This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:04] Mark Larson: Welcome to an all-new episode of the Broadway Exclusive, presented by the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:10] Mark Larson: This episode is a recording of a live conversation that happened on March 16th, 2024 at the Museum of Broadway between author Mark Larson and Broadway icon Stephen Schwartz about my new book, Working in the Twenty First Century.

[0:23] Mark Larson: The conversation is also a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Studs Terkel's timeless oral history, Working.

[0:30] Mark Larson: Together they dove into the creation and enduring impact of Stephen's 1978 musical adaptation of Terkel's 1974 classic alongside my contemporary perspective on the book.

[0:42] Mark Larson: Make sure to listen through to the end of the episode for a special performance by Stephen Schwartz.

[0:47] Mark Larson: Fun fact, the piano used in this event is Duncan Sheik's actual piano, which was used during the original production of Spring Awakening.

[0:54] Mark Larson: Make sure to check out the show notes of this episode for more information and to get the book.

[1:01] Mark Larson: Kicking off the event is co-founder of the Museum of Broadway, Julie Borderman.

[1:06] Julie Borderman: Hi everybody.

[1:23] Mark Larson: And you can purchase it out there and get it signed and all the fun things. But this is Mark Larson.

[1:42] Mark Larson: All right. Here you go. Thank you. I'm gonna do a quick little introduction of what we're gonna do. Um, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate seeing you, and I know you want to see Stephen. Um, it's very special to me too. I actually, um, you probably hear this kind of story all the time, but I did, I bounced a check so I can buy a copy of Pippin because I heard somebody else playing it and had to have it. Everybody has their stories about that kind of thing.

[2:12] Mark Larson: Um, this is what we're gonna do. Um, in 1974, Studs Terkel published Working. He had 133 interviews with American workers, and it became kind of a classic, it became a definite classic. Um, not long after that, and this is one of the things I want to ask you about, it was only 1978, the end of 1978, that Working came along by Stephen Schwartz. And Nina Faso and others, yes, definitely. We'll talk about that. But then that came along, and then in 2020, um, right at the beginning of the pandemic, my publisher who had published an earlier book I did on the history of Chicago theater, it's an oral history too, suggested that I do a book inspired by Studs Terkel's Working, but for the 21st century.

And I jumped at the chance because I loved Studs Terkel. He interviewed me twice. I'd always wanted to do the kind of work he does, and that was a golden opportunity, and that's why we're here. I'm really interested in the evolution from even prior to his book, from 1970 to 1974, when he was gathering the interviews, one-on-one conversations with workers, become the printed page, became this musical, and that's what I'd like to follow today.

[3:37] Mark Larson: All right. So thank you. Thank you for being here. It's really special for all of us. Can you tell me what you knew about Studs prior to picking up Working?

[3:51] Stephen Schwartz: Well, I knew who he was. Um, Hard Times had been very successful, and I read that and really liked it. And then I read Division Street, which was another basically book of interviews. Or, you know, he I guess he didn't really invent it, but he somehow, you know, codified the idea of oral history and made it um, you know, a well-known thing to pursue. Um, and then consequently, um, when the book Working came out, um, you know, I sort of saw an announcement about it and read about it.

[4:31] Mark Larson: Do you remember your first impression of it?

[4:33] Stephen Schwartz: I do. I mean, I read the what the I it wasn't a review even. I think it was just an announcement like Book of the Month Club or something like that. And it described what the book was, and it had little excerpts from it. And one of the excerpts was from a telephone operator who, um, whom Studs calls Heather Lamb, it's not actually her name, um, because he changed some but not all of the names. Um, and I was a person who this, this was in the day when there was such a thing as a telephone operator, and this was, and um, the telephone company was only Bell Telephone, it was a monopoly, and it was really annoying a lot of the time. And I was one of these people who would vent my frustration with the phone company on some poor telephone operator that I was talking to.

You know, if you couldn't get through to something or something when it happened, and I would be like, Look, you people are a monopoly, and you should, you know, blah blah blah. You know, this poor usually woman who had, you know, nothing to do with the running of the telephone company. Um, and then in this description of the book, there was an excerpt from the operator, and she said, you know, sometimes you get somebody on the line and they say to you, How's your day been, operator? Has it been a tough day? You're so thankful for these people. And I was like, Oh my God, that is not me. She's talking about um, but it made me realize that every day we have a whole bunch of connections to people that we sometimes, well, I'll speak for myself because maybe none of you do this, that I was not really thinking of as people.

