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Exclusive: BACKSTAGE WITH RICHARD RIDGE- Tonys Special with 2015 Honoree Stephen Schwartz!
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Nov 8, 2022
Welcome to BWW's exclusive talk show, BACKSTAGE WITH Richard Ridge. Follow Richard as he visits the theater's best and brightest in their dressing rooms, on their stages and favorite hang outs to talk about their lives, careers and all of the things you don't know, but want to know. In the special interview below, Richard welcomes 2015 Isabelle Stevenson recipient Stephen Schwartz!
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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I'm in the Tony Awards pop-up shop in the Paramount Hotel, sitting with composer Stephen Schwartz
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whose illustrious career spans over four decades, giving us such iconic musicals as Godspell, Pippin
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and the phenomenon known as Wicked. Well, this year he's being given a special Tony Award
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the 2015 Isabelle Stevenson Award. Please welcome Stephen Schwartz. Thank you so much for sitting here in the pop-up shop with me
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I know, it's a funny shop. Isn't this pretty cool? It's hilarious. All Tony memorabilia. Very cute
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Right. I just love that there's this store and then like in three weeks it's gone
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And then it comes back every year. Of course it does. It's very New York. You know, you're getting ready to receive the Isabel Stevenson Award. Right
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Tell me what that means to you this honor. Well, you know, it's an award for things that you do not thinking that you're going to get an award for them, if you know what I mean. Yeah
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Or even particularly that it's something that you'll be recognized for. This award is basically for a bunch of things that I've done over the years
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The SCAP Foundation Musical Theater Workshops that I've been doing for about 20 years
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The President of the Dramatists Guild and then some of the benefits that I've helped to organize
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for the It Gets Better project, the marriage equality, and various other causes
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And none of those are things that you are doing particularly to even have your name on
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So, you know, it's a little strange to get an award for it
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But I have to say that once this was announced, I got messages from people I haven't heard from for years
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and colleagues in the Broadway community. So that's been really nice, I have to say
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I know this is coming, like you said, you foster artists and new talent through the workshop
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Tell me what the workshop and the Dramatists Guild means to you. These are very important organizations to you
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Very important. I mean, they're two very different things. The Dramatists Guild is the organization that represents playwrights and composers and lyricists
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all around America and stands up for their rights, helps them not to get too taken advantage
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of in their contracts, and fights against censorship and piracy. And for the past six years I was the president of that organization which gave me a forum
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to talk about and work for things that I care about. And then ASCAP, which is one of the two organizations, ASCAP and BMI, that help songwriters actually
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get paid when their songs get played. But ASCAP has this foundation, this educational component, and the ASCAP Foundation sponsors
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musical theater workshop every year. And I've been the artistic director for that for about 20 some odd years
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uh done it in new york and in los angeles and we've also done it in various places um kind of
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pop up like the store around the country and even overseas and such disparate places as latvia and
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kenya and australia so yeah tasmania australia so um and basically it's um a workshop for aspiring
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composers and lyricists who are looking to write for musical theatre and they present
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work and get it critiqued and get a chance to work on it a little bit. And you know a
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lot of people, now we've been doing it for a while, so a lot of the names here on Broadway
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have come through that now. Which is very gratifying obviously. I want to go back to the beginning. You were brought up on Long Island in Roslyn
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Roslyn Heights. Which isn't quite as classy as Roslyn. It sounds more classy, but it's actually not
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Because I was part of in Glen Cove. Oh, okay. Well, then you know. Yeah, it's like 20 minutes away, right
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Yeah, I went to Minneola High School. Okay, I went to Glen Cove High School. There you go. So where did your love for music begin at an early age
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and what were those early creative outlets for you? I've been told by my parents
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neither of whom is musical or in show business in any way, that I was always a musical child
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and always liked listening to records, etc. because it was Long Island and we were approximate to New York City and they
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were theater goers and concert goers so they started taking me to things when I
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was quite young and basically the first time I saw a Broadway musical I thought
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you know that's that's where I want to live so I knew very early that that was
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the world I wanted to be in if I could yeah do you remember what your first Broadway musical was? I do because it was written by a friend of my parents, a
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composer named George Kleinsinger, who had several successful what we would call
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concept albums in the day and one of those albums was called Archie and the
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Hidabelle and it was turned into what ultimately became a short-lived unfortunately Broadway show called Shin Bone Alley and so when I was about nine
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years old, my parents took me to see that. And it was actually George who spotted
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the fact that I had some musical ability and suggested to my parents that maybe
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they should invest in a piano. Wow, that was Eartha Kitt, right
