Cover story
Creator behind ‘Wicked’ and more classics brings ‘Prince of Egypt’ to theater
We attend a rehearsal of the musical “The Prince of Egypt,” which will premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Pictured: Diluckshan Jeyaratnam as Moses. .
For the better part of an hour, the composer/ lyricist Stephen Schwartz barely said a word. Seated behind a long table in a Redwood City rehearsal room, he watched closely as the cast, director and two choreographers worked through the traffic control and stage business for “One of Us,” a second-act number in Schwartz’s new musical, “The Prince of Egypt.” Based on and greatly expanded from the 1998 animated film, for which Schwartz wrote the songs, the show opens Saturday, Oct. 14, in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley world premiere at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
The big ensemble number, in which the Biblical story’s hero, Moses (Diluckshan Jeyaratnam), makes his first comically inflected acquaintance with the Hebrews, was coming together slowly. There was a wall of desert sandstone blocks to negotiate. The actors were having trouble hitting their marks together, which meant slowing down the number’s tempo to work out the movement and spacing. Director Scott Schwartz, the composer and lyricist’s son, called things to a halt midphrase.
“I’m not hearing that line,” he told the actors.
“What we’ve tried to do is look at the story as if it were actually happening with real people as opposed to a legend.” Stephen Schwartz, pictured on facing page
“We’re going to have to physicalize it.” More shuffling about and reshuffling ensued.
Just about the only thing Stephen Schwartz had to say — and that only as an aside to his son — was a murmured, “This will get a big laugh if he (one of the actors) doesn’t step on the line.”
On a rehearsal break, Schwartz, the 69year-old creator of the megahit “Wicked” among many other shows in a long and abundant career, laughed when asked if he enjoyed the kind of meticulous rehearsal process he had just witnessed.
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s more useful for me to come in when something is farther along and I haven’t heard all the reasons for the choices being made, many of them persuasive. That way I can be more objective.”
The debut of a new Schwartz show in the Bay Area inevitably recalls the high-profile tryout of “Wicked” at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre 14 years ago, one of the biggest preBroadway test runs ever here. Full of the promise for wide popularity it was about to fulfill, but overstuffed and slightly unfocused, the show’s first full staging featured a relentlessly bubbly Kristin Chenoweth and a seething, green-skinned Idina Menzel as natural competitors struggling toward friendship. Robert Morse was an amusingly doddering Wizard in this adaptation of the Gregory Maguire novel taking off on L. Frank Baum’s Oz series.
After a month of San Francisco performances, Schwartz later remarked, “It was clear there was work to be done and revisions to be made in the book and the score.” And so he did what he has done many times before and since: He sat down and got to work cutting, reshaping and rewriting.
Schwartz, who burst onto the musical theater scene in his early 20s with music and lyrics for “Godspell” (1971), has spent many busy decades refining his methods in multiple creative roles. He’s written music and lyrics for two enduring Broadway staples (“Pippin” and “Wicked”). His collaborations with the composer Alan Menken on the animated films “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” earned him two Academy Awards. Schwartz has launched crossover hit songs (“Butterflies Are Free” from that eponymous show, “When You Believe” from “The Prince of Egypt”), adapted and directed the Studs Terkel classic “Working,” authored children’s books, and contributed
lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass.”
With “Prince,” which centers on the story of Moses and his Pharaonic brother Ramses ( Jason Gotay), Schwartz and book writer Philip LaZebnik aren’t tapping only a powerful Biblical tale but also the composer/lyricist’s “Wicked.”
“Oh, yes, we say this is ‘Wicked’ with boys,” said Schwartz, whose energy and flap of brown hair project his own kind of youthful aspect. “We’re completely conscious of it and shameless about that.”
Ever since it debuted as DreamWorks’ first animated feature 19 years ago, “The Prince of Egypt” has spurred inquiries about a stage adaptation. When Schwartz finally expressed interest a few years back, a joint production deal was worked out to mount a premiere at TheatreWorks followed by a run at the Fredericia Teater in Denmark. A representative of NBCUniversal, which owns the “Prince” rights, was looking in on the Redwood City rehearsal, but there are currently no plans for a commercial transfer to Broadway or anywhere else beyond Denmark.
Schwartz is relishing the opportunity to “deepen the humanity” of characters and a story that the animated film, primarily aimed at a younger audience, portrayed in necessarily truncated form.
“What we’ve tried to do,” Schwartz said of the new musical, “is look at the story as if it were actually happening with real people as opposed to a legend.”
In the brother-to-brother connection of Moses and Ramses, which turns out to be more complicated than it appears, Schwartz found similarities to the dynamic of the rival young witches Glinda and Elphaba in “Wicked” but important differences as well.
“For one thing these are brothers rather than just friends,” he said. “They’ve grown up together. There is both love and also rivalry, and it’s not an equal relationship to begin with.”
Scott Schwartz concurred in a separate conversation.
“Our first priority is to keep the focus on the story and its psychological complexity,” said the younger Schwartz, 43. To that end, he’s tried to render the big Biblical moments — the parting of the Red Sea, the plagues — in theatrical terms, with acting values and movement rather than big sets and projections emphasized.
In addition to new characters and situations, the stage musical “Prince” features 12 new songs. Though the score’s “When You Believe” from the film is already a certified hit, covered by the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, Stephen Schwartz freely conceded that he has no idea if and where another breakout song might occur.
“I’m very bad at judging that,” said the composer, who thought the love duet “As Long As You’re Mine” would outperform “Defying Gravity” or “Popular” as “Wicked’s” signature number.
Still going strong on Broadway after 14 years, and known to audiences around the world, “Wicked” is a career bookend to Schwartz’s early great success with “Godspell,” which is still frequently revived.
“All you do when you write a show,” he reflected, “is try to tell the story well and create something that you and your collaborators would like to see, and hope that other people will, too. When something transcends that and becomes a phenomenon, it has little to do with you. It’s so much about timing and the zeitgeist.”
Schwartz’s love for musical theater bloomed when his parents took him to see “Shinbone Alley” on Broadway when he was around 8. The show concerns the friendship of a cockroach and an alley cat. The critics, Schwartz drily noted, were skeptical. “Who,” they wondered, “would want to come see a chorus of dancing cats?” The reference to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster “Cats” didn’t need to be spelled out. “It does demonstrate the importance of timing,” said Schwartz,
Far from inducing pressure to live up to anything, “Wicked” has given Schwartz a sense of creative freedom.
“I don’t feel I have to live up to it. I did that, I achieved that, and now everything else is gravy. Now I just do things because I want to.”
Not that he’s taking it easy. Schwartz had just flown in from New York, where he’s working on a revised version of the 1986 American immigrant show “Rags,” for which he wrote the lyrics. Looking perky after an early morning flight, he settled in for the “Prince” rehearsal, rolling his chair closer to the actors at one point to drink in every detail. When the ensemble nailed a lyric about the dubious Hebrew cuisine Moses was about to face — “Though our food is fit for setting off alarms, the portions at least are small” — a quietly satisfied smile lit up the writer’s face.
Schwartz, as he said, was doing what he wanted to do. He was making a new show.