Broadway Master’s Pen Yields to Voice

Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz has put words and music into the mouths of some of the most famous figures to walk the Earth, in fact or legend.

Among them are Moses, Jesus and a panoply of characters from the Book of Genesis--including God. Also, the Emperor Charlemagne, Pocahontas and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo.

It took Schwartz 25 years to try writing songs about his own life, intended not for the stage but for him to sing on CD and in concert. He arrives tonight at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo for a show that will feature his renditions of the personal soft-rock songs he began performing in 1997 after the release of his first album, “Reluctant Pilgrim.” Highlights from Schwartz’s film and Broadway repertoire will be in the show as well, with two established New York singers, Debbie Gravitte and Scott Coulter, handling most of the nuggets from “Godspell,” “Pippin,” “Children of Eden” and other titles from Schwartz’s still-active career in musicals.

Barely out of college, Schwartz was an instant success during the early 1970s. “Godspell” (1971) and “Pippin,” (1972), his first two musicals, were long-running hits. When “The Magic Show,” featuring Doug Henning, followed suit in 1974, Schwartz became the first composer to have three Broadway shows running simultaneously. After seeing “Godspell,” Leonard Bernstein picked him to write lyrics for “Mass” in 1971.

Even when the hits stopped coming, Schwartz enjoyed a cult following for his less-popular shows, including “The Baker’s Wife,” “Rags” and his stage adaptation of Studs Terkel’s book of interviews, “Working” (which included songs by several other composers, including James Taylor). “Children of Eden,” a 1991 show based on the early chapters of Genesis, never made it to Broadway but has often been revived in regional and community theaters.

After more than 15 years without a hit, Schwartz returned to the commercial mainstream during the 1990s, when he was recruited to write for a new milieu: animated musicals. He put lyrics to Alan Menken’s music for Disney’s “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and wrote songs for DreamWorks’ “The Prince of Egypt.”

Schwartz, 52, lives mainly in Connecticut with Carole, his wife of 32 years. But he comes to Los Angeles frequently enough to keep a rented apartment there for a long time. He is using it as a base of operations for his current series of concerts, and to collaborate with a Los Angeles-based writer, Winnie Holzman, on what he hopes will be his next musical. “Wicked,” based on a 1995 fantasy novel by Gregory Maguire, spins a new tale from “The Wizard of Oz,” in which the Wicked Witch of the West gets to tell her side of the story and emerges as a humanized, sympathetic character.

Schwartz said it opens with her climactic meltdown at the hands of Dorothy and flashes back to reveal the trauma and strife that earned her an undeserved bad rep. Along the way, such Oziana as the secrets of the ruby slippers and the history of the witch’s corps of flying monkeys will be revealed.

Schwartz was an open, talkative sort in a recent phone interview from his L.A. apartment. Most interviewers, he said, usually get around to asking what it was like to be the hottest songwriter on Broadway before the age of 25 (not only were his shows hits, but the cast recording of “Day by Day” from “Godspell” and the Jackson 5’s rendition of “Corner of the Sky” from “Pippin” were top-20 hits), then recede into the shadows before he was 30.

“They say, ‘It must have been great when you had these hits, and wasn’t it crushing when [later ones] didn’t work?’ ”

But the important issue in his life at the time, Schwartz said, is the one raised in “Pippin,” the show he began developing while still an undergraduate theater student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“Pippin,” which made Ben Vereen a star, was about a medieval prince who vacillates between chasing a life of grandeur and achievement, and settling for quiet contentment and domestic satisfaction.

In his own life, Schwartz said, he had to find a way to live “a life not just focused on kind of running around in the limelight. I found it quite difficult to balance because I was so young. Now I’m able to do it somewhat more successfully.”

Schwartz, who grew up on Long Island, said he didn’t succumb to the most unbalancing indulgences of the 1970s, the decade when cocaine’s dangers weren’t so obvious. “I never did the drug thing. It was something that out of luck or excessive caution I managed to sidestep. It was more the mental pressure” that got to him. “There was a point I got really burned out and stopped working for a couple of years.”

That gave him time to be with his young son and daughter, now in their 20s and launching artistic careers of their own.

Scott, a theater director, will step up to the big time as director of “Lavender Girl,” a one-act musical that is part of “Three,” an evening of one-acts coming up in April at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Jessica, a recent college graduate, landed a job as graphics designer for the Acting Company, a New York City-based theater group that tours nationally performing stage classics.

Schwartz’s experiences clearly informed a couple of eloquent show tunes he wrote about parenthood: “Fathers and Sons” from “Working” and “The Hardest Part of Love” from “Children of Eden.”

But he didn’t start systematically delving into his life until a songwriter friend, John Bucchino, challenged him around 1995 to write some pop songs based on his experiences.

The pop sensibility was no problem: Some of Schwartz’s theater music, especially from “Godspell” and “Pippin,” is informed by the singer-songwriter tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s, epitomized by Carole King, James Taylor, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Indeed, “Reluctant Pilgrim” could easily play alongside albums by such literate, folk-influenced singer-songwriters as Eric Andersen, Bruce Cockburn and Shawn Colvin.

Schwartz has proved adept at mining his inner life and close-at-hand observations for songs. One of his first attempts was “Life Goes On,” an unusually complex song about grieving for a friend. Schwartz spends most of the song not pouring out his anguish over a buddy’s death but wondering why he isn’t harder hit by it. Instead, his life goes on, placid, untouched, seemingly unchanged.

“This guy who had been incredibly handsome basically looked like a concentration camp victim, but he was still very funny. We would laugh, and I would leave the hospital totally devastated. Then I would emerge into the L.A. sunshine, those warm April L.A. days when it feels good to be alive. In 10 minutes I would be at Disney, and we would be talking about jokes: What funny things can we have the raccoon do in ‘Pocahontas’? The cognitive dissonance between leaving a friend who is dying and then talking about jokes for raccoons and being totally involved in it--it was very difficult for me, isolating how cruel it is that life goes on and we are essentially all alone.”

Schwartz had rarely performed in public before he began playing occasional shows after the release of his album. He said he knew he was on the right track when Shirley MacLaine approached him after one of his early outings at New York’s Russian Tea Room. She had been struck by “Code of Silence,” a close look at a marriage growing cold.

“She came up to me and said, ‘I don’t know how you knew that--it’s as if you were reading my diary.’ My life is about as different from Shirley MacLaine’s as anyone can get. That was an interesting lesson: If you get down there and try to speak truthfully and even painfully, you can reach people.

“My wife just hates that song,” he added. “I keep saying, ‘It’s really not about you,’ ” though “it came from a period where we just weren’t talking about some things we should have been talking about, and I thought how destructive that is.”

Schwartz expects to release his second album of personal songs later this year and plans to preview a couple in his show. But he doesn’t harbor any dreams of pop stardom. That would take exhaustive touring, and he is happy keeping his schedule to about 15 shows a year.

“I still think of myself as a writer, not a performer. I don’t think I would ever go down in history as one of the amazing voices of our time. But I can carry a tune and people seem to like it.”

SHOW TIME

Stephen Schwartz and Friends, McKinney Theater, Saddleback College, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. 8 p.m. today. $23 to $25. (949) 582-4656.