Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Opened June 21, 2008 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts

The cast of TheatreWorks’ Snapshots creates scenes from the life of a married couple set to recycled Stephen Schwartz songs. Photos by David Allen

Stephen Schwartz songbook turns into Snapshots revue
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The idea of a musical revue was green before we even knew what green meant. Revues reuse and recycle, just as all good citizens should do.

We’ve had standard-issue revues along the lines of A Grand Night for Singing (Rodgers and Hammerstein), Jerry’s Girls (Jerry Herman), Cole! (Cole Porter),
Side by Side by Sondheim (Stephen Sondheim) in which shiny, happy people (usually too shiny and too happy for my taste) tap their troubles away with seemingly endless medleys clever twists on songs by great composers that we know and love.

Then there’s the jukebox musical (hello, Mamma Mia!), which recycles old songs (usually pop songs not written expressly for the theater) and shoehorns them into some semblance of a story, however awkward.

And then there’s Snapshots, the long-gestating revue of songs by Stephen Schwartz, the composer of Godspell, Pippin and Wicked to name a few of his better-known shows. This is a revue with jukebox aspirations, which is to say, songs from Schwartz’s shows from the last 30 years are forced into the service of an all-new story.

Conceived by Michael Scheman and David Stern, the show has been re-worked and refined right up through its most recent incarnation from Mountain View’s TheatreWorks. Schwartz and Stern (who gets final credit for the book) have been involved in this latest production, and the results are surprisingly good. IN theory, a cobbled together show like this shouldn’t work – it sounds unappealing.

But under director Robert Kelley’s care, there’s a real show here. Not everything works as Schwartz’s re-configured songs attempt to tell the story of how the marriage of Sue (Beth DeVries) and Dan (Ray Wills) has come to the breaking point, but some of the songs work beautifully, and some genuine feeling comes bubbling up.

Spun out in the attic (cluttered, useful set by Joe Ragey) of Sue and Dan’s Connecticut home, the story of the marriage is triggered by snapshots dating back to childhood when Dan, just after losing his mother, moves to the neighborhood and meets Sue, the woman who will be the love of his life.

In childhood the couple is played by Brian Crum and Courtney Stokes, and in the college to middle years by Michael Marcotte and Molly Bell. Everyone helps out by playing various other characters – lovers, friends, children (Crum even dons cheerleader drag) — to fill out the story.

One goal of any revue is to give audiences a concentrated sense of a composer’s life work. We should leave with a sense of who Stephen Schwartz is and what his musical palette has to offer. The overarching impression of Schwartz that comes through here is one of someone straddling two worlds: the pop-infused Broadway of the ’70s and ’80s (which can’t help sounding a little dated) and a more timeless musical theater sound.

Songs from Pippin and The Magic Show, for instance, even in new arrangements by Steve Orich (and under the musical direction of William Liberatore and his quartet), are strongly anchored in a hippie-ish pop, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just very specific, while songs like “Popular” (from Wicked) and “In Whatever Time We Have” (from Children of Eden) still have Schwartz’s strong pop sensibility but connect to a bigger musical theater sound that helps them work better in this new context.

The best re-worked song is “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife. Usually performed as a diva’s showstopper, the song in the context of Snapshots is performed by the three women in gorgeous harmony who are approaching the song from different places in their lives. It works so well, in fact, you wish the rest of the show could match its intensity.

Though there’s some emotional connection to the beleaguered married couple at the center of the story, our attachment to the individuals is lopsided. The woman, Sue, is far more interesting, and it’s hard to see what she ever saw in Dan and why she pined for him for so many years. The women get all the interesting songs, and as a result, the character of Dan doesn’t amount to much. In fact, one key moment, when Dan finally stops seeing Sue as a pal and recognizes his love for her simply happens – no defining moment, no song, nothing.

In the end, you have to wonder if all the futzing and fussing with old songs is really worth it in the telling of a new story. Wouldn’t a new Stephen Schwartz musical be more exciting than something recycled? Snapshots is perfectly enjoyable, well performed and staged, but it can’t help leave its audience wondering what lyrically and musically interesting things Schwartz still has to offer.

