Stephen Schwartz

It's An Art: Reflections On A Life In Song

Interview by Jem Aswad

Very few people achieve their dreams at all, let alone before they turn 25. Stephen Schwartz is one of the few: by the age of 24, he'd had two smash Broadway shows, Godspell and Pippin. In the years since, he's written musicals, scores, lyrics, and songs that have been covered by the likes of Michael Jackson (with and without The Jackson 5), Diana Ross (with and without The Supremes), Vanessa Williams, Bette Midler, Jennifer Warnes, The Fifth Dimension, Andrea Marcovicci, Jane Olivor, Jackie DeShannon, and many others. He's even achieved the formidable task of writing a song called "Prestidigitation" (which is a fancy way of saying "sleight of hand"). With his Oscar-winning work on Disney's Pocahontas as well as The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, the '90s find him at the top of his game.

Stephen Schwartz was born in New York City and raised there, in Long Island, and (briefly) in France. He studied piano and composition at the Juilliard School of Music while still in high school, and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968 with a B.F.A. in Drama. While still in college, he did summer stock at the New London Barn Playhouse in New London, New Hampshire, where he worked as director, musical director, and choreographer for many shows. Upon graduation, he worked as a producer for RCA Records, but shortly thereafter began to work in the Broadway theatre.

His first major credit was the title song for the play Butterflies Are Free; the song was used in the movie version as well. In 1971, he wrote the music and new lyrics for Godspell, for which he won several awards, including two Grammys (for Best Writer and Best Producer). This was followed by the English texts, in collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, for Bernstein's Mass, which opened the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The following year, he wrote the music and lyrics for Pippin, and two years later, for The Magic Show. Next were the music and lyrics for The Baker's Wife, which closed before reaching Broadway after an unsuccessful out-of-town tryout tour -- however, the cast album went on to attain cult status, leading to several subsequent productions, culminating in a London revival directed by Trevor Nunn in 1988.

Schwartz's next Broadway project was a musical version of Studs Terkel's Working, which he adapted and directed, winning the Drama Desk Award for Best Director; he also contributed four songs to the score. Next came a one-act musical for children, The Trip. In 1986, he provided lyrics for Charles Strouse's music for Rags, which, after an unsuccessful initial Broadway run, followed the now familiar route of successful cast album and subsequent productions, including a well-received revival at the American Jewish Theatre in New York. He also wrote the score for Children Of Eden, a book by John Caird, which recently was presented in workshop at New York's Playwright's Horizons.

In film, he has recently collaborated with composer Alan Menken on the scores for the Disney animated features Pocahontas and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. He received two Academy Awards (for Best Song and Best Score From A Musical or Comedy) for his songs for Pocahontas (1995).

He has taken an active interest in discovering and developing new musical talents and, over the past four years, has joined forces with Disney and ASCAP to oversee their Musical Theater Workshop. His recent or current projects include the music and lyrics for the upcoming DreamWorks SKG animated feature Prince Of Egypt; the music and lyrics for the Disney television musical Geppetto (which will appear on The Wonderful World of Disney); a revised version of Working -- featuring new material -- which recently opened at the Signature Theatre in Washington, DC; the first major U.S. production of Children Of Eden (at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey), and -- last but certainly not least -- his first-ever solo album, entitled Reluctant Pilgrim (available from Midder Music, 275 W. 96th St #5R, New York, NY 10025 / 212-665-0699 / MIDDER2000@aol.com). For further info, have a look at Stephen's web site -- www.stephenschwartz.com

So, do you consider yourself a "Reluctant Pilgrim"?

Uh, yes, actually. Less reluctant these days.

In what way?

The phrase comes from the song "Dreamscape," and the chorus goes, T"ime to sail reluctant pilgrim/My fear is all I've got to lose/Life is nothing but a dreamscape/And the dream is mine to choose." Which is basically about overcoming the fear of doing new things, of being vulnerable, of being honest — the usual things we urban folk face in the '90s.

Is this your first pop record?

Yes, everything else has been shows or films. This is really the first time I've written songs — with very few exceptions — not meant for characters in a play or movie.

Did you find it hard not to write for characters or plot?

Well, the technique is pretty much the same, but I couldn't stay as masked, I didn't have characters to hide behind. And that was a little bit scary, but ultimately... I don't know if "liberating" is the term, but it made me proud to be as open as I was.

Why now? Hadn't you ever considered doing a solo album before?