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Eartha Kitt and Eddie Bracken, yeah. And it was much criticized because it was
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about this cockroach, played by Archie, by Eddie Bracken, who was in love with an
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alley cat, played by Eartha Kitt, and it was much criticized because there was a
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big chorus of singing and dancing cats. And the critics said, why would anybody
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pay to see singing and dancing cats, which demonstrates the importance of timing
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Timing is everything. Everything, obviously. Oh, I love that. You know, you
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have this incredible career on both stage and screen, so I'd like to mention a
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few of your highlights. And just tell me what comes to mind, a story or a memory. Uh-oh. It's all good. This is your life, Stephen Schwartz. Here we go
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Godspell. Memories of the original production and the brilliant recent revival. Yeah. You know, that sort of came out of the blue. I had auditioned the score for Pippin
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which is what I came to New York with, for these producers, Edgar Lansbury and Joseph Beru
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who were not interested in Pippin, but about six months later, after the audition
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kind of out of the blue, I got a call from them and they said, there's this show at the Cafe La Mama that we think has potential as a commercial off-Broadway show
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but we think it needs a score. Would you go and see it? And of course they've denied it ever since
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but I assume they called every other composer in New York that anyone had ever heard of
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and they all said no, and finally in desperation they said, what about that kid with that Charlemagne musical
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So anyway, I went to see it, and it turned out that there were all these people from Carnegie Mellon University in it
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which is where I went to school. It had started there after I had left school, but I knew some of the people involved
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so it was a little bit like old home week. And, you know, we did the show quick
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You know the whole thing got the whole score got written in about five weeks And you know we didn really think beyond just putting it up opening night And then when it opened and was this you know phenomenon we were all a bit taken by surprise by it
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But it was a really joyous experience. You wrote it that fast? Yeah, I was too stupid when I was 23 to know that you couldn't do that
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So that's how much time we had, so that's how it got written. I mean, the show existed, in fairness
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And also a lot of the lyrics are derived from the Episcopal Hymnal. So it's not as if I had to write so many lyrics
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Tunes can write pretty fast, actually. I'm sure once you have to get something done
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you just go down that road really quick. I'm a big believer in and creator for myself of deadlines
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Deadlines are your friend. Okay. Because I remember looking at Theater World Awards
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There were like nine productions besides the one in New York traveling around the country
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It became a phenomenon. I think there were, in this country, there were ten productions running at the same time
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they were like sit down in various cities. So I spent about a year of my life
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traveling around the country working on productions of Godspell. And there were so many great names when I looked in the Theatre World Awards of all these, you know
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would-be stars that were doing this. That's the amazing thing about Godspell because it tends to be everybody's first job. Yeah
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But they are really talented people. So for instance, the Toronto Company was
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pretty much the entire cast of SCTV and a little bit of Saturday Night Live. It was, I mean
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Victor Garber and Gilda Radner and Andrea Martin and Martin Short and Gene Levy, and that was just
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Toronto. So yeah, I think Donna Summer was in Godspell. I think Madonna was in a production of
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Godspell. You know, a lot of people sort of, that was their first... Their star. Yeah. Or getting their
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record. And the Revival, what a beautiful job that Revival has. I thought so. I really
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thought it was so creative and again amazing performers in it, some of whom
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have already gone on. You know Uzo Aduba who's now the star on Orange is the New
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Black and of course Lindsay Mendez. But the whole company was just great and
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again it's always a lot of fun to work on that show because it's
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improvisational so you never exactly know what it's going to be and you know
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it's really funny to see what they come up with. Day by day by day by day
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Pippin. Pippin. Another show that got revived recently in a revival I just loved
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And by the brilliant Diane Paulus. And that was a great experience
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I loved working with her. The original production was a little bit of a difficult working experience
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I was directed by Bob Fosse, who was notoriously, though I didn't know it then, difficult and tough for writers to work with
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And, you know, I was very young and didn't have a lot of experience dealing with the politics of Broadway and the politics of collaboration
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Really, my only experience had been God's Belt, which was a very easy and joyous experience
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so sort of being thrown into that crucible was challenging for me
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and I didn't always have the best time, but in the end the show worked out
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and I think that some of the friction that existed between myself and Bob Fosse
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may actually have led to a better show than if either of us had gotten our own way all the time
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Yeah. Did it change a lot? Because you wrote this at school, right
