Stephen Schwartz Goes To Vienna

Stephen Schwartz' musical “Wicked” set a Broadway record for the highest one-week gross, taking in $3,201,333 for the week ending Dec. 29. The show becomes the first Broadway show to gross over $3 million in one week. (It broke the previous record of $2,947,172, which it also held, for the week ending Dec. 30, 2012.)  In a new project he will compose the score for “Schikaneder,” a German-language musical about the creative and sometimes tempestuous relationship between Emanuel Schikaneder, the 18th- and 19th-century impresario, composer, librettist and singer, and his wife and sometime business partner, Eleonore. The work will have a libretto by Christian Struppeck, the general artistic director of the Raimund and Ronacher Theaters in Vienna. It is scheduled to have its premiere at one of the theaters during the 2015-16 season. Opera fans will immediately recognize Schikaneder as the librettist of Mozart’s 1791 opera “The Magic Flute,” who also sang Papageno in the original production. Schikaneder was a character in the interationally successful musical "Mozart!" by Sylvester Levay and Yours Truly, so we regard this project as a spin-off of our show. May it become as awesome as "Wicked".