People have told me for years that I should do one, and briefly, in the '70s, Atlantic [Records] had come to me, but I didn't really have the interest. Then a few years ago I became friendly with a songwriter named John Bucchino, who is a wonderful pop/cabaret writer, but also has an obvious gift to write for the theater. I was encouraging him to do that, and he said, "Why don't you ever write songs that are just songs from your own life?" So we sort of made a bargain: he's been writing a show, and I did these songs and they became this album. It was fun: I was doing the album at a time when a lot of committees had to approve the other projects I was doing, so it was really exhilarating to have one corner of my professional life where I could just do what I pleased.

Have you ever wanted to be anything but a songwriter?

No. I've wanted to do other things besides what I'm doing — in a parallel life or something — and occasionally, fitfully, I've decided to chuck writing and show business and go back to school and become a psychotherapist, but ultimately I abandoned that because it's too much school!

Were there any childhood moments when you knew this was what you wanted to do?

Yes, very early. There were two things. I had obviously always been interested in music and liked it from the time I was two or whatever, which is not at all uncommon. But I think the two things that tilted me toward theater and musicals — as opposed to becoming a pop writer, which is what most of my generation did — were, we lived next door to a composer named George Kleinsinger, who wrote Tubby The Tuba and Archy and Mehitabel and had a couple of successes with what I guess were the 1950s equivalent of concept albums. The Archy album was turned into a Broadway show called Shinbone Alley, and I went to see that when I was six, and that was it. The other thing was, prior to that, my Mom took me to a movie at either Radio City or the Roxy, back when they still had stage shows. I have no memory of the movie, but I remember seeing the stage show and thinking that it was so amazing.

Was your family musical?

Not at all. We don't know where it comes from. My mom's parents divorced when she was very young, and she didn't know her father very well, but she seems to remember rumors of musicality on that side of the family. But it's nowhere else to be found. [Musical talent is] genetic, because musical desire and ability shows up so young, long before it could be instilled. It's an instinct, but it often skips generations — my mom sang a little but she wasn't particularly musical, and my dad is tone deaf! But they were extremely supportive — I asked for a piano right after I saw Shinbone Alley, and they got me one. And I never had the experience of "You have to get a real job."

But your talent was obvious early on, wasn't it?

Yes, but my parents' generation was more apt to say, "It's too tough to make a living that way, you have to study business or become a doctor" or whatever.

What was college like in the '60s?

Carnegie Mellon was a big art school. I was a drama major, but there were also graphic arts — Andy Warhol went there, David Byrd was there when I was — architecture and music departments, and the artsy types all hung out together. A lot of people went on to big theater and TV careers: the whole Hill Street Blues crowd — Bruce Weitz, Barbara Bosson was actually one of my roommates, Charlie Haid was a good friend, Michael Tucker — the L.A. Law people, the Steven Bochco group, the whole Godspell group, a lot of people.

In terms of liberation, and "doing your own thing," it was the '60s squared — it was very extreme in that way, and I found it very helpful. I'm relieved to say that I missed the drug thing by a year — the class after me started that. I started in '64 and graduated in '68. Drugs certainly destroyed a lot of people I knew.

What kind of music did you listen to?

My tastes changed very radically in 1964. Up until that time, I really had no interest in pop music — it was either classical or show music, and folk music. In '64, my roommate had a Supremes record, and the Motown sound changed my life and my writing. I got very interested in that music, and then the Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, the Mamas and Papas, the Jefferson Airplane, Judy Collins, James Taylor. It's still what I listen to, or people like that: Ani DiFranco and Mary Chapin Carpenter and Tricia Yearwood.

How did it change your writing?

I think it was still theatrical in its structure, in that the songs tended to drive toward an ending and be constructed to get a hand at the end, and they weren't songs that identified themselves within the first chorus and then repeated — obviously I did a couple of those in Godspell and Pippin, but basically they were structured as theater songs. But the sound of the music, the chord structure, and the rhythm became much more tilted toward pop. Lyric content and structure are the main differences between pop and theater, from my observation anyway.

Did you go straight to RCA after college?

Virtually. I came into New York with the show Pippin, which had been produced by a club at school, and I managed to procure an agent, and she took me around to play for everybody. I knew nothing about the studio — I had done a couple of demos of pop songs I'd written, but I never even went into the control room. When my agent took me to RCA, they said, "We'd like you to work in our A&R department," and I said "But I don't know what I'm doing!" They said, "You'll learn," and I did. I was there for a couple of years. I was sort of their expert on shows and helped them decide which cast albums they might want, then I would find groups for them and try to get them to sign them, most of which they didn't — I tried to get them to sign Harry Chapin and they didn't. But it was great — I was 21 years old and making what seemed to me an enormous salary, and learning about the studio, and synthesizers were just coming out, so to me it was like being paid for going to school. The first year was just exhilarating, and though after awhile it was frustrating, they were really nice to me; it was a good apprenticeship.