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Oh, completely changed. Completely. It began at Carnegie Mellon. It was for this organization called Scotch and Soda that did an original musical every year
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And at school it was kind of like a musical line in winter, like a musical medieval melodrama
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with a lot of core intrigue and plots and backstabbing. And then it sort of transmogrified over the years to becoming this story about a young
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man in search of what to do with his life using the Charlemagne backdrop as kind of
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a metaphor and a jumping off point, but really was a contemporary story and a contemporary
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show. And then I think when Diane did it she made it even more so
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Yeah, it was very, very difficult when we first did it. We never got it right
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It went through this very tumultuous out-of-town tryout and ultimately closed without ever coming to New York
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It still never actually played in New York. But then we did this little cast album of it that became kind of a cult thing
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And so people kept singing the songs from it. And then ultimately the British director Trevor Nunn heard some of the songs from it
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He did a revival in London and kind of helped us figure out how to solve the show
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though we didn't entirely solve it for that revival. But then a few productions later, it was done out at Paper Mill Playhouse with Gordon Greenberg directing
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And then the show really worked. We had fixed it. Gordon did a great job. It got great reviews
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and so now you know we could put a little red ribbon on it. My son Scott said to me
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you've worked on Baker's Wife for 30 years ever since I've known you
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You have been working on the Baker's Wife and now it's finished. What are you
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gonna do now? So I thought that was funny. One of the most beautiful songs is
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Metal Ark. Thank you. Easy song to write, hard, at what point during the process
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Kind of easy, I have to tell you. Like Western Avenue, it wrote very very quickly
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I was going through some kind of personal stuff in my life at the time so
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I was kind of all roiled up and I think I just was able to take the emotion of
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that and and funnel it into that song even though the story of the song doesn't
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really have anything to do with what was going on in my life I think the emotion
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of it got placed into the song and I think that may be why people respond to
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the strong ways they do. It's such a beautiful beautiful song. Did you know it was gonna be a big hit
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the song. No, to the contrary, the producer of The Baker's Wife, David Merrick, absolutely hated the
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song He felt it was too long and it just stopped the show cold You know I tried to do an abridged version of it and that didn really work And there was a point where he actually went into the pit in I believe Washington DC and took all the orchestral parts metal art out of the pit so that the orchestra couldn perform the
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song and we have to skip it but obviously that just lasted for one performance but that's how strongly he felt about it so now the fact that it's
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sort of become this famous song is ironic to me but things like that happen to me all the time
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That's crazy. It's a great story. It was horrifying at the time
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No, it was actually kind of funny. Where's the song? I wasn't there and somebody called me, Bob Billing
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the musical director called me and told me. I was just stunned
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After I got done laughing, of course, I called my agent. I said, all right, obviously, he has to put it back
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But he's made his point. Totally. Working. Yeah. Yeah, that's another show which did not succeed initially on Broadway, but then became this show that got done all over the country and all over the world
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Another show where I was able to learn a lot from what didn't work on Broadway and make some changes in the show and work with some of the directors who were doing subsequent productions
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you know and it's now it's it's in fact it's a there's one problem with it
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having been so successful for so long because it's a documentary it keeps
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getting dated and so we keep having to write new things for it and find new
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interviews and there was a recent off-walk Broadway production that won the drama desk award was very successful that again Gordon Greenberg did and
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and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer of In the Heights and Hamilton, contributed two amazing new songs for it
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So that's something that constantly gets updated in order to try to stay a little bit current
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with the circumstances in the current workplace. I just love the concept of how you had all these different people write all these songs for that
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It was a lot of fun. You know, originally, when I first encountered the book and decided I wanted to
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adapted as a musical, I thought that I would write the score, but then as I began
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to work on it, I realized that there were so many different characters from so
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many different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, and I felt if I was going to be
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writing all the songs, I would be doing pastiche a lot of the time and kind of
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imitating other writers, and so it occurred to me, why don't I just, you know
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instead of trying to write a song like Mickey Grant, the wonderful African-American composer
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why didn't I just call Mickey Grant? Or instead of trying to write a James Taylor style song, pick up the phone and call James Taylor
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The worst they can do is say no. And many people said yes, so I was lucky about that