I was thinking of them as their functions. They were the parking lot attendant, they were the waitress, you know, they were the telephone operator. And I suddenly thought, wait, we all are connected in this way that has been kind of heretofore invisible to me. I'm really interested in that, and I'd like to explore that theatrically. So it was, and so I got the book knowing that I was interested in pursuing it as a possible theatrical piece. I mean, uh, there had been A Chorus Line in 1975. Um, there had been The Me Nobody Knows off Broadway. So there were precedents for kind of documentary musicals, and um, and I thought this would lend itself to that.

[7:20] Mark Larson: You opened it in Chicago first.

[7:23] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, because it was obviously set in Chicago, and so that seemed a good place to develop it. And uh, we got to meet, and the cast got to meet many of the people they were portraying, so that was very um, weird and exciting.

[7:39] Mark Larson: Could you talk to a little bit about what those meetings were like?

[7:42] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, um, I don't know what it was like. It was it was strange for me to meet people who were now characters in the show, and you um, of course, one felt uh, an enormous kind of sense of responsibility to them to portray them um, with respect and accurately, but frankly also to be entertaining. So some of them needed to be funny and some of them needed to be sad and you know, um, but uh pretty much everybody was uh except for one was was was quite delighted with with how he or she was portrayed.

[8:22] Mark Larson: Can you talk about the one?

[8:24] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, it was um, who was kind of the guy who went all the way through um, who was the steel worker.

[8:32] Mark Larson: Oh, Mike LaFever?

[8:33] Stephen Schwartz: Yes, Mike LaFever, who had become a little bit of a celebrity because of the book, and he was now writing a column, I think, for either the Chicago Tribune or the Sun Times, I forget which. And he, yeah, he was not delighted about how he was portrayed, though I I thought he was kind of heroic, frankly.

[8:53] Mark Larson: He is so often quoted, too.

[8:55] Stephen Schwartz: Uh, it's from Mike LaFever that we get the whole song, the whole last song was based on what he had to say.

[9:03] Mark Larson: Yeah. How I didn't know that that was a problem for him. Um, if tell me if I'm wrong. Your dad was a businessman, your mom was a teacher.

[9:12] Stephen Schwartz: My mom was a teacher. Um, my dad did a number of things, but he sort of st he he worked for the Navy, he started some businesses, he also taught. He was involved in like the world of stocks and finance and stuff, which is all remains a huge mystery to me. Did what they well and your mom as a teacher too, did that have an impact on you and the creation of this? Because there is a teacher.

[9:39] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, I just I just like the character of the teacher so much because you know you like her a lot and then you slight slowly as you read and also we try to do this as we portray her, realize that she's like quite racist, but you don't really get it right at first. Um, so that she was interesting theatrically to me. Um, I mean I I'm I'm from I guess an you would call an upper middle class, middle class to upper middle class background, but you know, my parents both worked, my dad worked very very long hours. Um, yeah, so I think that aspect was was influential on me, but I wasn't really trying to portray them. I was trying to pick characters either who were extremely vivid or who were people that the audience would might encounter.

You know, w when you so that my hope was that when you left the theater, uh if you got your car, if you'd parked your car, if you went to a restaurant, um you would and you had an encounter with the parking lot attendant or the waitress or whatever, it would be different than the encounter you had on the way into the theater.

[10:58] Mark Larson: I love hearing that because I just did a talk on my book from much more recent that um somebody said how do you choose and I said I won't it it's fairly random in a way, but I wanted to give it a give people a sense of these are the people that you run into. You walk into in there's your pharmacist, there's the person, you know, your cab driver, whatever it is, or Uber now. Um, did you can you talk us through what it was like then you you know like you're gonna sing for us later um, it's an art. How did when you read the chapter, how does that start becoming a song then?

[11:38] Stephen Schwartz: Because I thought you captured Dolores so well.

[11:41] Stephen Schwartz: Thank you. Um, well, I mean, if I can talk specifically about Dolores now, but then I should go over and do the song. So if you want to let's let's if you want to hold it, then we should come back to that. This is my sense of you know theater structure. And conversely, my lack of it. Um, Fathers and Sons. There's a section in in the book called Fathers and Sons. And you wrote a book that or I wrote a song that it just slays me.

[12:13] Mark Larson: Thank you.

[12:14] Stephen Schwartz: Um, there's there's a lyric, um, see if I wrote it down. Everybody breaks and fathers make mistakes, and it makes me tear just I'm I'm a father and I'm a son. And I find it an incredible song. And could you talk about where that came from?