When did you write your first musical?

In high school I wrote a show that I tried to get them to put on, and they were actually quite willing to do it, but it was so much work that I realized I couldn't do that and go to Juilliard and somehow get into college at the same time. At Carnegie I did one show a year. Pippin was the third one I did; it was called Pippin Pippin and was a totally different show — at first, it was like a musical Lion In Winter, all about court intrigue and everyone singing really bitchy, sarcastic songs to each other. But over six or seven years, it gradually transformed itself into this thinly disguised autobiographical tale and became about something else. Some of the plot was the same as the final version of Pippin, but the songs were totally different — not a note or lyric is the same. Godspell came up right after I left RCA.

What form was Godspell in when you first saw it?

I was asked to see it at Cafe La Mama. The producers had heard the score for Pippin about a year earlier through my agent; they weren't interested in the show, but apparently they remembered me. I didn't figure this out at the time, but in retrospect I have to assume that they had worked their way through absolutely every other composer they could think of and got turned down, and finally said, "Mm, er, remember that kid?" So they called me and said, "Would you look at this show? We want to move it Off-Broadway, but we think it needs a score." At that time, the show had some songs that had been interpolated: there were existing songs by pop writers, and the cast had set some of the hymns to music --" By My Side" was in the show when I first saw it. But the producers basically wanted a new score, and the reason the credits say "new lyrics" is because many of the lyrics are from the Episcopal Hymnal — I felt I shouldn't be taking credit for those! I think there are 13 songs in it, five of which I wrote lyrics for; the rest are basically settings, like "Day By Day," "All Good Gifts," "Bless The Lord," "Save The People," "We Beseech Thee," "Turn Back O Man" — all of those are hymns, and then we kept "By My Side" from the La Mama production.

Did you know that the show was going to be special when you were working on it?

It happened too fast. I saw the show — I remember this because it was the day after my birthday — on March 7th, and the new show was starting rehearsals on April 11th, so I had just five weeks to write it. I do remember that after an early preview, one of the producers took me out to dinner and said, "Y'know, we're gonna be just fine, I can already tell. But if you guys really work and really pull this thing together, you won't believe what's gonna happen." But that was the only indication I had.

And how old were you?

23.

Was it an immediate success?

We didn't get The New York Times.

Really?

I've never gotten a good review in The New York Times, except for Pocahontas, by which point I'd given up reading reviews anyway. But we got good reviews everywhere else, so it took about three weeks before it started to sell out. It became a phenomenon pretty quickly.

And you followed it with Pippin?

That was my first show, but it didn't open until a year afterward. I had done one other Broadway thing: a song for a show called Butterflies Are Free, and that was successful, but the song was just an adjunct to the show. Then I did the Bernstein Mass.

Woah! One thing at a time! That's a lot in just a couple of years — after Godspell, did you become a kind of media darling?

Um... probably. It's hard to know that from the inside, particularly if you're so young you have no way of knowing what's going on. I had nothing to compare it to. I was certainly doing all these interviews and all that, but I didn't have any basis of comparison. It was very difficult for me. I found the success... well, the first year was fun, but after a year I found it very difficult. Partly because I couldn't understand why everybody wouldn't do what I said! (laughs) I have a lot of sympathy for people like John McEnroe — people who just act up — because I know how [fame] plays with your head, how distorted your perspective and point of view become if you're that young and everyone's carrying on about you. At the same time, I think there was an enormous amount of hostility toward me in the theater community, which remains to this day — I still think I have not been forgiven by the New York theater community for being successful that early, perhaps for things they didn't think merited it... I don't know. What was interesting was going out to Hollywood and, to my surprise, being instantly welcomed and feeling a part of things right from the start, but that may have been because I was older. I don't know. My career in the theater basically lasted seven years. I stopped in '78 and briefly came back to do Rags, and that was not a very good experience, and I never worked in the theater in New York again.

Why the hostility?

I don't know. I didn't get along well with Bob Fosse when we were doing Pippin, and he was a darling in the theater community and remains so. It was probably because I was young, and probably going through an ego trip, and also because he was extremely difficult to get along with. So I think it was both of our faults, but there was no question of where the sympathy of the community lay. I'm not saying that it was entirely unfair, because I was probably fairly difficult, but a lot of people are difficult — for longer, and when they're older — who aren't driven from the theater, which I feel I was. But I don't think I'm difficult anymore: I learned how to collaborate better, and know where to pick the battles, and where to just wait for things to fix themselves. But I think it's been more recently that I've learned that.

So how did you end up working with Leonard Bernstein?

