British Travel Journal | Autumn 2019

SPECIAL FEATURE DEFYING

SPECIAL FEATURE DEFYING GRAVITY Spotlight on composer Stephen Schwartz PICTURED LEFT-RIGHT: STEPHEN SCHWARTZ; PRINCE OF EGYPT CAST; WICKED'S ALISTAIR BRAMMER (FIYERO) AND NIKKI BENTLEY (ELPHABA) IMAGES © DWA LLC/ DARRENBELL/MATT CROCKETT BY 1976, WHEN HE WAS JUST 28 YEARS OLD, Stephen Schwartz had three hit musicals playing side by side on Broadway – Godspell, Pippin and The Magic Show. That’s a rare achievement, although he had actually made his Broadway debut ahead of all of them in 1969 when he was only 21, with a song he contributed to a play called Butterflies Are Free. He’s come a long way since then, including three Oscar wins for his film work, but there was a long gap between that early wave of Broadway successes in the mid-1970's before he had another Broadway triumph with Wicked nearly 30 years later in 2003. It was Schwartz’s childhood dream to be a musical theatre composer and lyricist. But not all dreams come true, and he was going to be a psychologist if it didn’t work out. One of Schwartz’s big breaks came with a call from Disney who were looking for a writing partner for Alan Menken for his scores for animated features. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Together they did Pocahontas (1995, for which he won two Oscars), followed by The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), again written with Menken for Disney, then The Prince of Egypt for Dreamworks (1998, for which he wrote both music and lyrics and won a third Oscar for best original song for When You Believe). A brand-new stage musical of The Prince of Egypt will begin performances at London’s stunningly refurbished Dominion Theatre on Wednesday 5 February 2020 for a limited 32-week engagement. Luke Brady and Liam Tamne will lead the cast as ‘Moses’ and ‘Ramses’ respectively, with Christine Allado as ‘Tzipporah’ and Alexia Khadime as ‘Miriam’ and with further casting to be announced. Stephen Schwartz also wrote the music and lyrics for global hit Wicked which opened on Broadway in 2003, where it has run ever since. It transferred to the West End’s Apollo Victoria in 2006 and defied his own expectations with more than 7.5 million people having now seen it in London. The show’s London executive producer Michael McCabe pointed out that the sheer volume of people coming through the doors in such a big theatre means that 18,000 people a week are having a remarkable time. The show is famously a production that resonates particularly as a story of female empowerment. As David Stone, one of the producers, has famously been quoted as saying, “We all have that green girl inside of us”. And, for young women, that story has not been told too often in their terms. There are a lot of aspirational male stories, but not so many for women. u Ü FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PRINCE OF EGYPT AND WICKED SEE WWW.THEATRE.LONDON 20 BritishTravelJournal.com