Wicked composer is bitter but better

If there's one man in the world who felt Martin Scorsese's pain when the director lost yet another bid for an Oscar two weeks ago, it's probably Stephen Schwartz. Six times now, Schwartz has been a bridesmaid at the Tony Awards, nominated for his work on Broadway musicals during a celebrated composing career that has spanned more than 30 years, but never a bride. His most recent nomination came for Wicked, the popular big-budget musical that begins a North American road trip with a stop in Toronto, opening March 20.

But last June, Schwartz had to sit in Radio City Music Hall and watch as the cheeky underdog Avenue Q stunned the audience by taking home the night's major awards, including the trophy for best musical and best original score, for which he'd been nominated.

"That was a big deal," Schwartz acknowledges now with a pained look, seated at a round glass table in the dining room of the two-bedroom Hell's Kitchen apartment he uses as his base in New York. "But in retrospect I'm glad about it because it completely cured me entirely of ever thinking about these things or dealing with them again. People kept saying to me this year, 'Were the Grammys fun?' [ Wicked beat Avenue Q at last month's awards for Best Musical Show Album.]And I was like, I don't know, because I wasn't there, because I'm never going to another awards show as long as I live. That's it."

It wasn't just Tonys night that hurt. The span of time between the nominations and the awards, when the talent involved in the shows goes out and presses the flesh with Tony voters, "was one of the most unpleasant six weeks of my life. It was really horrible. You know, most of these people don't like me, and there they are smiling their little fake smiles at me, and I'm not wild about a lot of them, either. It was just six weeks of fraudulence and pandering. And I just thought: I can never ever be part of something like this again.

"I'm extremely bitter about it," he adds, with a curdled purr. "I'm happy to talk about it, I took it extremely personally, I consider it a personal repudiation. I'm very, very bitter and I expect to be bitter about it for the rest of my life." Schwartz pauses, then adds, tongue-in-cheek, "he said cheerfully.

"I'm not a darling of the New York theatre establishment -- the critics, the cognoscenti, the tastemakers within this little island -- and I never have been, and what I realized last year -- and it was a very emotionally positive realization for me -- was that I was never going to be that."

One of the strange things here is that the nasty backbiting politics that Schwartz is talking about are usually associated with Hollywood, but he worked there for much of the eighties and nineties on scores for TV and feature films like Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas, and The Prince of Egypt, and he feels quite warm toward the place. Then again, he has won three Oscars, so why shouldn't he feel warm toward the place?

But even that rosy glow of success comes with some lessons attached. In the corner of Schwartz's living room, on the top shelf of a glass awards case, sits one of his Oscars, and if you look closely, you can see the statuette has lost some of its lustre. Literally. The thin gold leaf has peeled away from the little man's calf, exposing a dull gunmetal grey underneath.

"I just feel that's the perfect metaphor, for awards and for glamour in general," says Schwartz, 57, whose physical appearance and manner of dress proclaims no acute interest in personal vanity or glamour. "The shiny stuff is incredibly thin veneer and then under it is this sort of heavy, lumpen, leadish kind of thing."

But then, we all know surfaces can be misleading, a folk truth that Wicked enjoys playing up. Based on a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, the show offers a revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz by suggesting that the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North may not, in fact, have been as purely evil or good characters as we were led to believe in both L. Frank Baum's story and the 1939 Technicolor film.

"I am very attracted to what I would call Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ideas: something that takes a familiar story that is more or less part of our culture, and suddenly spins it and looks at it from another point of view," says Schwartz. His career is filled with examples of such spins: the classic Godspell, which presents a modern-day version of the gospels; Children of Eden, another off-kilter look at the Bible (in this case, the first half of the Book of Genesis); the TV movie Geppetto, which presents the Pinocchio story from the point of view of someone learning to be a father. Even Pippin, his first Broadway hit, gives the medieval era a modern attitude.

But it was more than the opportunity to give a postmodern wink to Dorothy that attracted Schwartz. There were the politics of the piece. "Americans are extremely uncomfortable with ambiguity," he notes. "They just want things to be simple. You hear over and over again in terms of political leadership: praise of clarity, simple thinking. And that's been increasingly true in America, certainly since the eighties, and I'm not sure that's really a good thing."

The Wicked Witch, here named Elphaba (a name created from the initials of L.

Frank Baum), is a green-skinned freak of nature with magic powers who becomes a convenient scapegoat for a morally vacillating Wizard needing to strengthen his hold over the gullible people of Oz.

The fact that the politics of Wicked happen to reflect the paranoid state of present-day America is an unhappy accident. When Schwartz dreamed up the show in late 1996 and began a campaign to woo the rights for the book away from Universal Studios, which was trying to develop it into a non-musical feature film with Demi Moore's company (oh, the horror!), he saw it more as a metaphor for Nazi Germany. (There is a subplot about the dehumanization, if you will, of the animals in Oz: Once equal members of society, they are chained up and lose the ability to speak.) But musicals take a long time to develop, and by the time the show opened on Broadway in October, 2003, there was no longer a need to reach back in time to find parallels.

But focusing on the politics would, ultimately, do the show a disservice, because it's really more about the relationship between the two witches: one perky blonde adored by all, one green outcast vilified by forces beyond her control. That's the part of the story pulling in young women and helping the show sell out the Gershwin Theatre every night despite its mediocre critical reception.

"It's not such an amazingly original approach," admits Schwartz. "Many writers are attracted to stories of people who feel themselves estranged from the mainstream, for one reason or another, but it's always attracted me." For a ready example, he points to a poster for Hunchback of Notre Dame.

"I think one of the elements of the popular success of Wicked is that there's a little bit of that green girl in everybody." Which is a truth that any almost-Tony-winner can surely understand.