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[0:00] Lauren Van Hemert: Hi everybody, I'm Lauren Van Hemert, and this is Beltline to Broadway, where we talk about the theater from inside the beltline to the bright lights of Broadway and beyond.

[0:16] Lauren Van Hemert: Step into the belt fun.

[0:18] Lauren Van Hemert: Lady James will go exhaust to shine.

[0:21] Lauren Van Hemert: Time for you to step into the sun.

[0:36] Lauren Van Hemert: Time for you to step into the beltline.

[0:39] Lauren Van Hemert: Time for you to step into the lines of broadband.

[0:47] Lauren Van Hemert: When I was a kid, I studied classical piano. I'd learn one song a year and then practice that song over and over and over again to perfect it for competition.

[0:59] Lauren Van Hemert: As I got older, all I wanted to do was play popular music, which in my mind consisted of movie themes and show tunes. And one of the first songs I learned how to play outside my classical repertoire was "Corner of the Sky" from the musical Pippin.

[1:17] Lauren Van Hemert: It is without a doubt one of my favorite musical theater songs, and Pippin is probably one of my favorite shows. And that's one of the reasons why I was so excited to get a chance to chat with Carol de Giere.

[1:32] Lauren Van Hemert: Carol wrote the biography Defying Gravity, which documents Stephen Schwartz's career from Godspell to Wicked. Here she is talking about the early days of Pippin, which was born out of the Scotch and Soda Club at Carnegie Mellon University.

[1:48] Carol de Giere: Pippin actually came out when Stephen Schwartz was at Carnegie Mellon University. He was there as a directing major, though his real passion was writing musicals. And the original version of Pippin was the third full musical that he was co-writing in college.

[2:08] Carol de Giere: He'd already developed his talent as a pianist when he was studying in high school; he went to Juilliard on weekends. So he was already quite good musically, so when he went to college he studied theater, and there at Carnegie they had this, they called it a Scotch and Soda Club. It was an extracurricular club where students put together musicals, original musicals.

[2:33] Carol de Giere: And someone else had come up with this idea about writing a show related to Charlemagne, the actual real-life Emperor Charlemagne and his family and his wife. He had a wife who was Fostrata actually, and a son Pippin, who tried to overthrow him at one point. So there was some court intrigue there, and it seemed like it might make an interesting operatic type of story.

[3:05] Carol de Giere: Well, when Stephen met up with this person, he wanted to shift it into a full musical of the type that he knew. So he ended up writing half of the music and lyrics for the show, and that was in nineteen sixty-six and sixty-seven. And then he graduated and he started looking for a book writer.

[3:27] Carol de Giere: So it wasn't until much later that it evolved into kind of a quest musical of a young man in search of himself. That came up later. It's obviously not biographical to Stephen, but it is definitely a story, a quest story he seems to favor and kind of something that he can relate to. He calls it semi-autobiographical.

[3:56] Carol de Giere: So although he's not the book writer, he certainly gave his ideas for it. And he was a young man in search of his career. He was working on Pippin before he got the contract for Godspell, so he really was trying to find his way and establish himself as a musical writer. So yeah, I think he really wanted to tell that story.

[4:24] Carol de Giere: And speaking of Godspell, that was really such a positive and collaborative experience for Stephen. But the first production of Pippin wasn't so much so because he was very young and he was working with a very established and kind of experienced Bob Fosse.

[4:47] Lauren Van Hemert: So can you talk a little bit about that relationship between Stephen Schwartz and Bob Fosse working on Pippin?

[4:54] Carol de Giere: Well, I think it's so interesting that the whole musical Pippin in a way is about so many disappointments when your expectations are not met. And that was literally Stephen's experience at the time because he was expecting another collegial supportive experience like he had with Godspell. He didn't know that Broadway could be so contesting and argumentative, and he didn't know that a director who could take so much control over the book and music and so on.

[5:29] Carol de Giere: So that was a disappointment and a shock and a break from expectation. And another aspect of that was Schwartz says the songwriter naturally wanted to have singers who move, as they say, but Fosse mostly cared about having dancers who could adequately sing. And that was distressing for Stephen because of course he was looking for really great singers. So there were casting issues and all kinds of confrontations. That was a big surprise for him.

[6:08] Carol de Giere: And he also had to fall back on the Dramatists Guild contract in certain situations where Bob Fosse had made some decisions that he didn't agree with. A couple of times he would evoke the Dramatists Guild contract that says that the writers of a show ultimately control the content of the show. He was trying to take out a kind of woman because he couldn't figure out how to stage it well. And Stephen insisted that when the character Catherine comes in the second act so late in the show, she really needs a song to present her in a musical to an audience, and so he really insisted on that.