Snapshots continues through July 13 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

To keep up with Stephen Schwartz visit his Web site: www.stephenschwartz.com

In terms of Broadway composers, Stephen Schwartz is up there with Sondheim and Lloyd Webber as one of the latter-day saviors of modern musical theater.

From his first show, Godspell, right up through his most recent hit, Wicked, Schwartz has been up, down and in between, but his work has been constant. Some of that work has been for movies as well. He won Oscars for his work on Disney’s Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and earlier this year, three of the songs he and Alan Menken wrote for Disney’s Enchanted were nominated for Academy Awards.

At 60, and with Wicked showing no signs of slowing down (the national tour hits the Bay Area yet again in February 2009), Schwartz doesn’t need creative projects, but a long-gestating revue/musical – we’ll call it a revusical, though Schwartz himself calls it a “musical scrapbook” – is coming up for air once again. Way back in the mid-’90s, Michael Scheman and David Stern, who were then both working on one of Broadway’s most notorious flops, Nick & Nora, approached Schwartz about using songs from his existing catalogue and turning them into something more than a revue – a book musical that told a story through songs and gave the songs – some familiar, some obscure – a new spin.

“They had a lot of down time working on Nick & Nora,” Schwartz explains on the phone from the TheatreWorks rehearsal hall in Mountain View. “They had the idea of taking my songs and putting them into a new story framework. I said it would be impossible for me to allow that. I’d never seen it done successfully and frequently seen it done unsuccessfully. But I said do a reading, I’ll come and we’ll see. They did, and I have to say, they had some interesting takes. For various reasons, nothing went much further. A few years later, the thing reared its head.”

The show, called Snapshots, saw incarnations in Norfolk, Va., and more recently at Seattle’s Village Theatre in 2005, but the TheatreWorks version that begins previews today (June 18) and opens Saturday, June 21, is even more fully revised and includes songs from Wicked.

Schwartz insists that this is not a revue because it does indeed tell a story (penned by Stern) about a middle-age couple whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. A box of old photos sends the couple reeling into the past. The structure allows six actors to play the couple at various ages. Schwartz thinks the concept really works this time around.

“I’ve seen this tried before, and the script and the songs are inconsistent in both lyrics and tone,” Schwartz explains. “The songs were clearly not meant to fulfill dramatic moments in this particular story. It always seemed like a shotgun marriage. When I saw what was being developed for this story in terms of interesting relationships, I said if you’re really going to do this, the lyrics ought to be revised and songs ought to be rearranged or put into medleys to tell the story properly. That’s what we’ve done. This is truly a hybrid in almost the true botanical nature of the word because it yields a strange, exotic flower for fruit.”

Schwartz estimates that all the songs – most from his shows and movies, with only the title song freshly penned – have been about 50 percent rewritten, which could irk his fans.

“I can see how audiences will either be intrigued by it and think it’s cool or some will say it’s too weird and that they’re not accustomed to hearing certain songs with new words,” he says. “It’s adventurous and challenging, which makes it fun.”

Admitting that some might consider it sacrilege to re-write songs like “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife or “Popular” from Wicked, Schwartz says he relishes revisiting and revising his own work. In some cases, there are only a few lyrical changes, a verse here, a line here. In others, it’s the same tune with entirely new words.

“If, for instance, you know `Lion Tamer’ from The Magic Show, you’re suddenly going to hear words you’ve never heard before,” Schwartz says. “Other songs, like `Popular’ are pretty much the same except for a few words but in a totally different situation. If people are willing to get their heads turned around a little bit, then it’s fun. If that’s hard for them to do, it will just be annoying or disturbing.”

The last time Schwartz was in the Bay Area was to fine tune the world premiere of Wicked. He was so busy then that he didn’t deign to chat with journalists.

“In all honesty, the San Francisco run couldn’t have been better for us,” he says. “The show was well enough received that no one was panicking or feeling it was a disaster – no throwing of bathwater or babies. It was clear there was work to be done and revisions to be made in the book and the score. The critical community was, frankly, very helpful to us. We learned a lot from the reviews, which were honest and constructive in the aggregate, unlike New York, where the critics make up their minds before they come to the theater. It’s not just the negativity the critics express but their corruption.”

