Photo: WireImage
What is Stephen Schwartz doing in his downtime with the stagehands on strike? Getting an education. The Broadway composer and lyricist told us he’s still working on an opera (commissioned in 2006) to premiere in Santa Barbara in 2009. “It’s like going back to graduate school a little bit,” Schwartz said at the Enchanted premiere at the Ziegfeld last night. Schwartz revealed to us, for the first time, that the opera is called Cluelessly and Recklessly, and it is a psychological thriller. He said he adapted it from the British film Séance on a Wet Afternoon and is getting used to composing for singers who don’t use microphones — for him, the biggest departure from his Broadway work. “Like in Wicked, you know, the orchestra’s just playing away. Or in Enchanted, the orchestra’s just playing away and you turn the mike up and you hear the singers over the orchestra. In the opera you can’t do that. So you have to make sure there’s space for the singers. So that’s a different way of thinking about writing.” This is Schwartz’s first opera. “That’s why it’s so foolish for me to be doing this!” he said. You call it “foolish”; we call it “the only good theater news we’ve heard since the stagehands’ strike began.” —Amy Odell
