Shedding light on humanity

WFiddler on the Roof? Did Tevye and his family make it in America? We may soon find out. Rags, the musical, opens in January at The Park Theatre in north London. It’s not directly about Tevye’s family. But let lyricist Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Godspell…) explain.

“The original version of Rags was written in the 1980s,” he says. “It’s about Jewish immigrants coming to America at the turn of the 20th century and was originally envisaged as a kind of follow-up to Fiddler on the Roof. Joseph Stein, who wrote the book of Fiddler, had been asked many times what happened to families such as Tevye’s when they came to America. Rags is the story of similar people from around that time. He enlisted myself as lyricist and Charles Strouse [Annie] as composer — and to be honest we struggled with the show and figuring out what story to tell and it was not successful on its original Broadway run.

“A couple of years ago, because of the attention on issue of immigration, the writers of Rags were approached to reconsider. In the meantime, Stein had passed away. A new writer had to be brought on board — David Thompson [ Scottsboro Boys]. With David, Charles and I went back to square one and extensively reconceived the show… and it seems to finally work for us. This production at Park Theatre leads on from the recent very well-received production [at the Hope Mill Theatre] in Manchester. Park Theatre is a fantastic space. It’s very intimate, the shape of it is terrific; I think it will work brilliantly.”

And Rags has come of age. “It feels to me, again speaking personally, that the show feels more relevant and more contemporary than when it was first produced in the 1980s, when it was a nostalgic look back but didn’t have the urgency of the national and international conversation about immigration,” says Schwartz. “That’s not to say that the show is polemic — it’s a human story, about characters that we find touching.” But there is no denying the political context.

Schwartz himself is a third-generation immigrant. “The truth is I didn’t know much about my heritage when I undertook this show. I am Jewish on both sides. My father’s family came to America in the late 1860s and my grandfather was born in America. My mother’s family came over more or less at the time Rags takes place, but even her [immediate] family were born in America. But virtually all Americans are the descendants of immigrants. Sometimes they seem to forget that.”

Rags tells the story of Russian immigrant Rebecca who, with her son David, travels to America in search of a better life. Rebecca must decide what matters more to her — staying true to her roots or adopting a new cultural identity.

“I’m always interested in the stories of individuals who are ‘outsiders’, for want of a better term, who feel themselves outside mainstream culture and struggle with trying to fit in,” says Schwartz. “What is the cost to them personally and morally and at what cost does one make compromises to win acceptance? In The Prince of Egypt [his next project in the UK, opening in the West End in February], it’s the story of someone (Moses) who learns that everything he started out with has been a lie — his relationship to his family and his world. He has to find out who he is and how he fits in.”

Schwartz wrote the music and the lyrics for the 1988 DreamWorks Animation film of The Prince of Egypt. Requests then poured in for a stage production and DreamWorks decided they were ready to put together a production using the writers who had worked on the film — Schwartz as songwriter and Philip LaZebnik (Mulan, Pocahontas) as screenwriter.

Schwartz pays tribute to the “astonishingly talented and extremely diverse cast” of the stage production and fulsomely praises the producers who “gave us something really unheard of — a month or so ago we had a two-week workshop with the entire cast and got to experiment with parts of the show… This kind of artistic freedom and opportunity, I’ve never really experienced in commercial theatre.”

The Prince of Egypt is “the story of two young men, two brothers, who love each other and then are forced by circumstance and the burden of their own responsibilities to be in conflict with one another. Moses, who becomes leader of Hebrew tribes trying to gain freedom and his brother Ramses, who becomes Pharaoh of Egypt — it’s a love story, in the sense that Wicked is a love story except that that is about two women — about the relationship between two young men. No spoilers — but essentially that’s the tack the movie takes to some extent, but in the stage adaptation we’ve gone further.”

The familial warmth may be autobiographical but the rift is not, he emphasises. He is close to his sister and parents “and I have a good relationship with them, but all families have conflict and I’ve always been interested in the dynamic of family. I’ve written a lot about parents and children, fathers and sons and The Prince of Egypt is no

felt nostalgic in the ’80s. Now it feels more relevant’