[12:28] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I mean that song almost didn't make it into the show. Um, yeah, because it's the only I mean it's extremely personal. I mean, I was basically writing about my son, who was in fact three and a half at the time, and my dad and my relationship with my dad, which um is very good now, but wasn't always. And um, and so I you know, I did this song sort of inspired by um things in the Mike LaFever um interview. But then I was like, well, this is really strayed a lot from their words, and it's maybe too personal, so maybe this doesn't belong in the show, but I got talked you know talked into doing to putting it into the show by um by Nina Faso with whom I was collaborating, and musical director Steve Reinhardt and other people that were like, No, no, no, you have to put it in the show. So I did.

[13:23] Mark Larson: And you're glad it's there.

[13:23] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, now I'm glad. It's a beautiful now you're glad.

[13:27] Mark Larson: It's a beautiful show. I'm struck by you, um, first mounted this in 1977 at the Goodman, and then came here within just a few minutes, uh, a few moments later.

[13:38] Stephen Schwartz: It felt like a few minutes.

[13:39] Mark Larson: Yeah. Let's say a few months later. Um, but the longevity of this thing, Stephen, it's phenomenal.

[13:47] Stephen Schwartz: It's really been amazing. And a wonderful recent thing has happened. Um, actually he's a friend of mine. Um, a guy in Ridgefield, Connecticut, my hometown now, um, has an equity theater there called, um, I think it's ACT of Connecticut or something. And he did a production of Working and he had an idea which he did there and which was enormously successful, and it's now we've now put it into if you want to do the show, which is he went and did local interviews. So we, uh, and um, so I think we call it the localized version that you can do because what was happening with Working was we never thought in 1978, oh, you know, 30 years later people are still going to be doing the show, or 40 years later, and of course the workplace keeps changing.

[14:39] Mark Larson: Yeah.

[14:40] Stephen Schwartz: So we kept having to like every 10 years we'd have to like update it, and I'd have to do new interviews, and we'd have to like change lyrics, and it got to be a little, um, burdensome, you know, and I just thought like I can't constantly be rewriting Working. And, um, and then Dan Levine had this idea, and so what he did was he went and interviewed people in the town and videoed them. So he talked to, in fact, a waitress at the local diner and a person, uh, a young woman who worked at the pharmacy, and you know, like I think he did five or six interviews, and then he found ways to substitute those interviews for um, the ones that are in the show. And, um, this was first of all extremely successful, and meant that I didn't have to keep rewriting the show.

[15:34] Mark Larson: Yeah, yeah.

[15:35] Stephen Schwartz: So, um, so now we sort of offer that with like a guidebook of like if you want to do it, these are the kinds of people you talk to, and this is where the interview goes, and this is how you get from this to that. Um, so now I feel like, you know, the show can just keep on going. We just, Mary and I just saw a production at Northwestern, which was beautifully done, and it was the localized one.

[15:59] Mark Larson: And they did the localized one. It's so cool, right?

[16:01] Stephen Schwartz: It is very cool. But it's also interesting to think of Studs's original version as a time capsule too.

[16:10] Mark Larson: Which I think it can stand on its own in that way. Although there, well, you sound like a lot of things. But I mean, but it's definitely set in the time because there are jobs that don't exist anymore.

[16:23] Stephen Schwartz: Right. And also, I mean, I think why the show has had longevity is that what I try to do, and I think, um, my fellow composers, because there are multiple composers, uh, songwriters for it, succeeded in doing was getting enough at the essence, the core essence of the feeling of what the characters were talking about that transcended time.

[16:50] Mark Larson: Yeah.

[16:51] Stephen Schwartz: So that even if the specific way someone works in a mill is gone, you know, James Taylor's mill worker still, you know, pertains, or you know, it's got something to point to, or if I could have been, or you know, the songs that, um, you know, Delivery is a newer song that Lin-Manuel Miranda did, but it's still basically about a kid who is doing his first job and hoping that this was just gonna lead to, you know, a bright future. I think there are so many perennial themes, and I love the way that you've described that, that even though some of those jobs are gone, the need to matter, the need to point to something is extremely strong.

[17:35] Mark Larson: Um, can I show you a clip from, please, from my thing? Um, you have a teacher, uh, Rose, I think.

[17:45] Stephen Schwartz: Rose.

