On the subject of magic and family, in the 1980s Stephen bought a magic book for his son, Scott, who then developed a small career as an illusionist during his teen years. “And my next show, Wicked, is about the Wicked Witch of the West, so it too will contain illusions.” Schwartz also wrote a song called “Prestidigitation” in the 1970s and included it on his solo CD, The Reluctant Pilgrim. I was a bit disappointed when I saw the details of how the illusions worked, so I asked him to stop explaining his tricks to me.” Returning to his discussion of magic, Schwartz says “I created a show where I could work with Doug Henning- The Magic Show. ![]() Darkly suntanned, he wears white sneakers even when he’s performing. Schwartz still lives near New York City, not far from where he was born, and he keeps an apartment in Manhattan, but he has a distinctly California look. “When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon,” revealed the boyish-looking, 53-year-old Schwartz, “I wrote the opening of Pippin as a magic trick, showing the Player pulling our scenery out of his hand.” His first show, Pippin, opened with the song “Magic To Do” and another of his early hits was all about the profession, The Magic Show, which ran on Broadway from 1973 to 1975. And the song “Fathers and Sons” in Working.Īnd magic has interested him ever since he was a kid. The Biblical families in Children of Eden. There’s also Pocahontas and her father in the film Pocahantas. Consider Pippin and his father Charlemagne in Pippin Geppetto and his puppet-son, Pinocchio, in the TV musical Geppetto Judge Frollo, the controlling surrogate father of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Stephen Schwartz has continually, and pointedly, written about parent-child relationships. Two themes run repeatedly through the songs of Stephen Schwartz. But I’d like to travel back to that middle point and observe how he described his life at age 53, before the big resurgence. He invited me to the Wicked recording session, and I also talked with him at the premiere of his opera, Seance on a Wet Afternoon at Lincoln Center, and at the Paper Mill premiere of his stage musical (with Alan Menken) The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We remained in touch when he achieved the biggest success of any Broadway composer in the early years of the 21st century. (Yes, he wrote other theater pieces in between, like The Baker’s Wife, Rags, Working and Children of Eden, but they were not smash hits.) To be precise, 28 years between engagements! In 1975 his first three shows ended their Broadway runs, and Wicked was not to open until 2003. He just happened to be what actors call “between engagements” on the Great White Way. We, and the others at that luncheon, knew he was an immensely accomplished composer and lyricist. The composer was happy to drive down from Long Island to sit at an upright piano in a small restaurant across the street from that theater, to play and sing some of his tunes. The Ritz Theater was mounting an intimate show in which actors discover a warehouse filled with illusions, and experiment with them. His mega-hit Wicked still lay ahead.Īt this quiet point, Schwartz was content to appear at a luncheon to raise funds for a small theater in the town of Oaklyn in South Jersey. Almost 30 years had passed since he was a wunderkind who had his first three shows running simultaneously on Broadway- Pippin, Godspell and The Magic Show. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.In 2001 Stephen Schwartz’s career was at a lull. In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. ![]() Putin is pushed too far - was a potent reminder of his capacity to strike back at his adversaries with the asymmetric weapons that remain a key source of his power. Putin may be planning to place a nuclear weapon in space - a bomb designed to wipe out the connective tissue of global communications if Mr. Putin will tolerate no dissent as elections approach.Īnd the American discovery, disclosed in recent days, that Mr. Navalny’s suspicious death in a remote Arctic prison made ever clearer that Mr. Russia made its first major gain in Ukraine in nearly a year, taking the ruined city of Avdiivka, at huge human cost to both sides, the bodies littered along the roads a warning, perhaps, of a new course in the two-year-old war. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far - sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment - would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order. As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V.
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