What is the history of PIPPIN?
Stephen Schwartz: PIPPIN began as a show for the Scotch ‘n’ Soda club at Carnegie Mellon University in 1967. S cotch ‘n’ Soda produced an original musical every year, and I had written the songs for the musicals my two previous years there. A friend of mine, Ron Strauss, had seen a paragraph in a history textbook about the son of Charlemagne launching a revolution against his father, and he had begun writing a musical about the idea. We decided to collaborate, thinking it would be fun to do something like a musical “Lion in Winter,” with lots of court intrigue and crackling dialogue. The show was entitled PIPPIN, PIPPIN. The following year, I received a letter from a young man who represented himself to be a New York producer and who said he had heard the album we had made of PIPPIN, PIPPIN and was interested in developing it as a Broadway musical. Ron was (wisely) more suspicious of this letter than I and decided he didn’t want to pursue it. But when I graduated from Carnegie and move