[17:46] Mark Larson: And one of her, one of the things she sings, where's Rose? They tell me to keep up with the times, but nobody tells me how, right? And this is a clip from, uh, an interview that I did with a teacher, uh, who lives in, I think West or, um, well, it'll it is said on the thing, but in a rural area. She lives in a rural area, she's one of two black teachers in her school. And I asked her, uh, and she's in her 20th year, and I asked her how she felt about how that was going. And this is what she said.

[18:23] Stephen Schwartz: It's a lot like Rose. The whole critical race theory thing came out, and they were talking about, oh, it's gonna be, it got really blown out of proportion really quickly. We're in a Bible belt, and, uh, but I don't think people understood what it was all about, and they still don't. I mean, I still don't know what they were expecting us to teach. Um, so we had a lot of our Caucasian or white population that said, well, affirmative action oppressed us. So, you know, you have, we had that going. We had those debates going, and I did hear some of those debates. Uh, but, uh, now when you know we have the proper pronouns to use in the classroom, and that's, people feel very strongly about that. I have been advised by, um, administration before that I need to send a notice home before I start teaching evolution. I don't do that. I'm just gonna be honest, I don't spend a lot of time watching and keeping up with a lot of these things because it kind of hurts my soul to watch the news.

[19:40] Stephen Schwartz: I just find that really moving. Um, just trying to figure out what these times demand of me now. I don't know if you had the same impression I did from Studs's book, but you know, the 70s was a pretty raucous time itself, and he was writing from 70 to 74, and we're in pretty difficult times too. But I there's not a whole lot of direct reference to the politics of the time in his book.

[20:06] Mark Larson: And it's the same here. What you do end up with is this though, which is you feel the tension and you feel the pressure that they're under.

[20:16] Stephen Schwartz: I know, but just wonder if you had any, uh, any thoughts on what she said.

[20:20] Mark Larson: Yeah, I mean, I think that we are in a time now where politics and the polarization and the tribalization of, um, political identification is much stronger than it was in the 70s. The 70s was the split was basically generational because it was essentially over the Vietnam War. So that, you know, that was a time when the, uh, the slogan of don't trust anybody under 30. Um, because the kids of whom I, I was at the time had a certain attitude about the Vietnam War, and it just spread into everything. You know, it was also the beginning of the sex, love and rock and roll era and free love and just a real shift in society, but it was generational. It wasn't red state blue state.

[21:21] Stephen Schwartz: Yes.

[21:21] Mark Larson: There just was not no such, I mean, of course, as always, cities tended to be more, um, left wing and rural areas tended to be more right wing, but it was not really a time of if you lived in a certain state then you know, you were in a red state or a blue state. It was much more like hippies and people who were in ROTC.

[21:45] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah. And now too, I mean as you could tell from the clip, the, um, most of my interviews were on Zoom because I was doing this during COVID.

[21:56] Mark Larson: Of course.

[21:56] Stephen Schwartz: So there was that pressure. So the nurses that I spoke to, you know, COVID was very much a part of that and the pressures of that and they talked about the miscommunication coming from the government and how they're trying just trying to keep going. It was very difficult right now.

[22:13] Mark Larson: In terms of the, um, uh, updating too, I was just thinking there are elements in his book which we probably wouldn't allow now. There's a delivery guy who likes to sneak up on the women who did you want to, he was on our show for a while and we still, he kind of still is.

[22:13] Stephen Schwartz: Tell them about that.

[22:13] Mark Larson: Well, he was, uh, he was the gas man in the original and he used to, um, in order to like amuse himself during the day because it was so boring just going around reading um meters, one of the things he did was he said, like if there was a woman in the backyard, you know, and she'd be sunbathing and maybe have her, you know, her top undone, he would sneak up and then he would go, Gasman. And she would like jump up.

[23:03] Stephen Schwartz: And yeah, I remember that. I, uh, Studs particularly wanted me to put him in the show because he thought he was funny.

[23:10] Mark Larson: I think we then, he then he was like a UPS guy in our show for a while. I think he is like finally out of the show now.

[23:17] Stephen Schwartz: That's probably why I thought it was UPS.

[23:18] Mark Larson: He's out of the show.

[23:19] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I don't know if it'd go over that one.

[23:22] Mark Larson: Um, I'm gonna go back to Mike Lafever and then we'll go to Dolores, and then I'd love to hear questions. Um, Mike Lafever, I every time you get to the end of the show, it really makes me kind of weeping.

[23:35] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah.

