Stephen Schwartz writes musicals on a biblical scale. The three-time Oscar-winning composer made his name in New York in the 1970s with Godspell, a show based on the parables of the Gospel of Matthew which ends with the crucifixion of Jesus. Then there was Pippin, a coming-of-age tale about the son of a Holy Roman Emperor who embarks on a far-reaching quest across his kingdom, and The Prince of Egypt, which follows Moses as he leads the Hebrews to the promised land.
All of these, though, have paled in comparison with the spell Schwartz put on Broadway and the West End with Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, which made a star of Idina Menzel (Frozen).
Schwartz’s 2003 musical is a Broadway behemoth, second only to The Lion King in box-office revenue. The first of a two-part film adaptation starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (later the Wicked Witch) and Ariana Grande as Glinda (who becomes the Good Witch) is set to arrive in cinemas in November — more than a decade after it was announced.
So, king of the mega-musicals? “I keep thinking that every show that I do is a little show,” he protests. “And then they kind of get out of control! I’m not deliberately trying to write giant shows.”
But Schwartz has had his flops as well as his hits. We’re meeting in a café in east London to talk about one of his passion projects with a traumatic history — The Baker’s Wife, revived this month at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the culmination of 50 years of development.
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In 1974, at the age of 26, Schwartz had three musicals running simultaneously in New York. Audiences were awaiting the wunderkind’s latest hit and Schwartz, with his writing partner Joseph Stein, decided to adapt La Femme du Boulanger, a 1938 slice-of-life comedy by Marcel Pagnol set in rural Provence. “Joe and I didn’t start by saying, ‘What can we do that will be a surefire hit?’ This was a story that attracted us that we wanted to tell — it turned out to be more difficult to solve than we anticipated.”
As soon as tryouts began in Boston the show was plagued with problems. Even Patti LuPone, a 27-year-old star on the rise, couldn’t save it. Schwartz, 76, admits that the experience was “torturous”. He couldn’t nail the story, new directors were being brought in on a regular basis, the production’s leading man didn’t want to be there and the show’s producer was removing key songs. “There are jokes that what you wish on your worst enemy is to have a musical in trouble on the road. It was that kind of experience!”
The reviews were not kind. The Los Angeles Times said it was “not an embarrassment”, while the Boston Globe wrote that the show didn’t “have a prayer”. “Our struggles to fix it really didn’t have to do with what the reviews were saying,” he says. “I don’t think I ever read the reviews because we were struggling just to try and get our show. We were a mess, no matter what the critics said.”
Plans for a Broadway run never materialised, and The Baker’s Wife seemed destined to fade into obscurity. A few years later, however, it found a guardian angel in the form of Trevor Nunn, the director of Les Misérables.
“Trevor had become familiar with the music because people were singing songs from The Baker’s Wife in auditions,” Schwartz says. “Then he staged a production in London in the 1980s and we were able to get the show much closer to being right. We didn’t completely solve it, but I always credit Trevor with showing us what the show should be.” While reviews this time were strong, audiences were small, and the musical closed after 56 performances.
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More than 30 years of tinkering later, Schwartz is hopeful the show’s first significant UK revival has learnt from its earlier stumbles. “It feels as if we now have a musical, and the hope is that this production will be able to make the most of a show that’s finally gotten itself together.”
Those with passing knowledge of Pagnol’s work — The Marseille Trilogy, The Water of the Hills (which later became Jean de Florette) — will recognise some familiar themes in Schwartz’s adaptation of La Femme du Boulanger. As a novelist, playwright and film-maker, Pagnol was known for acutely observing the minutiae of everyday life in his native Provence. The Baker’s Wife is no different, an intimate snapshot of a close-knit village where small misunderstandings can escalate into mighty feuds.
In the opening scene of the musical, the villagers bicker over overhanging branches and slow service in the local café. So imagine the scandal when a handsome outsider arrives and sweeps the baker’s wife off her feet …
“It’s like a petri dish,” Schwartz says. “In the case of both the Provençal and provincial community in which the story is set, these people never leave. Part of it is geographical, so they’re constantly dealing with one another, which becomes a microcosm for bigger relationship issues that translate well to the stage.”
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The show’s songs may not be instant earworms but Meadowlark, sung by the heroine as she decides whether to pursue a life with the man she has run off with or return to her dejected husband, has become a staple concert number for Broadway divas.
“The song is about a romantic fairy tale and how she has always wanted to find that in her adult life,” he says. “I think a lot of us have romantic illusions about love and relationships and the stories we’re told when we’re little. Then we have to come to terms with real life.”
Giving a voice to the female characters was a much-needed tweak to Pagnol’s original film. “Doing it in contemporary terms, we felt it was important to have the characters be more three-dimensional,” he adds.
That was the same thinking that led the author Gregory Maguire to write the novel Wicked in 1995, which later provided Schwartz with the material for his smash-hit musical of the same name. Having been a children’s author, Maguire realised that many of the villains in children’s books were one-dimensional “stock villains”, which prompted him to write a sympathetic revisionist backstory for the Wicked Witch of the West. Schwartz bolstered that message and then some with anthems such as Defying Gravity — Elphaba’s showstopping song that marks her decision to fight the Wizard and use her magic powers to the full.
Schwartz’s most giant show has turned into a very giant movie. He has been involved in the adaptation of Wicked since it was announced in December 2012 — writing new music and rejigging orchestrations.
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Four years of radio silence followed that news, and the original release date of 2016 came and went. Its second window in late 2019 was handed to the ill-fated film adaptation of the musical Cats, before a new release date of December 2021 was confirmed. As if on cue, coronavirus began sweeping across the world, prompting yet another delay and a change of director.
Finally, in the summer of 2022, filming began in earnest, but then came the announcement that Wicked would no longer be one film, but two, so as to avoid “compromising the story”. Part one will end as the first act of the stage musical does: with Defying Gravity. Universal Pictures recently announced that its release date has been brought forward to November 22 — the same day that Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II hits the big screen — to avoid a clash with Moana 2.
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Elphaba has been played by nearly a hundred actresses since 2003, but Schwartz is convinced that Erivo will prove to be one of the character’s greatest interpreters. “When I’m in the studio working on the movie, we’ll freeze a scene and it’s like it’s still in motion because Cynthia brings so much to it,” he says. “She is extraordinary, and so is Ariana. I see them over and over as I’m working on the film, and their performances, in my opinion, are unassailable.”
Yet theWicked films come at a tricky time for cinematic musicals. The trailers for Mean Girls, Wonka and The Colour Purple all went to varying lengths to disguise the fact that they were packed with songs, perhaps fearful of diminishing mass audience appeal. Other shows such as Dear Evan Hansen struggled stylistically to make the leap from stage to screen.
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“When you are live in the theatre and there’s one extraordinary performer, and all they are doing is standing on stage singing for three and a half minutes, that doesn’t translate to film,” Schwartz says. “You have to find a way of putting motion into it.”
Another problem is the presence of songs in the first place. “When you come to the theatre, you’re already suspending your disbelief. It’s very clear you’re in an artificial environment. One of my hopes for Wicked is that it will be easier to overcome the strangeness of people singing their thoughts because you’re in such an artificial world anyway. We know from the 1939 movie that people sing in the Land of Oz.”
The Baker’s Wife is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1 to September 14, menierchocolatefactory.com
