Stephen Schwartz Gives Updates on WICKED Film, Broadway's HOUDINI

Composer Stephen Schwartz attended the opening night of Wicked alumna Idina Menzel's new Broadway musical If/Then Sunday night, and teased that a big screen adaptation of Broadway's long-running musical Wicked may indeed be underway.

"We're starting to do some work on it," the Wicked composer revealed to Vulture. "We've actually started gearing up on it a little bit."

However, he went on to admit, "I don't know exactly how many years away it is."

The six-time Tony nominated composer who brought us such Broadway classics as Pippin and Godspell, spoke about how faithful the film version will remain to the beloved musical, now celebrating ten years on Broadway. "What are we going to change?" he pondered. "What are we going to keep? How do you use a whole new language and medium to tell the story? [We can] really look at it again and say, 'Oh, we can do this, and we've always wanted to do that and we couldn't onstage, but we can in a movie.' We're actually having a blast."

Schwartz also gave an update on his current Broadway project, a musical about the life of famed magician Harry Houdini. The show recently hit a roadblock when its star, Hugh Jackman, had to back out last December. "I think he didn't really understand, to be perfectly honest, how much work a brand-new musical takes," said Schwartz "Every show he's ever done, whether it's been a musical or a straight play, has been a show that somebody else has done ... When he suddenly looked at the fact that he has this other career, it just became impractical for him, frankly."

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Photo Credit: Joan Marcus