[6:58] Carol de Giere: So Fosse eventually figured out how to do that. Then they had another big fight later about the ending of the show. So there were some issues. And we're going to cut to a clip and hear what Stephen Schwartz has to say about that himself.

[7:14] Stephen Schwartz: I think, you know, I was so young and so inexperienced, but I was also, you know, this fairly arrogant kid. I think, you know, now obviously if I were dealing with somebody like Bob, I would have a much easier time with that collaboration. I think the issue with Bob was not so much that we were altering and developing the show. That's just part of what you do, but that our point of view and our taste was very different in a lot of ways.

[7:45] Carol de Giere: When we spoke before, you talked about some moments in that first production that Stephen really did like.

[7:51] Carol de Giere: Yeah, "Magic to Do," "War is a Science," he liked those. And then "On the Right Track" is a song for Pippin and the Leading Player that has an interesting story. It actually came up because John Rubinstein, who was the original Pippin, realized he was in a Bob Fosse show but didn't have his own dance number. So he kind of pleaded with Stephen and Bob that, you know, couldn't I please have a number like that.

[8:19] Carol de Giere: So Stephen wrote the song, but he included full lyrics, and Bob Fosse said to him, try to take out every word that you don't really need and I'll fill it with a dance move. And that's why the song has kind of a staccato effect. It has a really interesting rhythm to it. And Stephen ended up loving that and found that fascinating that that kind of collaboration could create a unique experience with the song.

[8:52] Carol de Giere: A unique song. You write about the fact that he really did like the Broadway revival of Pippin, and Stephen kind of felt that that was almost redemptive in a way from the earlier production. Can you talk to me about how he felt about the revival and the ending that we've all come to know as the Theo ending?

[9:18] Carol de Giere: Yes, well in I think it was two thousand twelve, two thousand thirteen, the Broadway revival of Pippin was directed by Diane Paulus, and Stephen just loved her concept and the way she seemed to trust the show. She brought in, it was her idea to bring in these extraordinary performances by a Cirque du Soleil type of company and integrate that with the show.

[9:47] Carol de Giere: But deeper than that, Stephen felt that Diane really trusted the story of Pippin's journey and that that was enough, that and the Leading Player and so on. That was enough to create a great musical, and he had felt in the original production that Bob Fosse wanted to kind of trick up the show. It wasn't interesting enough. So he was always trying to find ways to make it more flashy. And Diane, he felt that Diane's work was more integrated and created a more holistic show. And they did a lot of revising. Stephen's one of these people who if he has a chance to revise a show, he usually will.

[10:32] Carol de Giere: So Diane, for example, wanted to have an intermission which hadn't been included in the original. So Stephen and the book writer and Diane worked to create an amazing scene with "Morning Glow" as a powerful first act finale. They reworked it from what it had been. They were reworking the beginning of the show. And the ending, the new ending had been there for a while. Basically, the idea is that the son of Pippin's love interest comes back and reiterates a little bit of Pippin's journey. So it kind of creates a unity to the whole show. And that was an ending that they hadn't thought of. It just didn't come up for like forty years. They finally figured out how to make that work better. And of course, we can't talk about Pippin or Stephen Schwartz without talking about this really great music.

Some of my favorite musical theater songs actually come out of this show. And there's so many musical influences that you can kind of hear from Motown to pop to folk songs. Can you talk about some of Stephen Schwartz's musical influences for this show and maybe some of the musical undertones audiences should listen out for when they see the show?

[12:01] Carol de Giere: Well, one thing that's interesting is that Stephen was one of the first writers, with the exception of the writer for Hair and the concept for Jesus Christ Superstar, he was pretty much the first to bring to Broadway the blend of contemporary music with theater style and using a full pop sensibility in a musical, and Pippin really represents that. And you can hear an influence, as you say, from the songwriters of the time. Stephen was especially attuned to, besides the Motown and the pop rock groups, he loved the singer-songwriters. James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Paul Simon, he was very influenced by Laura Nyro. And he and I, when we were doing interviews for the book Defying Gravity, I had come up with this term "musical diving boards," and he kind of accepted that.