Very simply. He had a commission to do a piece for the opening of the Kennedy Center in September of 1971, and it was May, and he didn't have anything! He was getting increasingly desperate, and his sister, who was my agent, said "You should see this kid's show," so he came down and liked it. Later, we met and he told me what he was trying to do, and played some fragments. I sort of devised a structure, and he liked it, and so on. It's not the work I'm proudest of, frankly. I don't think I was up to it at the time: it was the first time I'd written lyrics to someone else's music, I had no technique, I didn't really know how to do it, and I think I would do a much better job now. I learned a lot from the mistakes I made, and I made a lot of mistakes in it. But there's much in the piece that I'm very proud of, and I think the structure is pretty successful. In any event, it got done!

As far as working with him, he was such a conflicted and paradoxical personality. I liked him enormously. I thought he was extremely generous in terms of his willingness to make people feel comfortable with him when he was so much more famous, more powerful, more talented than them. And yet he did not use that in any way, where many people I've worked with since would be quick to use any advantage they can eke out, and here was someone who could easily have done that, and did not. But he was very tormented, particularly at this time in his life. I think he felt trapped by his own reputation. He felt that he was always being judged and judged harshly, and I think it frightened him on some level. I couldn't have been as articulate about it then, but looking back on it now, I think he was somewhat paralyzed creatively, because he felt that he would be attacked no matter what he did. I think he was trying to find a way back to the sort of free and easy and instinctive way he had written when he was younger and not so scrutinized by himself and by others. I remember one day when I was waiting for him to start working, and I was working on a song I was writing for Pippin. He came in and listened for a bit and said, "I remember when I used to do that: just sit down at the piano and knock out a tune. Now it's so hard for me to put two notes together: I think, 'Is that worthy of Leonard Bernstein?'" And I never forgot that, it was such a great lesson when I was 23, to hear that and think, "No matter what, don't let that happen to you."

How can you avoid it?

First of all, by not reading anything that's written about you. I mean that. Reviews are extremely destructive to artists, good reviews as well as bad. Any kind of judgment of your work that makes you look at what you do through someone else's eyes is extremely destructive. So I don't read them, especially the good ones! And I think you have to be willing to fail, and just say, "I've been knocked down before, I'll get up again."

You must be a good judge of your own work.

You have a goal about what you're trying to achieve, and you can say, "I really got there," or "This was as good as I was going to do at the time," or "I didn't really solve it," so you have your own perspective and opinions. They don't always — or even don't often — coincide with the world's opinions, and I think it can be very bewildering if you place too much credence in what other people are saying. If you're having success, you can hunger for it too much; if you're having failure, you can be too devastated by it, and feel too worthless, and so on. Maybe this is just me, but I think careers are such a matter of huge peaks and valleys, and as an artist or writer or craftsman or whatever you want to call it, I think it's very important to have this middle, straight-ahead path that you're on; you try to stay in that moderate zone of emotion, not get too high when things go well, not become too devastated when things go badly, just keep plowing ahead. And that's very easy to say, and very hard to do.

The Baker's Wife and Rags didn't do well at first, but did very well later. Do you think they were ahead of their time?

No. I think they were both works that had problems in their structure. They both have wonderful things about them, and things which don't work. Both are celebrated for their scores; I think Rags is Charles Strouse's finest score. But that's not all that a musical needs to function. A more telling case is a show like Working, which was unsuccessful on Broadway but almost immediately afterward became a huge hit everywhere else. That can happen, and that's just a matter of being in the wrong town at the wrong time... although there are even reasons for that, because the show was improved slightly between Broadway and its big success everywhere else. With some shows, I think you can look at what didn't work and say, "Oh, I can fix that," and you can do it fairly easily, without tearing your hair out. That was true of Working, and it was also true of my most recent show, Children Of Eden: they didn't really work in their initial outings, and with a little bit of tinkering, boom, it's fixed. Rags and The Baker's Wife were more problematic. But I've been very lucky in that all the shows of mine that have failed, have always gone on to rise later. That's been extremely lucky and quite unusual.

What were you doing during the late '70s and early '80s?

Basically I just burned out and stopped working. I hid out — I don't know any other way to put it. I played a lot of tennis, I practiced the piano, took some classes in psychology.

Was it a regenerative time? You'd been working pretty hard.

Yes, I think that's part of it, and I think it was part of a long process that had begun when I was catapulted into fame and prominence before I was ready emotionally at all. You know, I was just this kid who came into New York with the same illusions about what it would be like to work on Broadway as any kid who thinks it's all going to be this glamourous, collegial, wonderful atmosphere, and the community of the theater and all that total bull**** that they say on the Tony Awards. Ultimately, it was so disillusioning to me, and so unpleasant and painful, that I just gave up. It wasn't even conscious, I just completely burned out. It was like Bjorn Borg — he just said "I can't do this anymore" and quit at 26. I quit everything.

