The way the audience experiences Elphaba’s story meant they skip her childhood and leap ahead from her birth as a green baby in Oz directly to her entry to Shiz University. It takes what would be a moment in a play and stretches it out for 3 ½ minutes or however long it is.”Īs we continued speaking about time flow on the musical stage, I brought up a discussion we had years ago as he and Winnie Holzman were finishing Wicked. But musicals also have characters stopping to sing a song, and that expands time. “Musicals employ devices that play with time that compress it so that a lot of storytelling happens in an artificially brief period of time. Things may jump, but within the scene or act you don’t have the kind of time compression or the stretching of time-it’s not as malleable as it is in musicals. Straight plays tend to take place more in actual time. In opera everything is stretched out for the time it takes to sing it. I think compression is a characteristic of musical theatre that you don’t really see in opera. It takes what would be a moment in a play and stretches it out for 3 ½ minutes or however long it is. Musicals employ devices that play with time that compress it so that a lot of storytelling happens in an artificially brief period of time. ![]() It’s part of story structure-would you agree with that? It’s like a tapestry that you weave, or maybe it’s a ruler that everything gets measured against. It’s a poetic way of saying it.ĬD: It seems to me that time is a big part of musical writing. Stephen Schwartz: Nor am I! It just means over time we remember things, basically. I made a grand entry to our talk time by quoting his lyric from “With You” from Pippin:Ĭarol de Giere: “Time weaves ribbons of memory.” It’s very poetic, though I’m not sure what it means. The following discussion has been edited for clarity. While sitting at a patio table covered in an oddly out-of-sync vinyl tablecloth, Stephen and I explored some of these questions. Musical makers face many questions about how to set up time, like how much should I dip into the character backstories? How far forward in time should I let the story advance? How can I compress the characters’ experiences into brief song moments? I had easily compressed my journey using a modern vehicle, but for musical bookwriters and lyricists, reducing a story journey is often challenging. ![]() Stephen lives closer so could have trotted over in minutes, though that September day he drove his Hyundai hybrid and I my Toyota Corolla. For a moment I imagined myself riding a horse for the rendezvous-it would have taken me about five hours. The former stagecoach stop that predates the American Revolutionary War remains open today as a restaurant. When Stephen Schwartz agreed to meet me for an outdoor dinner to discuss the treatment of time in musicals, I thought the Horse & Hound Inn of South Salem, New York, might be a good setting.
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