[23:35] Mark Larson: Um, but such, I mean he says such great things. He says, yeah he's very eloquent, which is no wonder he wound up having the column. He said, I would like to see on one side of, uh, oh, he's talking about like on the side of a building, like the Empire State Building. I would like to see on one side of it a foot wide strip from top to bottom with every the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician with all the names, he said.

[24:02] Stephen Schwartz: And you worked that in beautifully.

[24:04] Mark Larson: Yeah. Um, and then later the chorus, uh, says 40 floor, uh, 40 flights up, I scratched my name. And that's really moving to me, too. I read that part to a, um, a carpenter, and I said, do you, would that mean anything to you? And he got a big smile, and he goes, I hadn't thought about it. That would be very cool. I mean, there's a, I'm trying to remember when this was, but a few years back, I think it was Seattle. They did that on a building.

[24:31] Stephen Schwartz: Oh, did that?

[24:34] Mark Larson: And it had to do with word with the show or something. I forget how there was a tie to the show, but they put a thing, a strip with all the names of the people who worked on the building.

[24:43] Stephen Schwartz: I've been dying to share this with you. This is, uh, Shahera Biford, who is a, who owns a construction company. And she told me this. She said there's something they do called a topping off party, often on a steel frame job on steel frame jobs. You get all the way to the top of the job, and there's that last piece of steel that goes in place. And often everybody who's out, uh, at the job signs that piece of steel, and then the drywall goes up and the paint goes up and you never see it again. But those people who were that makes me, it's um, everybody who was part of it knows it was there and they know it'll be there forever. I've worked with people who like to say, I'd like being able to shape the skyline, they say, I was part of that.

[25:32] Mark Larson: That's so perennial to me.

[25:34] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, that's so moving.

[25:37] Mark Larson: Let's, let's, well, I think people have, all of us have a deep need to be seen. Um, maybe that's one of the most primal human needs, and a need for recognition. It doesn't have to be, you know, your name up in lights, though that is what motivates a lot of people in this room. Um, including maybe myself in some way. But, but people don't want to be invisible.

[26:05] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah.

[26:06] Mark Larson: Um, that's, uh, and that that's in the end, that's what Working, all of these interviews are about.

[26:13] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah. Didn't you say somewhere that it's also about the interconnectedness?

[26:18] Mark Larson: Well, that was my, you know, as I described why what attracted me to the show, that we are all connected in ways that we don't see sometimes willfully, but more often, um, because we just never think about it.

[26:33] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah.

[26:34] Mark Larson: Well, and the extension of that is interdependency.

[26:37] Stephen Schwartz: Yes.

[26:38] Mark Larson: Yeah.

[26:39] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah.

[26:40] Mark Larson: Um, before we go to your song...

[26:45] Julie Borderman: This is Sarah Norton Webster.

[26:48] Mark Larson: Um, each of the pictures, too...

[26:50] Mark Larson: I don't know how many of you were here when I was flashing pictures at the beginning, but they're all pictures that they sent to me.

[26:55] Mark Larson: So that's their choice, right? But um Sarah, um, not only is she a server, not a waitress, but uh she's a server, she started an organization called Serving Those Serving. And it's it's to support um other servers because she feels they really need it. And this is what this is what she says. This will resonate, I think, too, for you. If I had to pick one, I would say uh classism is probably the main adversary. That's the thing that we fight against the most. People say, "Why don't you know, why don't you have a real job? Why don't you go get a real job?" Well, my god, is this not a real job? I put my husband through college and raised three children and bought a house. How is this not a real job?

You know, I heard this so many times. "When are you gonna do something with your life, Sarah? You're just a waitress." A lot of it, I think it's the classism, I think it's the uh uh the ignorance of what it takes to be good at this business. Um again, it's prejudice against people who are serving you, so therefore it's like they're lower than you if they're serving you.

[28:07] Stephen Schwartz: You know, when people say to you, "Why are you just a waitress?" Yeah, in Studs Terkel's book, he interviewed a waitress and she would hear the same thing 50 years ago. And when people would say, "Why are you just a waitress?" she would say, "Don't you think you deserve to be waited on by me?"

[28:07] Mark Larson: Interesting.

[28:07] Stephen Schwartz: Oh, I wish I would have had that gem years ago.

[28:07] Mark Larson: Isn't that great? "You don't think you deserve me?" Oh, wow. Oh, I like that. I couldn't wait to share that with you guys.

