But I have a personal feeling about how their shows affected the structure of the shows that I write.įor Wicked, Winnie Holzman and I were directly and consciously influenced by their shows, particularly The King and I, which is my favorite musical. He replied, “It’s been well-documented how influential Rodgers ad Hammerstein were to the history of American music theatre, and I’m not sure I have anything useful to add in a general sense. Do you have anything you can say about how they altered musical theater history?” I suggested, “One reason why people care about their work is, of course, that they affected musical theatre history.

Over lunch when I asked him to opine about the Rodgers and Hammerstein influence on his profession, he focused on structure. But if it’s wrong, the individual brilliance of the writing is hard-pressed to deliver anything.” In Defying Gravity, I quote him as advising, “Musicals, like films, are essentially about structure, and if you get the structure right, then a multitude of sins can be forgiven. Since the days of Godspell and Pippin, Schwartz’s up-and-down career taught him lessons that he passes along to aspiring writers at ASCAP’s musical theater workshops. I read it when I was a kid as part of understanding musical theatre structure and how shows were put together.” Stephen continued, “There was a book of libretti Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But for learning how musicals worked, he studied shows on his own through books, recordings, and live productions. For performance and composition, he had piano lessons and studied for four years at Juilliard’s preparatory division.

Unlike Stephen Sondheim, whom Oscar Hammerstein II famously mentored, Schwartz was self-taught in terms of how to write musicals. I think it was the third musical that I ever saw. “South Pacific was the first musical I saw of theirs-a revival at City Center.

“As you know, I listened to a lot of their work as a kid,” Schwartz noted. During the interview he thought back to his childhood days on Long Island. Stephen was born in New York City in 1948, a year before South Pacific opened on Broadway. What follows is our discussion, which we both edited later to clarify our points. For this interview I probed whether he felt a sense of debt to the earlier writing team’s work for enhancing his own style. As we lunched on quiche and wild-caught salmon, I raised questions about the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.įrom my years of periodic tea or lunch interviews with the composer-lyricist for my biography of him, Defying Gravity, I already knew how much he appreciated their shows. Stephen was sitting across from me at a French-styled café in suburban Connecticut with my digital recorder pointed his way. A group of theater lovers have been trying to save Oscar Hammerstein II’s Pennsylvania farm from the interests of subdivision developers, I explained to Stephen Schwartz in a January 2019 interview.

Steven schwartz musicals