The Story Behind Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon"

The Origins of Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon"

By Steven Rosen

After composing the music and lyrics for “Wicked,” one of this decade’s biggest Broadway smashes, Stephen Schwartz decided to move to opera for his next challenge. Only once before had he attempted the form -- what he calls a "very bad one-act opera" while in college.

His new “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” – based on a tense, psychological British suspense film from 1964 – had its world premiere on Sept. 26 with Opera Santa Barbara. The company is celebrating its move into the restored Granada theater by commissioning the new opera from Schwartz. There will be two additional performances on Oct. 2 and 4th.

This is Schwartz’s first full opera – he has written the book and libretto and spent the last three years developing and orchestrating the work. “It’s been all-opera all the time,” he says, by telephone from a friend’s New York apartment. (He lives in Connecticut.) “It’s been unbelievably time-consuming and attention-consuming. I had a co-orchestrator, and it still took me solidly from last November to just a couple weeks ago to get that done.”

The film “Séance” concerns a disturbed medium named Myra Foster, played by the great Broadway actress Kim Stanley, who enlists her husband Bill (Richard Attenborough) in a scheme to kidnap a young girl so she can pretend to use her “powers” to find the victim.

The film by director Bryan Forbes, from a novel by Mark McShane, is well-respected among film buffs and Stanley received an Oscar nomination, but it is not especially known to the public-at-large. “It has the advantage of being both a classic and obscure,” Schwartz says.


For the opera, Schwartz moved the setting from London to San Francisco to take advantage of the kind of rainy, chilly, moody American climate that seems suitable for the story, its sets and costumes. Myra posits that her and Bill’s own deceased 11-year-old son Arthur speaks to her during séances, and she uses him to “find” the young, kidnapped daughter of wealthy industrialist during her trance-like séances.

Of course, it is all a scheme – with her husband’s reluctant support – to garner her attention and fame by “saving” a child after she has lost her own. As one might expect in tragedy, things slowly but spectacularly go wrong as Myra attempts to maintain a pleasant demeanor to the world while hiding her roiling inner neediness and delusions.

Schwartz, 61, has already won three Oscars and three Grammys for his composing, and has been nominated for five Tonys. Before “Wicked,” a celebrated revisionist take on “Wizard of Oz,” his hit stage productions included “Godspell” and “Pippin” – written in the early 1970s, shortly after his graduation from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.F.A in drama.

Born and raised in New York, he took classes at New York’s Juilliard School of Music while still in high school. In Hollywood, he has written lyrics for the Disney musicals “Enchanted,” “Pocahontas,” and “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” (He wrote music and lyrics for the animated film about Moses, “Prince of Egypt.”)

But during all his time as a Broadway/Hollywood composer, he has also been an opera aficionado. In New York City, he was a friend of Michael Jackowitz, a house doctor for the New York City Opera. “It so happens his partner doesn’t like opera, so on many occasions I got to accompany him,” Schwartz says.

Jackowitz now lives in Santa Barbara, and thought of Schwartz when opera officials expressed interest in commemorating a new work. “He said, ‘You should call my friend Stephen Schwartz. He likes opera and said he’d be interested in writing one someday,’” Schwartz explains. (Jackowitz is now “Séance’s” executive producer.)

Contacted by the opera company, Schwartz thought of “Séance,” which he had seen when new. “It’s very memorable – it’s one of those movies with a sustained creepy mood to it, so it stayed with me,” he says. “Obviously, Kim Stanley’s and Richard Attenborough’s performances are remarkable. I was in drama school, so Kim Stanley was one of the heroes. I remembered it for her performance.”

Actually, Schwartz had another reason to remember “Séance.” Shortly after “Wicked” had opened on Broadway, a William Morris Agency literary agent took him to lunch to pitch some ideas for musical theater. One was “Séance.”

“I said to him for several reasons I didn’t think it was a good idea for a musical and then forgot about it – but obviously I didn’t forget about it,” Schwartz says.

“I felt it didn’t have the right energy for musical theater,” he explains. “It’s very dark, which isn’t by itself a problem, since there have obviously been dark musicals like ‘Sweeney Todd.’ But it felt moodier than musical theater, and the characters didn’t feel to me like musical-theater characters in terms of how they would sing.”


However, Schwartz explains, “Séance” did feel appropriate for a modern opera: “It was just as instinctive when I was thinking of what would be a good opera that I thought of it,” he says. “You can use music to create mood more in opera. The music tells the subtextual story much more, so the characters are saying one thing and the music telling you something else.

