Perhaps there's a worse librettist in the history of musicals than Stephen Schwartz but I don't know one. What the hell does the lyric "morning glow/fill the earth/come and shine/for all you're worth/we'll be present/at the birth/of old faith looking new..." mean? He begins with a vague hopeful image but then the sentence keeps going and going, desperately trying to find it's point; the next twelve words do little to deepen things.
This is what annoys people about musicals. You can get away with perky, poorly written sentiment tossed away as dialogue (I've just named every drama that won an Oscar in the last 70 years) but as songs, the schlock is transparent. It's called padding; it appears most often on college exams and in poor creative efforts from the 60s and 70s. It was all Fosse could do to undermine this amorphous treacle with his more acid take on things. Schwartz could make a decent melody but his lyrics...ugh. Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself.
Pippin is absolutely trite, and in it's current form it barely resembles Fosse's work.
This is what annoys people about musicals. You can get away with perky, poorly written sentiment tossed away as dialogue (I've just named every drama that won an Oscar in the last 70 years) but as songs, the schlock is transparent. It's called padding; it appears most often on college exams and in poor creative efforts from the 60s and 70s. It was all Fosse could do to undermine this amorphous treacle with his more acid take on things. Schwartz could make a decent melody but his lyrics...ugh. Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself.
Pippin is absolutely trite, and in it's current form it barely resembles Fosse's work.