories that take a familiar story or myth or character and then spin it and look at it from another way. I’ve done several pieces like that; I refer to it as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead school of writing. It is something that always intrigues me; from an academic perspective I guess it would be called post modern because it takes an existing work and deconstructs it. For whatever reason, I’m very attracted to that, so immediately that aspect of it appealed to me.

I also was very taken with the idea that this character of the Wicked Witch of the West, who is so much a villainess that she doesn’t even have a name, she is only referred to in The Wizard of Oz as the Wicked Witch of the West, that someone had the idea to look at what had transpired through her point of view. It was pretty obvious that something called Wicked was going to deal with themes that appeal to me: the difference between the reality that is presented to us, where things are oversimplified and told in black and white terms, and something is evil or good and there are good guys and bad guys, and the reality of life, which is, of course, a good deal more complicated than that. For all those reasons I was very intrigued by the idea.

The next day, when I got back to the mainland, I called my representative and said look, there is this book called Wicked and somebody has the rights to it, because it has been out for about a year. And therefore someone has bought the rights. Please find out where those rights are, because I think this is something I would like to do, and then I went out to get the book.

At that point, things turned out to be lucky, frankly. It turned out the rights to the book belonged to Universal Pictures. They had bought it and were in the process of developing a movie, not a musical movie. They were a good way along, as you might imagine because the book had been out a while. They had a first draft of a screenplay and had given the writer notes, and were expecting a second draft shortly. As you can imagine, they had spent some time and money on it. So the first task was to persuade Universal to abandon the idea of doing it as a movie and to consider the idea of doing it as a stage musical, something they had never done before because they are a movie company and not a theater producing company. So I began to get meetings with various people and work my way up the food chain and it took a while. After about 6 months of this, I finally got a meeting with the gentleman who was running Universal Pictures at the time, Marc Platt, and this is where luck took over a bit. It turned out that Marc, very much unlike most motion picture executives, had a knowledge of the theater, had a love for the theater, liked musicals, and in fact in college had been in his college production of Pippin. So he was not completely deaf to my entreaties.

[Photo of Marc Platt and Stephen Schwartz 9 years after their first meeting. Photo by Ben Strothmann for BroadwayWorld.com as part of the party for the 1000th performance of Wicked. Wicked party photos]

Basically what I did was go to him and say, ‘Look, I know you’re developing this as a film. I don’t think it’s going to work as a film and this is why,’ and I had some reasons that may or may not be legitimate but sounded cogent anyway. I said, ‘I really believe this is a theater piece. I think it needs to be a musical,’ and I gave him some reasons why, mostly having to do with the leading character of the Wicked Witch. She was going to need to give voice to what was going on inside her, and this was going to need to involve soliloquies, which are very difficult to do on film unless you do a tedious voice-over. What’s more, the usual thing film relies on to convey this kind of emotion, which is the close-up, was not going to be particularly effective in this case because she’s green and covered with makeup. So it was going to be difficult to turn her into a complicated and nuanced character. And I had some other reasons as well.

In any event, Mark was cordial and he gave me no indication that he actually was going to do this, and in fact he sent me out with a huge packet of other movies, treatments of other movies that Universal owned in case I was interested in any of them, which of course I was not. There was a bit of a depressing time when it looked as if they were not going to go along with this. I started thinking what other villains could I do? Should I do a musical about Iago? Should I do something about the wicked queen in Snow White? But nothing was as satisfying.

I had by this time read Gregory’s book and seen how much of that book lent itself to musicalization. The end of the story is obvious. Ultimately Mark did call me and say, ‘Okay let’s give it a go.’ And then I went and met with Gregory.

Again I got lucky, because I had to go this guy who had sold his book to the movies and was waiting to have a great big major motion picture and say, ‘Guess what? Instead of that, how would you feel about the risky and unlikely prospect of a show?’ I was lucky in that Gregory is sort of an amateur musician, and he told me that he had learned to play piano by playing the scores to Godspell and Pippin. Again my past rescued me. And so he agreed, and then from that point on we began.

Carol de Giere: That’s Stephen Schwartz’s report and how it all began. And of course then he and his colleagues found ways to compress and rearrange the story from Maguire’s 406 page novel to create a 2 ½ hour musical. Thanks for listening to this podcast from www.theschwartzscene.com

LINKS: Read about the characters selected for the musical as they relate to the characters in Maguire’s novel. Wicked Characters

Read more about Gregory Maguire and Wicked the novel.

Visit the Wicked home page at MusicalSchwartz.com - an index to over 50 pages related to Wicked the musical.

Copyright for this blog and website is by Carol de Giere, 2007