What made you start again?

In '81, I was approached about doing Working as a TV show. That show had been a real love of mine, and I had been so depressed when it failed on Broadway. When it later became successful, I felt better, then when they wanted to do the TV show, I discovered that it could be fun to work again. Then I started looking around for things to do — I did a childrens' show, some things like that. Then I started to work on Rags, and even though it was unsuccessful and somewhat difficult, I had a whole different attitude: it didn't destroy me the way both hits and flops had destroyed me before. I was more realistic about my expectations; I didn't go in with all this dewy-eyed romanticism. Then Disney called.

What did they originally call you about?

Pocahontas. I had been working in England for awhile and I had just gotten back. Howard Ashman had died, and they were looking for someone to work with Alan [Menken], whom I knew a little. I had a meeting with some guys out there, and they asked me if I would consider doing just lyrics, which I was delighted to do just to get my foot in the door. Then I had a wonderful time.

How do you like working with Alan?

Very much. It's a very good collaborative marriage. We like each other very much personally, we have somewhat similar points of view, but different enough so that we're both bringing different things to the table. It's really been a very easy and mutually supportive collaboration. Obviously I have opinions about the music, and he about the lyrics, but we pretty much stay out of each others' bailiwicks. Now we're starting work on adapting The Hunchback Of Notre Dame for the stage.

Why not another Disney film?

Animated films are going a slightly different way at Disney now: Phil Collins is writing one, Sting is writing one. The Lion King was such a huge financial success that I think they're going more toward pop and less toward theater writers. Plus, how many animated features can one do? Alan would have done six or seven, the DreamWorks one I'm doing now is my third — we're all interested in doing other things.

How long have you been doing workshops with ASCAP?

I've been running them for four or five years. Occasionally I had been on panels when Charles Strouse ran it, and I did a few other panels around town. I didn't really like doing them because I thought some of the panelists were much too mean to the writers. When [ASCAP Director of Musical Theatre] Michael [Kerker] asked me, I was very reluctant, but Michael... well, it's just astonishing what he's accomplished, both in regard to this program and his whole support of cabaret in New York. I think he's singlehandedly created a cabaret scene in New York. He's been so, so supportive. He's organized concerts, the series at Town Hall, and just generally put people together. He gave it a kind of credibility, just by increasing its visibility constantly. It might have happened anyway, and maybe I'm giving him slightly too much credit, but I think he deserves a lot. He certainly wouldn't claim this credit, and I don't think he'd really believe it, but he's a pretty amazing guy.

What do the workshops do for you?

I learn an enormous amount from listening to what the other panelists say, and from organizing my own thinking about the work I hear. I think it keeps me tough on myself, because you can't really be lazy about your own work if you're criticizing people for being lazy with theirs. And I've always liked doing this — teaching isn't really the term, because I don't think that's what I do. But I'm really interested in process, and other peoples' processes — how songs are written, how they develop, it's just endlessly fascinating.

What is your process? Do you wake up in the middle of the night with a melody in your head?

It starts with an assignment, either from a film company or, more often, one that I give to myself. It usually contains a problem to be solved, a story to be told, and an idea. And then it can emerge in any number of ways — those things can suggest music, a title, a couple of lines, a feel, a mood, and then it develops differently for any given song.

Where do the melodies come from?

Who knows? It has to do with the story you're telling in the song, the emotion of the song, or a title will suggest itself and a certain melody comes with it and affects everything else. It's such an instinctive, unconscious process, and part of writing is to find a way to get out of your own way and just let it come through you. Now and then you have to be alert and edit and organize and write things down, but the more unconscious I think it can be, and the more it can flow out of that subterranean place that it taps into, the better the work is, I think.

Do you get blocked?

Occasionally, but not very recently. The last time was few years back and I called my friend John Bucchino, and I explained what was going on, and he said, "Oh, it's because you're being the editor, and you're doing it too early. Just write, and don't care about how stupid or sloppy it is, then go back and edit." And that was such good advice, and it worked, and I still use it.

What would you like to do that you haven't already done?

I would like to do a live action musical for film. That's my big goal right now.

Have many been done?

Not recently. There was Newsies, that Alan did, which didn't work. I guess you'd have to go back to things like Gigi, and I guess you can count things like Flashdance and Fame and Footloose, to a certain extent. And the other thing is a musical for television, which I'm writing now. I'm sure there'll be others. I like to do things that I haven't done before.


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