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Rags. I just heard that title song on my way to the city today on Sirius FM
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them. They were playing it on the Broadway channel, and it reminded me, you know, that
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there is just, Charles' music for that show is so wonderful. I just think it's, you know
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maybe Charles Strauss' best score. And I always said that that was the experience on which
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I learned to write lyrics. I really learned, I believe, the craft of writing lyrics. Up
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until then, which sounds strange since I think it was my sixth show, but, you know, I'd sort
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been going on instinct up until then and then because I was working with another composer
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and we were always working music first and Charles is quite smart about lyrics anyway
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I feel like I really got a crash course in the craft of writing lyrics so you know I always
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appreciated that. You know that's a show we've never, it's the one show of mine I feel is
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unsolved. But maybe someday you know Stephen Daldry or somebody will come along
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and want to direct it and say this is how we should do it and we'll finally solve that one. That would be nice
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But it sure has I think some great music in it. So you said you worked music first. When you work with someone else does it work that way
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It does. I mean these days I collaborate fairly frequently with Alan Menken, albeit on art films
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rather than theater, though we just did Hunchback of Notre Dame. Yes, and we sort of do the same thing
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We basically work music first. So maybe that's just because that's how I learned how to do it when I was working with Charles
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When I worked with Leonard Bernstein on the Bernstein Mass, actually we worked, well, no, that's not true
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I was going to say we worked the other way sometimes. I would give him a lyric, but now I realize a lot of the times he had music done already
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that I set lyrics to. It's hard to do that. But I think ultimately it makes for better songs, at least for the way I write
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Oh, I love that. So what got you from Broadway to Hollywood to like the Disney years and starting to write for movies
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Luck got me from, you know, it happened at a time when my career was really dead in the water
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Nothing was happening for me. I had actually gone back to school and I was taking psychology classes
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And I was thinking of becoming a therapist. And then Alan Menken and I were doing a benefit one evening and he said to me, you know, I'm
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working on this new animated feature for Disney and we need a lyricist and would you consider
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just doing lyrics? You know, and I of course had seen Alan's work with Howard Ashman. The
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reason of course he was asking me was because Howard had passed away. But having seen Little
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seen Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast and been so impressed with them, you know
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I was delighted to be asked to do that. And then I wound up having this really great time
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out in L.A. doing animation, you know, and I've got another couple of movies I'm working
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on now. So it sort of opened this whole door to me for, you know, working in Hollywood
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that it never had occurred to me that I would ever be able to do that. You know, now I have
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story about Woodwalled to fame so strange things happen. I just saw Hunchback out at Paperbell
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Beautiful, beautiful production. Thank you. Yeah, I feel it's one of the best shows that I've ever
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been involved with. I just was thrilled with it. We're about to, I think it's all right to say this
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I don't think it's a secret anymore, we're about to do the cast album. Disney has gotten in touch
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with us about that so it'd be great to have an album there and I know there are a lot of you know
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theaters around the world actually that are interested in doing productions but
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I have to say I don't think we'll ever match that production. It's disappointing
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that that particular production was there for three weeks but you know that's
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that's the bad part of live theater is that it's there and then it's gone
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I want to talk about the phenomenon known as wicked. Okay. I mean, did you ever think during the time period when you were writing it, it would have the longevity it had
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I mean, I'm sure you want that when you write something. Well, I don't think one ever really thinks about that
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You never think, you know, is this going to run for ten minutes or ten days or ten years
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I mean, you don't. You just are trying to get the show right and trying to get as close to whatever the collective vision is
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For me and my collaborators, we're trying to get as close to that on the stage
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We did have early inklings that we were onto something special because of the way people responded just in readings of the show
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Even when it was way too long and a mess and the story wasn't being told very well
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And even when we first opened in San Francisco, and the show was a mess
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and at this point we were still in previews, and we were coming down after 11 o'clock
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so the producers were just saying, you've got to cut this because it's costing us a fortune every night
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And I think that we had done three previews, and we had a creative meeting, which was very tense
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and there was a lot of sort of yelling back and forth. this sometimes can happen out of town even when the team as we for the most
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part did was it was a good collaboration you can get tense so I came
