Stephen Schwartz's 'Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook' opens at Goodspeed

October 29, 2013 12:00 am • Last Updated: October 28, 2013 5:42 pm

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Stephen Schwartz, composer of the musicals "Godspell" and "Wicked."

"Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook" does something no other show has done before, at least as far as legendary composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz knows.

The musical pulls tunes from Schwartz's impressive canon - think "Wicked," "Pippin" and "Godspell" - and fits them into a fresh storyline. The unique twist is, Schwartz then went on to rewrite about half the lyrics for those songs.

"Snapshots" dates back a number of years, when writer David Stern and director Michael Scheman approached Schwartz about doing a revue of his material. Schwartz agreed, but the idea morphed from a revue to a show with a storyline - about a long-wed couple who have drifted apart and begin reminiscing about their past as they look through a box of old photos.

Schwartz realized the old lyrics didn't exactly fit the new scenario and decided to rework them.

When Goodspeed asked about developing "Snapshots" at its Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, Schwartz was all for it. He had what he describes as "a very happy experience" when he worked on his musical "The Baker's Wife" at the Norma Terris in 2002. He recalls Goodspeed as being "just very conducive to creative work, the way they set things up at their space in Chester."

Schwartz is working on other projects, too. After his time at Goodspeed, he's heading out to Los Angeles to work with "Slumdog Millionaire" composer A.R. Rahman on a Bollywood animated feature for Dreamworks.

He also has been involved in creating the music for "Houdini," which could end up on Broadway with Hugh Jackman. The project has reached a point where the team should know soon if the show's going to happen or not, Schwartz says.

Schwartz spoke by phone last week about "Snapshots" and more.

How Schwartz decided to rewrite some lyrics to his existing songs for "Snapshots":

"Somewhere along the line, it became less of a revue and more of a story in that it had characters and they had dialogue, et cetera. As it transformed from a pure revue into this hybrid, the songs themselves, which were all taken from other shows started to make less specific sense lyrically, which I find is often the problem when people try to do revues of a composer's work and they add a story. If they don't adjust the songs, the songs start to not make as much sense and sort of feel shoehorned in.

"As I saw a couple of these incarnations and actually thought they were good - the show was developing well - but the songs weren't serving the show as well any more. I foolishly suggested that perhaps I should revise some of the lyrics - more as one would do if one were writing a book musical from scratch."

An example of how it worked:

"Some of the fun is in not just changing the lyrics but in combining songs, so one of the more recent appearances in the show is a combination of the song 'Popular' from 'Wicked' and the song 'No Time At All' from 'Pippin.' These are both pretty well-known songs, first of all, and, second, they both happen to be in their original incarnations playing on Broadway right now.

"But in the show 'Snapshots,' I think it's like the second or third song in the show, and it has to do with the two main characters meeting for the first time when they're kids. The girl is a kind of tomboy, and the boy is sort of shy and in a new neighborhood, where he's moved with his father because he's just lost his mom. She's helping him to come out of himself and join the other kids in the neighborhood.

"If you think about the situation, you can understand the applicability of a song like 'Popular,' which is essentially a makeover song, and 'No Time At All,' which encourages a character to jump into life again. Obviously, the situations in 'Wicked' and 'Pippin' are completely different, but the basic idea of the songs remain the same. I revised a lot of those lyrics to suit the situation, and that was a lot of fun."

Reworking lyrics for "Snapshots" was, in a way, not all that dissimilar from what Schwartz usually does:

"As someone who's been a theater writer essentially all my life, I am so used to rewriting because that's how musical theater gets done. Somebody famously said, 'Musicals aren't so much written as rewritten.' I find that to be very true. I like the process of rewriting. I never actually feel anything is done. That's another famous quote - 'Musicals are never finished; they're merely abandoned.' There's always something more you can do. In this case, I wasn't trying to fix songs that had not worked within their original context but to make them more workable for a new context."

The notion of new lyrics to familiar songs might not seem so foreign to modern audiences:

"Appropos of 'Popular,' because the song was just on 'Dancing with the Stars' the other night, there is this new version out, which is sort of a riff on 'Popular' that British recording artist Mika has done. It's called 'Popular Song,' and he uses some of the lines from 'Popular,' but he also has written some of his own material. I just love it.

"I just feel like these days, because there are so many pop songs where they include elements of others songs and sample things, maybe people are more used to that and so it will seem less weird and less a desecration (he laughs) that it might have some years ago."

When Schwartz heard from a friend about Gregory Maguire's then-new novel "Wicked," he immediately tried to secure the rights because he realized the incredible potential behind the book's central idea:

"It seemed instantly that this was a great character, the idea of making the Wicked Witch of the West the central character of something and coming up with their story of how she came to be the Wicked Witch of the West, because it's a character we all know incredibly well but actually know nothing about. She's sort of beloved and feared at the same time. So she just seemed like a great character to me. Of course, Oz itself, as we know from having seen the movie, is a very musical place. So that was very intriguing to me. ...

"I am particularly attracted to - and in fact spent most of my career doing - stories which take something that is already familiar to an audience - I mean, appropos of 'Snapshots' - and spin it and look at it from a different perspective."