Stephen Schwartz Started 2025 Mentoring Mark Sonnenblick. Now They’re Competing Against One Another for Awards.
SOURCE:Hollywood Reporter|BY:Nicole Fell
Wicked’s Schwartz and KPop Demon Hunter’s Sonnenblick discuss their respective big years, the art of crafting songs for musicals and why it means so much to be honored this year.
In the beginning of 2025, composers and songwriters Stephen Schwartz and Mark Sonnenblick were working as a mentor and mentee, respectively, in the ASCAP Foundation Musical Theatre Workshop. To kick off 2026, the pair now both sit on the Oscars shortlist for original song, likely competing against one another come March.
Schwartz returned to the land of Oz — although he insists he never left given he and fellow Wicked writer Winnie Holzman are constantly dealing with new productions of the musical — penning two new songs for Wicked: For Good, Cynthia Erivo’s “No Place Like Home” and Ariana Grande’s “The Girl in the Bubble.” He’s already landed a Golden Globe nomination for both tracks, which were also shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Awards.
Sonnenblick, the mentee of the pair, found himself co-writing one of the year’s biggest hits, “Golden,” from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters. The song made the ultimate crossover to mainstream music, landing atop the Billboard Hot 100 and constantly being played on a loop on the radio. Much like his mentor, Sonneblick scored a Golden Globe nomination for “Golden” and was shortlisted for this year’s Oscars.
Despite warring awards campaigns, Schwartz and Sonneblick both seem thrilled for one another, the latter spending some of this Zoom call finally getting to ask his mentor burning questions about songwriting and Wicked’s new songs.
Below, the pair discuss their mentor-mentee relationship, why they’re so thrilled to be recognized this year in particular and how they each crafted their respective hits.
You were mentor and mentee in ASCAP’s Foundation Musical Theatre Workshop. Can you tell me more about that experience?
SONNENBLICK [Writing for musical theater] is such a niche passion. I grew up in California with a family that loved theater. We got to see some Broadway shows, but [it] was very distant from the world of professional theater. And to come to New York and know a few people, just so quickly there is this community and this sense of through programs like the Dramatists Guild and then eventually, the ASCAP workshop, [which I] finally had a chance to [do] earlier this year.
I love writing musical theater. I think there’s just this instinct to be like, let’s talk about it. Let’s discuss this thing. Growing up, my life changed the first time I ever saw a show. I’m just lucky, I mean certainly to be on a call and get to discuss projects like this, but that things like ASCAP workshop exist. I was telling you the other night, Stephen, just watching YouTube videos of you talking about the process. It is such a singular process. Not that everybody doesn’t work differently, but this legacy of this weird art form over decades that if you’re into it, you become fascinated by the people who inspire you so deeply and are just masters of it. [We’re] lucky that they’re sometimes willing to share that mastery and an insight with you.
SONNENBLICK With some friends, I’d written an adaptation of this movie Weekend that is a beautiful movie. It uses pop music in a sideways way to tell the story. The main characters don’t sing. The songs are in dialogue with the play that’s happening and the story and the emotion being told. But it’s not coming directly from the language and the heart of the characters, which is also a way that I love to write, and Stephen is one of the best at all kinds of writing, but especially [that].
SCHWARTZ There are ways to use song in film that are more oblique in montages. We are seeing a character go through some action and you’re hearing a song play on the soundtrack, and it’s not necessarily a direct reflection of what the character him or herself would sing, but it gives a kind of feel to it. I find that kind of technique very interesting, and it’s sort of what Mark and his collaborators were experimenting with in this musical of Weekend. It was one of the things that made what they were doing both challenging but interesting.
Why is it important for you to help the next generation, Stephen?
SCHWARTZ I like going to good musical theater, whether it’s on stage or in film. It is challenging, it’s difficult to do. There are a lot of pitfalls and there are a lot of mistakes that we all make. Well, of course we continue to make mistakes, but there are sort of rookie mistakes that are somewhat avoidable if someone has warned you about them in advance.
Part of it for me is that I like talent and getting to know talented people. It’s interesting and instructive to me to see what their processes are and how their minds work. But the other is purely just the selfishness of wanting to have good musicals to attend and therefore encouraging the talented people who can make them.
You began the year working together in this program, as you said earlier, and now you’re ending it likely competing against one another for awards.
SONNENBLICK It’s amazing that it’s musicals though. Not that there aren’t musical movies that come through, but in kind of an amazing year for really musical movies, and with Sinners too.
SCHWARTZ This was a big year [with] a lot of people doing good work. Some years it’s quite arid.