So the idea was that you use a diving board or a touchstone from what someone else has written to launch into a new song. And some of his diving boards that he's told me about for Pippin, there's a Burt Bacharach song, "What the World Needs Now," and he kind of used that as a touchstone or the sensibility for "Kind of Woman." "Magic to Do" is influenced by Carol King's song "It's Too Late," and "Corner of the Sky," I think in general has a Carol King feel.

[13:33] Carol de Giere: Anyone who's an artist who creates will sometimes come across this question: "All right, should I persist?" 'Cause normally persistence is a good thing. You want to keep going on something, and even if you get discouraged, you continue and sort of make yourself do it. Or should I give up? You know, when should you let go and realize that something isn't quite, isn't ever gonna work? So he worked on something for two weeks, which is about the maximum he's ever worked on a song at one time, and he just started to feel, well, there must be something misbegotten about it because it wasn't solving what he needed it to solve. So he started searching beyond that for other ideas and just decided to start from scratch.

In this specific case for "Corner of the Sky," he started thinking, okay, Pippin's looking for something that isn't really real, it's beyond reality in some way. And somehow Stephen came up with the idea of a corner in the sky because the sky, of course, is unbounded and doesn't have corners. But Pippin would, in his unrealistic way, be seeking for a corner of the sky. So Stephen was dwelling on this idea, and he was traveling with his wife Carol on a trip, and he said to Carol, "What are things that fit places?" And she said, "Well, cats fit on a windowsill," and he started with that and made a list of things that fit, and by the time they got home, the song was written.

[15:14] Carol de Giere: Do you have a favorite Pippin story that he maybe had shared with you?

[15:20] Carol de Giere: Well, I think one of the most important things for me what happened in our interviews is when I was asking him about the song "Morning Glow," and I was trying to really understand, so how does he write a song? 'Cause I wasn't there. I can't sit at the piano and watch him write a song, but so he's recalling for me, and what how does he do it? So I had this idea for "Morning Glow," okay, I'm picturing him seeing an inspiring sunrise and then going to the piano and writing a song "Morning Glow." And he saw how confused I was, and he said, "No, it's actually the opposite," that he always works from his inside vision. He never appends anything from the outside as the start for a song and, you know, maps it onto a character.

He'll instead go into a room with his writing pad or his piano and pencils, and he'll try to step inside the character and imagine what the character is feeling at that time. And then he may draw on his sense memories of a nice morning glow, and that metaphoric expression could come up for him, but he doesn't work from the outside. Like a pop songwriter might go through their day and experience, you know, the tugs of love or this or that and write a song based on that. But when he's writing for characters, he feels that it's sort of the opposite. He goes from the inside. So that's, I think, one of my favorite stories.

[17:01] Carol de Giere: Does he have a favorite Pippin song or moment in the show that he may have shared with you?

[17:07] Carol de Giere: He doesn't like to pick favorites, actually, from his songs. He did once say recently if he was gonna create a legacy disc feel and he could include, you know, ten songs or something from his whole career, "Corner of the Sky" would be on it. So I think that's interesting. My favorite, I think, is "Morning Glow." I love that song. I actually named my house "Morning Glow."

[17:32] Carol de Giere: Why do you think Pippin has such longevity? Why do people love the show so much? What is it about this show that keeps people wanting to produce it and people wanting to see it?

[17:45] Carol de Giere: Well, I think there's a combination of reasons. First of all, Stephen's work has a kind of energy and intelligence that is attractive, and all of his work has a kind of soul. It has a reason for being that's deeper than the surface, I think. And Pippin is a story that we can all relate to in some way. We've all gone through some kind of journey between not knowing where we want to go and how to find our own meaning and fulfillment and then seeking and trying to find something else. And we also go through moments of we could call whining, you know, our kind of negative voices inside. This is a little tangential, but I'll just tell you this funny thing that Stephen and his friend do. They have something they call "wine and dine," as in W H I N E wine and dine.

So you know how friends can do that? They'll get together and whine, and it sometimes makes you feel better, you know, if you're letting go of the things going on. But we all have some experience with the negative voices, which are the equivalent of what the Leading Player in Pippin is doing and the players around Pippin trying to draw him into the ending there, which is self-destructive. And we all have to find ways to overcome that and to not take it seriously and to continue with our life. I think at the ending of Pippin, where he's learning how to be more in the present moment and enjoy, it's a really uplifting message.

[19:28] Carol de Giere: Sometimes it takes a village to get these episodes together, and this was one of those shows. It covers everything from Godspell to Wicked and is full of anecdotes and information about your favorite songs and shows. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Blue Sky at Beltline to Broadway. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.