“And ‘Séance’ has lots of subtext, where things are going on under the surface that are not what the characters are saying. The ways they express themselves vocally, and the kinds of characters they are, just seem more operatic, if you will. That’s all just instinct and I could be completely wrong, but that’s how my response went.”

If there is another film classic close to "Seance" in tone, Schwartz says, it is Billy Wilder's 1950 "Sunset Boulevard," featuring Gloria Swanson as a delusional fading film star cloistered in her mansion. "Theyre very similar underneath in terms of that kind of character who wants something so desperately she makes very misguided decisions that bring her and everyone around her down," Schwartz says. "The ending of 'Séance' is so close in some ways to 'Sunset Boulevard' I had to consciously find ways to not make it the same."

Incidentally, Schwartz did get back in touch with the William Morris agent when he decided to go forward with the opera. “I phoned him and asked, ‘Do you think it will be all right with your clients?’ He said, ‘I don’t represent them, I just thought it would be a good idea.’ That’s one of the first times I’ve heard of an altruistic agent,” he says, laughing.

Working within the idiom of Broadway and movie-musical songs, Schwartz found composing an opera a new and great challenge. “There are certainly set pieces, structured more like arias than musical-theater songs, but they are ‘set pieces’ in the forms of solos, duets, quartets,” he explains.

But that’s not the key distinction between opera and the Broadway musical. “It’s more in the kind of voice and the way music is used,” he continues. “It’s not amplified so you have to compose differently for the voice to be heard above the orchestration. In theater or pop music, you have the music going on and people sing above it, and if you can’t hear them you turn up the microphone.

“You can’t do that in opera so that was a challenge,” he says. And then simply orchestrating was a challenge, because theater writers don’t orchestrate their own work – the closest would be Leonard Bernstein. I’m not talking about a pop score like ‘Godspell’ or ‘Spring Awakening’ where you’re dealing with a small group of pop musicians. This is a 46-piece orchestra, and learning how to write for that has been an enormous learning curve for me.”

The style of music, too, is different, Schwartz says: “I think people who know my work will know I wrote this, (but) it is more in the tradition of modern classical music that Broadway music.”

Still, there are recognizable themes – “One Little Lie,” an aria sung by Myra to Bill when he loses faith in the scheme, is meant to have a sinisterly memorable and suitably haunting minor-key melody. Schwartz also hopes her deceased son’s appearance will result in a suitably ghostly musical theme.


To sing the part of Myra, the medium, Schwartz chose New York City Opera soprano Lauren Flanigan. The baritone Kim Josephson has the part of her husband. Schwartz decided early on about what kinds of voices he wanted, but he still had doubts. “There was some question whether it was better for Myra to be a soprano or mezzo soprano. “Part of that was practical,” he says. “There are more sopranos than mezzos. Lauren Flanigan, who is singing it for me, says I’ve really written a mezzo role with some high notes.

“One of the things I’m consciously trying to achieve is for the words to be understood,” he says. “We will have super titles because audiences expect them now, but I’m trying to make it so you understand every single word without titles. Technically with female voices and with sopranos particularly, once you’re above a certain range it’s almost impossible to understand words. So one has to be conscious if you want comprehensibility and not just sound.”

Schwartz chose his son, Scott, to direct. It will also be his first opera, after the Broadway productions “Bat Boy: The Musical” and “Golda’s Balcony.”

"Working with my father on ‘Séance’ has been a thrilling experience,” Scott Schwartz says via E-mail. “To collaborate with him on the story and to develop a visual language to complement his music and philosophical ideas has been a joy, and always deeply inspiring. He, of course, is known for his work in the musical theater, but he has stretched himself into new styles of music and musical storytelling and, I think, deepened his scope as an artist."

So far, Opera Queensland in Australia has agreed to stage a production, probably in 2011. Schwartz is hopeful there will be more. “Other opera companies expressed interest and will come check it out,” he says. “If they like it and feel they can sell tickets to it, they will put it into their seasons. And if not, not.

“I have been told by various artistic directors and managing directors of opera companies that their audiences are looking to see new pieces,” he says. “Whereas ten years ago if they put a new piece into the season, that would be their least seller, now I’m told the new operas are leading sellers. It is incredibly encouraging if it continues to be true.”

(A different version of this story ran in Jewish Journal of Los Angeles on Sept. 2, 2009.)