By Sally Fuller
It’s not much of a stretch for the Bible to come to mind in relation to Stephen Schwartz musicals.
As a regular “boy wonder” of Broadway in the early ‘70s, the 24-year-old songwriter had used the Book of Matthew as source material for his first hit, the Grammy Award-winning Godspell, which played Off-Broadway, the big screen, and Broadway. Two decades later, he returned to Biblical texts for what is now a community theatre staple, Children of Eden, based on stories of Adam and Eve as well as Noah’s Ark. Even when he ventured into animated features, penning songs for The Prince of Egypt brought him yet again to the Old Testament. He feared his name was becoming so linked to Bible stories, in fact, that he’s quoted in his biography Defying Gravity as almost turning down The Prince of Egypt entirely.
But ironically, one of his least directly bibliocentric pieces makes a stronger case for the Gospel than even his musicals that quote scripture. And that is the story of the purpose-seeking prince Pippin.
Pippin, the son of King Charlemagne (yes that Charlemagne, though the historical significance is hardly relevant), finds himself determined to find a place in the world made uniquely for him. In one of the most textbook “I want” songs in the musical theatre canon, “Corner of the Sky,” he expresses there must be something better out there than running through the motions of royal life. So he sets out to find true fulfillment.
The first stop on his quest takes him to the battlefield, which he quickly realizes is full of gore and too horrifying for his liking. So he does a pendulum swing away from the castle to enjoy life’s simple joys, and then the fleeting pleasures of meaningless sex. He again leaves dissatisfied, finding that loveless hookups leave him feeling emptier than before.
All the while, the story is narrated by a troupe of players, with the Leading Player guiding Pippin along his journey.
In a rather shock
ing Act I finale, he murders his tyrannical father, thinking that his calling must be to take the throne himself so he can do away with the war and suffering so prevalent in the kingdom. Before the first song of the second act, however, unable to achieve the utopia he pictured, he finds himself following in his father’s footsteps. Luckily, stage magic works it out so that the Leading Player brings Charlemagne back to life to rule the kingdom and free Pippin up to go to the next adventure. Gotta love theatre!
After another unsuccessful pursuit (this time dabbling in art and pseudo-religion), his quest leads him to a quaint farm estate. There he befriends the widowed owner (Catherine) and her son (Theo) and agrees to help them tend to the mundane needs of the homestead. Pippin falls in love with Catherine, but decides that his purpose in life must be more exciting than the tedium of family farm life. All according to the Leading Player’s plan, Pippin again feels empty.
So the players tell Pippin that he will only find fulfillment in the grand finale they have for him- to become one with a flame and end his life. Though he really almost does it, something in him halts him just in time, and he is determined that there must be something besides death. But what? Pippin has his “aha” moment that maybe there isn’t anything extraordinary in store for him, but he can imagine feeling content in an ordinary life with Catherine and Theo. To close the show, Catherine asks him how he feels, and he answers, "trapped, which isn't too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta da!" Curtain.
So, we spend this entire show wondering what Pippin’s purpose is, and no doubt relating to him. There’s even the slightest glimmer of hope that perhaps he will discover something earth-shattering that will help us find our Corner of the Sky as well. But after all of this, the answer turns out to be family, or we could extrapolate further and just say “relationships.”
But I just don’t buy it. What is it about family at the end that suddenly appeals to Pippin, a man who has been searching far and wide for just the right thing that will satisfy his longing? And as it applies to my life, what if the odds are not in my favor, and I never have the same aha moment where I feel whatever satisfaction Pippin feels (whatever that feels like)?
The message I strongly infer from this ending is much more Ecclesiastical. (Don’t tell Schwartz he came dangerously close to adapting another book of the Bible here) I think we see a man who searches the world for his purpose in life and comes up short. I can almost hear him quoting Ecclesiastes 2:10-11, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”
Pippin is absolutely right in all of his assessments of the world, even his assessment of family life that causes him to leave Catherine in the first place. At the end of the song “On the Right Track,” his frustration reaches a boiling point, shouting, “I’ll never find it! Never, never, never, never!” Of course, when a character says that kind of thing, we know the opposite will surely be true by the end. But I think he’s actually spot-on.
His quest for fulfillment gets right to the core of humanity, asking the question we all ask, the one that matters most. Like Pippin, every person is born knowing they have a purpose outside of going through any kind of rote motions. We want to be skilled at something and impact the world with it. We want to be appreciated. We want excitement. We want intimacy. And we want all of those desires met in something or someone who won’t fail us. Crafting the right ending for Pippin was an illusive and contentious process for the whole creative team, and I’d wager a guess that it’s because they knew they were getting at something important.
“[Bookwriter] Roger [O. Hirson] and I argued endlessly with [director] Bob [Fosse] and producer Stuart Ostrow,” Schwartz recalls on pages 422-423 of Defying Gravity, “about whether Pippin’s last line should be, ‘Trapped, but happy, which isn't too bad for the ending of a musical comedy’ or eliminate the ‘but happy’ and just say, ‘Trapped…’ We even went into arbitration over it.”
While their working relationship was fraught, it seems Schwartz and Fosse could agree that a happily ever after wouldn’t do justice to a show that asked such an important question. Schwartz says he and Hirson won the arbitration, but that he himself was never all that satisfied with either ending.
When the show was almost 20 years old, a troupe performing Pippin altered the ending yet again. After Pippin’s reprisal of “Magic Shows and Miracles,” Theo enters the spotlight, singing a line from “Corner of the Sky,” at which point the Players close in around him. The idea is that the same thing is about to happen all over again, this time with the next generation.
Schwartz loved this ending so much that he has used it as the licensed version of the show, and it appeared in the 2013 Broadway revival. Perhaps even less helpful than the original ending that suggests that family/relationships are the source of true fulfillment, this one avoids the question, “What is truly fulfilling?” and jumps right to, “Who knows what’s fulfilling? It’s different for every person anyway, so let’s just talk about what we know for sure, which is the journey.” Ta da!
Even as believers, it can be so easy to fall into the trap of looking to worldly things for fulfillment. But the fact is that all of scripture is one big parade of disappointing person after circumstance after idea. David fell into covetousness and adultery. Moses doubted God. Abraham disobeyed God. Job, even with remarkably tenacious faith, finally cracked, and in his pride, demanded God explain himself. In his sovereignty, God demonstrates in the history laid out in his word that there is nothing this earth can come up with that will save mankind from ourselves. We are in desperate need of a savior with some staying power.
Enter Jesus.
God’s plan since the dawn of time wasn’t that the right person would finally come along, but rather that he would have to send his own son to live the life no fallen human could and yet take the punishment that was rightfully ours. Hebrews 4:15 says about Christ, our high priest, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”
Finally, along came a hero who did not doubt God, did not disobey, did not give into pride. In God’s grand finale, there’s no fire, no “trapped”- in fact, God’s grand finale proved that neither the giant stone of the tomb nor death itself could trap his son. He reappeared, not dead at all, but indeed alive, and returned to Heaven to be with his father.
And the greatest news is that Christ himself is the solution to our human plight of longing for something that will satisfy and never disappoint. In John 6:35 (fittingly, after feeding the 5000), we see this, “Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’” Of all things we can delight in that might seem to satisfy us, delighting in the Lord will never fail us. As Psalm 37:4 says, “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
But even the end of the show isn’t the end until there’s a curtain call, is it? And Christ’s curtain call will be the most epic of all time, when he comes back to reclaim his earthly throne and eradicate our sin problem once and for all. Now that’s a “ta-da!” worth looking forward to!
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