[28:07] Stephen Schwartz: Amazing.

[28:07] Mark Larson: Yeah, so let's let's hear...

[28:07] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, okay, "It's an Art."

[28:07] Mark Larson: Well, before we do that, so I because this was very heavy and I brought it in, um, so I don't have it in paperback. I thought um, you know, I would share my where's my little paper clip, there it is, um, you know, give away my my secrets about, you know, songwriting because I've been you know, people say like, "How do you write a song?" and I have my fatuous answer, you know, "Tell the truth and make it rhyme." Um but basically one of the one of the tasks that all of the composers all of the songwriters in Working gave to ourselves and it was it was conscious and discussed was to absolutely try to stick as close as possible within song structure to what the people actually said not really to try and make it up, but try to represent them.

So I thought I would share with you a little bit of some of the things Dolores says in her interview with Studs. She is she does talk earlier about being Italian and her Italian heritage, and when I get excited, I speak like an Italian speaks. And the reason I bring that up is because that is the music is kind of a mock Verdi. It's sort of like sempre libera. And that was because I thought like that was a way of sounding Italian. But here are some of the things she said. She said, um, "Carrying dishes is a problem. We do have accidents. I spilled a tray once with steaks for seven on it. Um but when that tray fell, I went with it and never made a sound. Dish and all, never made a sound." Um she said, "Some don't care.

When the plate is down, you can hear the sound. I try not to have that sound. I want to be my hands to be right when I serve. I pick up a glass, I want it to be just right. To be a waitress, it's an art. I feel like a ballerina too. I have to go between those tables, between those chairs. It is a certain way I can go through a chair, no one else can do. I do it with an air. If I drop a fork, there's a certain way I pick it up. I know they can see how delicately I do it. I'm on stage." Then she talks about at the end of the night, she says, near crying, because you're tired. "When the night is done, you're tired. You hope everyone is satisfied. The night's done, you've done your act, the curtains close."

So there's a like a monologue that goes into it about "I have to be a waitress," and but which which actually involves some of the things that um yeah that that we uh Mark just talked about. But when the song begins, it is this.

[31:57] ♪ Musical number: "It's an Art" — performed by Stephen Schwartz ♪

[36:19] Mark Larson: Goosebumps and tears. I wish Sarah could hear. Actually, I'm gonna send that to Sarah.

[36:25] Stephen Schwartz: Okay, cool.

[36:26] Mark Larson: Questions.

[36:27] Julie Borderman: Thank you for that. Jeffrey.

[36:30] Unknown Speaker: Um really interested to hear what your relationship was with Studs Terkel. Certainly part of the theater community.

[36:38] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, he was really um supportive all all the way through. Um he had a lot of suggestions, and um when I first went to see him about the book, he was he was dubious that it was possible to make a musical out of this. But um, when he got on board, he really got on board, and he always had ideas about what interviews to use and maybe what things weren't, you know, could could be could be improved, et cetera. And he stayed um with the with it even after the um initial run when it would continue to be done. The last time I saw Studs was in the like 1999, maybe around then, um, when it was being done at Long Wharf. And he came for that. And and then I I think he was doing something rather at like Yale or something, and I went to um see him then.

But the point is he would come from time to time. And um when we did a uh television thing for PBS, he um he introduced it. So he was um yeah, he he was extremely supportive, and he like uh made the the original tapes available um to listen to. Uh he he was very much collaboratively involved.

[38:03] Unknown Speaker: Were you ever interviewed by the other?

[38:05] Stephen Schwartz: No. No, I was never interviewed by you know, I don't do some I'm I'm just in the theater, it's not all that interesting.

[38:13] Unknown Speaker: Yes, sir. How did you pick who wrote what song for the show?

[38:17] Stephen Schwartz: Um I I started out thinking I I was just gonna make a musical and I was gonna write all the songs. And then as I was starting to work on things and think about characters I wanted to, I thought should be in the show, um, like the parking lot attendant, um, and uh there was uh uh a cleaning woman named Maggie Holmes that I thought was very important. Um, and I I started thinking, like, I'm just gonna be writing pastiche here. I'm gonna be in because you want to sound genuinely like the characters. I'm just gonna be imitating other writers. Maybe I should talk to those writers. Um, this wasn't a time where you worried a lot about cultural appropriation, but I still felt that African American writer characters probably should be would be better off if if they were written by an African American.