TheatreWorks, thankfully, is far from that critical crowd. Schwartz says he had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the company and its founding artistic director, Robert Kelley, who is directing Snapshots. Schwartz even remembers – barely – a previous attempt at a Schwartz musical revue done at TheatreWorks in the late ’70s or early ’80s, but he can’t quite remember the name.

His big project at the moment is an opera commissioned by Opera Santa Barbara based on the movie Séance on a Wet Afternoon, a 1964 British film about a psychic who kidnaps a child to “prove” her abilities. The opera is slated to have its premiere in December 2009.

And for Wicked fans who were hoping that Schwartz and team might turn the book’s sequel, Son of a Witch, into a musical, don’t get your hopes up.

“I’m not big on sequels,” Schwartz says. “I don’t quite get why other than for economic incentive, they’re necessary. We told that story. I can understand the perspective of Gregory Maguire (the book’s author) about writing a sequel. I encouraged the writing of the sequel and another. I think he should make it a trilogy.”

Snapshots continues through July 13 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, corner of Castro and Mercy streets, Mountain View. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Last night I attended a screening of Disney’s big holiday movie, Enchanted, and I have to say, I was pretty charmed by the notion of a classic Disney animated feature turned on its head and morphed into a modern-day, live-action musical.

The trailer gives you a pretty good idea what the movie’s all about:

The songs are by the Academy Award-winning dynamic Disney duo of Stephen (Wicked) Schwartz and Alan (Beauty and the Beast) Menken. The pair previously collaborated on Disney’s Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And though there aren’t enough songs for my taste, there are two — a huge, joyful production number in Central Park that ends in a veritable festial surrounding Bethesda Fountain, and a romantic waltz at a ball sung by Jon McLaughlin – that make me anxious for the CD (slated for release Nov. 20, and the movie comes out Nov. 21).

Amy Adams plays Giselle, a gentle (and somewhat simpleminded) lass who has Snow White’s woodland cottage and affinity for all creatures great and small. In her hand-drawn animation bliss, she has Ariel’s red hair and Belle’s taste in clothes. Her Prince Charming (Edward, actually, played by James Marsden in his second musical of the year after Hairspray) is more taken with himself than with Giselle, but every prince needs his princess.

Of course Edward’s stepmother, the Queen (Susan Sarandon chewing the scenery), has a problem with a potential new queen, so she and her bumbling sidekick (Timothy Spall) figure out a way to kick Giselle out of animated fairy tale land and into the harsh reality of Times Square.

Soon Prince Edward, the sidekick and, eventually, the queen herself, end up in the real world, where people, doggone it, just don’t spontaneously burst into song.

Giselle is saved from a downpour by handsome lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey, naturally), single dad to an adorable princess-deprvied daughter (Dad wants her to have strong women role models like Marie Curie and Harriet Tubman). Of course they think this beautiful redhead is absolutely bonkers, but they both fall for her charms.

Robert’s somewhat harsh girlfriend is played by Idina Menzel (the Tony Award-winning star of Schwartz’s Wicked), who doesn’t even get to sing a song, which is a shame.

There’s a lot of charm in this movie — not the least of which is a computer-animated chipmunk named Pip that nearly steals the picture — and the “let’s make fun of musicals while loving them at the same time” tone works well .

That said, I have reservations — and they’re cynical and very non-fairy tale in spirit. I can just hear the Disney corporate meetings that concocted what amounts to a giant commerical for its new line of princess toys and princess costumes and princess birthday party kits and princess everything under the sun. The princess business is already booming, and this movie is sure to kick it into even higher gear (I hear there are already Macy’s tie-ins).

I’m all for girl-power, feminist-revisionist fairy tales, and when, at the end of Enchanted, it’s up to Giselle to save her mister in distress, it should be a lot more triumphant than it is. There were so many opportunities to be clever and smart here, and Adams’ utterly captivating performance (sincere and silly in equal measure, knowing and hearfelt and, yes, enchanting) could have take the movie to a much more finely etched portrait of female empowerment and charm. But the script (and the heavy-duty special effects) ultimately disappoints.

And may I chime in with all the 10-year-old girls and complain that we don’t get to see the final, most important wedding (there is a wedding, but it’s not really the one we want to see). And there should be a great final musical number, not a soundtrack song by Carrie Underwood.

Here’s the official Enchanted Web site. There are film clips and behind-the-scenes glimpses.