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The Wizard and I

 The great gift of Stephen Schwartz is an ability to invent people with monster-sized, epic desires--people who can fight. A Schwartz hero is unhappy with the world--not just with one academic class, or with one annoying boss--and a Schwartz hero is ready for earth-shaking drama.


Of course, Schwartz looks to Eve, from the Old Testament:

We think all we want is a lifetime of leisure--
Each perfect day the same.
Endless vacation....
Well, that's all right if you're a kind of crustacean--
But when you're born with an imagination--
Sooner or later, you're feeling the fire
Get hotter and hotter....
The spark of creation....

And Schwartz basically "repackages" Eve when he writes a story about Oz:

I'm through accepting limits--
'Cause someone says they're so.
Some things I cannot change--
But, till I try, I'll never know....

Real talent tends to announce itself early, and Schwartz was around twenty years old (twenty!) when he wrote his first canonical "want" song:

Shall crime bring crime forever?
Strength aiding, still, the strong? 
Is it thy will, O Father, 
That men shall toil for wrong?
NO, say thy mountains.
NO, say thy skies. 
Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise--
And songs be heard--instead of sighs.
God save the people....

Here, Schwartz casts the apostles as socialist crusaders, asking God to do battle with capitalism.

This extraordinary writer is still at work after several decades; he now has his focus on a new oddball, "the Queen of Versailles." I'm told that Kristin Chenoweth is working with SS; I'll believe this if and when I see the evidence on Broadway. My fingers are crossed.
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