Um so I I first approached Mickey Grant, um, who was a wonderful um she had done Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, and I was a big admirer of hers. And she signed on, and then it just sort of escalated from there. And I talked to a lot of different writers. Um I wanted to have a pop sound, and so I I met with my heroes. I met with Joni Mitchell, um, just to get to meet with her, it's great. Um Paul Simon was interested for a while, but he was doing a movie, and then um didn't wind up being able to do it. But James Taylor did kind of brilliantly. Um the the biggest regret I had was that after the show was really kind of done and it was too late to add people, Billy Joel called me and he was like, you know, that show that you asked me about four months ago or whatever.

Could I think I'd like to do so? That's that's a regret because he I think he would have done amazing work, but it was it was too late by then. You know, and I heard um work by Craig Carnelia and and just thought he was brilliant, and so I asked him to participate. And it was sort of a matter of gathering um forces, and then in some cases, I had ideas for them, like I'd like you to maybe tackle this number or that number, but in some instances, like I I it never occurred to me that the mill worker should have a song.

[40:35] Stephen Schwartz: I mean, that did not seem like a musical to me. And James said it was James Taylor who said, like, I want to write a song for that mill worker. I was like, oh, okay, great, you know. And then, you know, he wrote like this incredibly brilliant song. Yes. This is so incredible. Thank you so much. I feel like we just magic. That's what makes us all love your work so much. What this museum represents so much. But I think some of the how soon this happens, not in the private magical sense, but in the sort of sense of you've only clone yourself so much, you know, stack out. And so the days I see coming up. And thanks for the show, Steve. I'm wondering if you can shed any light on whether they helped in Silver Lord, Stephen Friedman, Irving Meyer, Joseph Harris.

Yeah, I mean, they were the producers. I have mixed feelings about them because they were wonderfully supportive. But I think they also pushed us to go to Broadway too soon. I there was a trajectory that I had after Chicago we had talked about, and I was hoping we would go to the arena in Washington and worked with Zelda Fitch Handler, who was very helpful about the show and always loved it, and they just decided they would. And you know it might have been an economic decision. I understand you can't just keep funding something forever without ever getting anything back. But I wish we'd made one more stop because things that didn't work about the show structurally when we did it on Broadway, we figured out later, which is one of the nice reasons for the longevity of the show, but I wish we'd been able to figure that out a little sooner.

I'm trying to remember how they got involved. Maybe my agent, I don't remember. I didn't know them, but they got in touch with me or Irwin and Steve. I'm not quite sure how that I can't remember anymore who told what about whom.

[42:53] Stephen Schwartz: Yes, sir. I've just been noticing a lot of a theme within your work is that you tend to exalt people or characters that might seem ordinary. And looking at you as a person from the outside looking in, I don't know anything about them personally, but it seems quite easy for you. With all of your success, you move farther and farther away from being able to connect or understand or to pick those types of people. So my question to you is how through all these years, especially hearing about the creation of this piece, how you've had to revise it and go back to you as your fame and lore has kind of grown. What has kept you grounded and tethered in a way that you're able to go? I could still connect to that guy. I can still connect to him. Like what in your life keeps that curiosity blowing it down easily.

[43:52] Stephen Schwartz: Well, I think, you know, I think writers, Jeff, I'm sure you all maybe you'd agree with I'm I know I think you'll agree. You know, writers just write the same thing over and over again, basically. We have our obsessions, you know, two or three themes, and we just keep writing them disguised in different stories and with different characters, etc. But for whatever, and I think that forms very early. I don't know if you feel that way, Mark. If you do, it's sort of like there's a sort of maybe therapy going on or whatever. You're working through your obsessions, and I feel like one of my themes has always been about outsiders and people who feel themselves not completely part of welcomed in, comfortable in society, whatever that means, and have a desire to be part of it, but at what cost.

You know, and because you have to give up the more you fit in, the more of yourself you have to give up. And I think that's always been just an obsession of mine that I still strongly feel, and I think working that's a bit of what working is about that these are people who feel that they're part of society, but they're invisible, and that they want to be seen. And so I think that's just a reflection of the same theme. But working on this show and the book and meeting some of the people, etc., you do feel a really intense responsibility to not just these specific people, but people in you know who do this sort of like unseen, unsung work. There's a television show right now that I'm trying to help with a little bit.

It wasn't my idea, but it's a show kind of based on this called Unsung, which is to try and find people who can sing but are like nurses or, you know, sanitation men or whatever, and have songs written for them that they would then perform. And I don't know if this show is gonna get sold, but I love this idea. Yeah, so you know my point is I still feel I just feel our values are so messed up in this country about what we celebrate and what we don't, and the people we admire and the people we don't, and the people we pay attention to and the people we don't, and that still is very significant to me.