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out of that meeting you know having yelled at the director and the director
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yelled at Winnie and she cried and the producers were yelling we have to cut
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the show and I came out of the meeting and I was walking to the theater to meet
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with Stephen Remus the musical director and I got to the theater and there was a
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a mob in front of the theater. And I remember thinking, oh my God, there's been a terrible accident. A car
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has driven into the lobby or a brick has fallen off of the current theater and hit somebody and all these people are gathered
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because of this horrible accident that's happened. And then when I got
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closer, I realized it was a line at the box office. And that
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happened in three days before the show had even opened. So we began
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to have an inkling we were onto something, if we could just get it right. All of us have
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tried to understand what it is about the show that's made it such a phenomenon because
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you know, you, you know, there are hit shows and, you know, I've had my share of hit shows
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as well as failures, but every now and then something happens where it goes beyond the
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show itself. And you just hit the culture, the zeitgeist, at exactly the right time
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You know, to an extent I think Book of Mormon has done that. Way, way back at the
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beginning of my career, that's what happened with God's Dog Show. It just was the right show at the right time. And then it sort of explodes, and there's no
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way of planning for it or expecting it. You just, you know, if you get on that
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ride, you just enjoy it. Yeah. Is there anything you can tell us about the
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talked about film version? Just that we are at work on it. Winnie is working on the screenplay
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I've seen some of it. We have an outline. We have some early scenes done. It's so much fun
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because we get to go back into this world and these characters that we love and now know very
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well and think about how can we tell the story using what you can do on film. So there are things
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that we couldn't do on stage that now we can do. There's some things we did on
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stage that we can't do and we have to find other ways of doing them. So it's
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it's really exciting and it's a lot of fun for us to reimagine it for the
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screen. So it'll be there someday. Well tell us about your new show. Okay it will
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premiere in Vienna in German in the fall of 2016. Obviously I'm not writing it in
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German. It's called Emanuel and Eleonore and it's about these two very flamboyant theatrical
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personalities who were kind of the Brangelina of the German-speaking theater back in the
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1790s. There's a trick to it, which I'm not going to tell, but there's a surprise ending
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which is kind of what made me do the show. But I'm having just a great time writing in the world of that kind of music
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It's very Mozart-y. And Trevor Nunn, again, who's one of my favorite directors, is directing it
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And the artistic director of the theater where it's being produced, whose name is Christian Strupeck
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who's a very clever writer and very successful in the German-language musical theater
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He's writing the book. I just came back from there a couple of days ago
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where we were doing a reading of what we have so far in the second act
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We're going to continue to work in English this year, and we hope by the end of the year that we'll have a complete show
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And the translator is going to be Michael Kunze, who translated both Wicked and Hunchback to Glucknath and Notre Dame for me in Germany
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and is a very, very successful writer in his own right over there
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He wrote Elizabeth, which is the biggest hit that's ever been originally written for the
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German Language Musical Theater. So it's an amazing team. It's nice to do a show that's funny, I have to say
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You know, it's a romantic comedy. I think some of the scenes are just hilarious
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And, you know, I haven't done that before. I haven't done a flat-out A comedy and B love story before
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so I'm having a good time. My final question is, what is the best bit of advice that you've been given
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either personally or professionally, that you live by? You know, I had an answer to this
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and obviously it couldn't have been such good advice because I've now forgotten it
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But, you know, I think that the most important thing that I've learned over the years
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and that people have talked to me about is just persevere. That you just, every time you get knocked down
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you don't bounce up right away, but you just have to get back up and persevere
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And it can lead to, you know, if I had quit the theater in 1992
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when I was back at school trying to become a therapist, which I would quite have enjoyed, by the way
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and hadn't gotten called to do Disney and therefore had all of that stuff happen again
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I never would have had Wicked. So, you know, I mean, sometimes you have to hang in there for a long time
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but it can be worth it. Well, I thank you for an incredible afternoon. Absolutely
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And congratulations on your Isabel Stevenson Award. Thank you. Stephen, a real pleasure
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Thanks. Always great to see you. Always great to talk to you
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