Getting Back to ‘Eden’

As this week wends to a close, it’s likely to be one that Oscar-nominated composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz won’t soon forget.

Last Sunday night he jetted into LAX from his New York base and raced to Fullerton to catch a 7:30 p.m. run-through of Fullerton Civic Light Opera’s new staging of his oratorio-turned-musical, “Children of Eden,” which chronicles Genesis from Adam and Eve through Noah’s Ark and the Flood. It opens tonight and runs through Feb. 28.

Since its 1991 London premiere, “Eden” has been staged more than 200 times without ever hitting Broadway and getting no closer to the Los Angeles-Orange County area than Riverside. So Schwartz described himself as “pretty relieved” that Fullerton CLO is staging it. He praised “the wonderful singing chorus,” which is crucial to the storytelling.

On Monday, Schwartz settled into his rented apartment on a sloping Hollywood Hills street, where he has kept his Los Angeles home for nearly two years, since he collaborated with composer Hans Zimmer on the ambitious DreamWorks’ animated musical “The Prince of Egypt.” Schwartz and Zimmer previously had collaborated on the mega-hit score for “The Lion King.’

Then he hears that mechanical and electrical problems have been plaguing his New York office, shutting down the computers. He fears the Y2K bug may already have arrived.

Tuesday brought good news: two Academy Award nominations, his fourth and fifth. One is for best score for a musical for “The Prince of Egypt;” the other for best song, for the film’s hit single, “When You Believe.”

He downplays the buzz that the song is a virtual shoo-in for the Oscar, noting that it didn’t win the Golden Globes.

The Arrival of a Creative Payoff

Tonight will be the payoff for the frenetic week when the Civic Light Opera opens “Children of Eden,” one of the company’s rare forays into new musicals. It also will be one of the largest American stagings yet since its 1997 production at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, which has been captured on a recently released BMG Classics recording.

Schwartz said he isn’t bothered by the musical’s long gestation period and the fact that it hasn’t appeared on Broadway, noting that other successful musicals, such as “Phantom,” haven’t made it either, yet are still quite successful.

His own “Working,” which had a brief three-week Broadway run, “has had a wonderful life in regional theater,” Schwartz said. In fact, “Working,” based on Studs Terkel’s book about blue-collar values, will get its 20th anniversary staging in March under Christopher Ashley’s direction at the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut, where the composer lives.

Schwartz has a long list of credits, some with a biblical theme. His first hit show, “Godspell,” was written at 23. He wrote “Pippin,” which was produced in 1972, and he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on “Mass.”

“It’s truly a coincidence that I’ve revisited the Bible so often,” he said. “I was offered ‘Godspell,’ I didn’t hatch it out of my head. Then Lenny [Bernstein] saw ‘Godspell’ when he was stumped about how to proceed with ‘Mass’ and asked me to work with him as lyricist. After working with Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney on ‘Lion King,’ “Pocahontas,’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ he asked me to work with Hans on ‘Prince of Egypt’ at DreamWorks.

“I didn’t plan any of this at all, I swear,” he insisted.

While “Children of Eden” is “the show among all of my shows that most fully reflects my world philosophy on the big issues of why we are here, what is human responsibility, a family, a community,” Schwartz said it, too, was brought to him.

Television designer Charles Lisanby approached him about commission from a St. Louis-based religious organization for an oratorio to be sung by musically gifted students. Lisanby envisioned a story covering the Genesis creation to the Flood, and Schwartz was so pleased with the results that he asked British writer-director John Caird to refashion the oratorio as a book musical.

Caird’s internationally acclaimed stage version of Charles Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” had impressed Schwartz as “the greatest piece of theater in my life, and I had to work with the man who made that.” After “Children” was tepidly received at its 1991 London premiere, Caird and Schwartz reworked the show while maintaining what Schwartz said is the core of the piece.

“We had originally put God offstage as the sound of thunder and a voice,” he said. “But I realized that he is the character who goes through the most changes. He is a father, who creates all these eventually wayward children, and he must learn to let them go and be human and grow and make mistakes on their own. That’s why he’s called Father, not God. This becomes less a biblical tale than a story about family relationships.”

The saga coursing from Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to the slaying of Abel by brother Cain, to the family quarrels swirling around Noah’s somewhat dysfunctional clan is hardly new to Broadway musicals. “Eden’s” first half essentially covers the story told in the 1960s musical “The Apple Tree”; the second half was made into the Danny Kaye musical comedy “Two by Two,” which was lyricist Richard Rodgers’ farewell show.

Schwartz took pains to avoid repeating those works. “Our approach here is quite different. I emphasize a large singing chorus, a Greek chorus that sings, giving the narrative a more mythic sense than ‘The Apple Tree,’ which has some wonderful things in it. The tone is never really musical comedy. My issues are a little too meaty for a light musical comedy.”

A Familiar Theme of Rebellion

Viewers of “The Prince of Egypt” also may recognize that Schwartz’s main focus seems to be about sons rebelling against their fathers. Just as Moses rejects his adoptive pharaoh father, Ramses, so Adam, Cain and Noah have their run-ins with the all-knowing, all-seeing father.

“I keep going back to this,” he admitted. “It’s even there in my new Disney television musical, ‘Gepetto,’ in which Pinocchio and Gepetto clash. My relationship with my parents is really good now, but . . . I did have issues with them that took years to resolve. But every guy I know has father issues. It’s part of human nature.”

What has most surprised Schwartz is the acceptance of “Children of Eden” in fundamentalist Christian circles. “People should know that while ‘Prince of Egypt’ stuck closely to the biblical narrative, ‘Eden’ takes more liberties. That’s why I was worried that it would get flak among more strictly religious groups.

“But it’s like my experience on ‘Godspell’ all over again. It seems to cross religious boundaries, which are often so hard to cross. Evangelical colleges have done this show, and dinner theaters have done it.”

Schwartz is doubtful it will ever get to Broadway. “I’m always talking to people, [but] investors consider the sheer cost of employing the large chorus, and they blanch.”

Still, he’ll have plenty to do when the Fullerton production closes at the end of the month. After the “Working” anniversary show, he’ll goes into rehearsals in New York (in English) and in Berlin (in German) for Disney’s theatrical staging of “Hunchback” with director James Lapine.

Oh, and there’s a little show to attend where they hand out Oscars.

* The Fullerton Civic Light Opera opens with “Children of Eden” at 8 tonight at Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Continues every Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. through Feb. 27. Also Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 28 at 2 p.m. $14-$35. (714) 526-3832.

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