[46:48] Stephen Schwartz: Years ago, I saw an article about a it was an obituary for a woman in Detroit, an older African American woman who had been a teacher and a doctor and a scientist. She was so extraordinarily accomplished, and the reason her obituary was given the prominence it got was because she was Diana Ross's sister. And I was like, if she hadn't been this unbelievably accomplished woman, if she had not been the sister of a famous singer, no one would have paid the slightest bit of attention. And there's just I don't know what you do to fix that, but there's something wrong about that. That caring you have for the people is interesting to me too, because Studs so cared about every person. I have a picture of the top shelf of my bookshelf, and there's a book of Studs' books.

There's thousands of people he interviewed. I'll tell you a quick story. I was at a garden party, and Studs was asked to say a few words. Off the cuff, he didn't know this was gonna happen. He could not have, he certainly wouldn't have checked Google. He said, You're gonna have to excuse me, right at the beginning of the talk, you're gonna have to excuse me and forgive me. There are four people here who are in my books, and he went through each of us with a little paragraph about what we said in the book. That's astonishing. But that's care too.

[48:30] Stephen Schwartz: Other question. Yes. I'm not talking about the tourists. You think really ultimately both of you is that isn't this book really kind of a tribulation of the racial algebra? I mean, basically, people think that if I'm the working day job, I'm not getting anywhere, even though I'm working 50 hours a week on the back of the house in a restaurant. But you sort of I know people that getting these jobs they internalize, but I'm not doing it. You know, I'm not advancing. You know, I just think that definitely I don't know if our values recently like quote unquote thought that or has it always been that? No, we're race that's the industrial revolution too.

[49:14] Mark Larson: One of the themes in the book is finding meaning. You know, Studs talks about that at the beginning, and no matter what it is that you're doing, people are trying to find meaning in their work. And you see it all the way through. The people that I talked to in much more recently are doing exactly the same thing, but it's a lot more difficult in some ways, and it's a lot more fragmented, and there's a lot more working against it. I just did a talk where I pulled together like three or four different people who said the American dream absolutely failed my parents, or I believed in this and it's just not the way it is. Well, one person worked for a large organization, was laid off with 81 other people, and was doing consulting work and barely making it. And she said, I set out to do good in the world. That's what I was taught that you would do, but there's no value in it. That was her phrase. So it's yeah.

[50:14] Stephen Schwartz: What was your thought?

[50:15] Mark Larson: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think I'm working on a show currently, which is called The Queen of Versailles, which is based on a documentary from 2012 about this woman in Orlando, Florida, who's building the biggest private home in America. She's married to a man who has dubbed himself the timeshare king, who sells timeshares in quite a predatory way. And the reason that I'm in that I was attracted to the show is because it has something to do with how the American dream has shifted from being about if I work hard, I will be able to support myself and my family, and my children will be positioned to have a better life than I have now. In fact, that's the theme of that's what Mike La Fever says in the book.

And it just was since post-war America, post-World War II America, that was kind of true. You know, like each generation was doing a little bit better than the one before, and that has shifted now. And also are feeling like I need to have more. It's not, you know, just having that is not enough. If I have that, I won't really have succeeded in life. And that's so I need to have more and more and more and more. And when is it enough? You know, that's not entirely everybody because you know Mark's book and Studs' book and most people's lives are about just trying to get through and keep your head above water, and if you have children, have them be better off. Just give them a little bit of a leg up more than you had. But somehow that has the American dream, what we call the American dream, has shifted away from that.

[52:29] Stephen Schwartz: I know you need to go. It's been wonderful to have you here. Wait, before we do let you go. Could you tell us something about how things are going with the Wicked film?

[52:41] Stephen Schwartz: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I guess principal photography is done. There is a rough cut, and we're all working hard to get it done for Thanksgiving, because somehow on November 27th, there's gonna be some movie out there. So we have to have something there for people to see. So I mean there's a lot of work to do still, you know. But yeah, I mean it's coming along. That's all I can say.

[53:18] Mark Larson: That's great. Thank you so much. Don't forget to check the show notes for more information on Mark Larson's book Working in the Twenty First Century and more information on the phenomenal Museum of Broadway. You can also visit themuseumofbroadway.com/calendar to find out about more great events just like this one.