SONNENBLICK Or the songs in contention are more of a credit song. It’s just cool. Hopefully opportunities for future musical movies [will arise]. What’s so great about theater is you have to go in person and see whatever it is, but when it’s a movie, the reach is just so much bigger to be able to tell these kind of musical stories.
Both KPop Demon Hunters and Wicked are movie musicals but they both also crossed over into mainstream music and popular culture. This certainly isn’t always the case.
SCHWARTZ Way, way back musical theater songs were also the pop hits. Then there was an enormous divergence before Mark was born, but when I was a kid, where you couldn’t get on pop radio if you sounded too much like a musical theater song. Then there was the period of time of the Disney animated movies, which integrated musical theater storytelling — thanks to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken and those of us who followed along — but still the songs became part of pop culture. There was a bit of a divergence again, but for those of us who like storytelling that utilizes songs, it’s very encouraging to have it return to more mainstream pop culture.
SONNENBLICK Stephen, I’m so curious. You just as a writer — who throughout your career was writing in so many different ways — but when you were making your first shows in New York, bringing popular music into theater and into musical theater in a way that was not very prevalent. I feel like your writing at that time, and part of the reason it resonated and did crossover was because you were using pop music and integrating it in kind of a pretty novel way back then. How did you feel? Was that something you were consciously thinking about? What the landscape was like?
SCHWARTZ You’re correct that I, along with Alan Menken, a little bit later than me but not much, and Andrew Lloyd Webber over in England, the three of us were young. We were writing the kind of music that, well, I’ll speak for myself, I shouldn’t speak for Alan and Andrew. They may have entirely different motivations and stories. I was writing the kind of music that I was listening to and using that kind of music to illuminate character and tell stories seemed perfectly natural. But to some of the theater establishment at the time, there was some resistance to it.
People felt you couldn’t really do that. You can do something like Hair where you use pop songs more or less in a review. But if you are really doing storytelling, if you are really having characters, then you have to use traditional Broadway music. Of course, over time that changed and now essentially all Broadway musical scores are pop scores mostly, but Mark is correct that when I started out a million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, that was unusual and there was a degree of resistance to it.
Mark, what was the collaboration like on KPop Demon Hunters?
SONNENBLICK A beautiful thing about songwriting… Any project, you are collaborating with so many different artists in these very collaborative art forms, certainly when you’re part of a bigger story. Stephen referring earlier to learning things that are the easy mistakes to make that maybe just by hearing someone talk about it, seeing a song in isolation, it might be the best song in the world that you’ve ever heard, but then when it’s in context, it doesn’t work at all. And that’s when you learn from scriptwriters, you learn from directors or choreographers. Every collaboration, I feel like I’m taking so many things away, whether it’s a direct musical style or something that you can literally hear in another project.
Can you tell me about working with EJAE?
SONNENBLICK EJAE is in so many ways such a singular artist and writer and performer. But also the amount of time that we spent kind of in the weeds on these songs, it’s the closest pop collaboration that I’ve had. I learned so much from her about the way that words sit on the voice. She would topline melodies over the production tracks. “Golden”‘s a good example where we have an instrumental but no melody, no lyrics and this incredible instrumental that The Black Label made. EJAE then takes that and comes up with 10 different melodies, and they’re all amazing in different ways.
Part of what’s so theatrical about [K-pop], in a cool way, is that the sections can be so different from each other in a very dynamic way, and so there is this little bit — EJAE calls it Frankensteining — [where] you’re putting together these things and trying them in context. Some of that’s melodic, but there’s also conceptually too — this line for this character, OK, maybe we need to move it later, maybe we need to move this. That kind of process I had never really done before, and it was amazing to go through that with her, both in terms of the construction of the song, but then also, how do these lyrics sit on the melody? When does something work, when does something not work? Whether I’m writing pop or not, I will absolutely be taking that with me in my DNA in a way it wasn’t before.
Stephen, did it feel like you were revisiting Wicked when writing these new songs for Wicked: For Good?
SCHWARTZ It didn’t feel like revisiting. It just felt like a continuation of the process that Winnie and I did when we first created the show. Maybe if the show was over and we were now coming back to [it, we] would’ve felt differently, but the show is still running. We’re constantly dealing with a new production of it here or there, so it’s very fresh for us.
It didn’t feel as if we were suddenly going back and wedging things in. The truth is that if the storytelling of the second movie hadn’t required new songs and a great deal of revision and new sections to existing songs, we wouldn’t have done it. The songs in the first movie are essentially the first act of the show, [there’s] an expansion in one song, which is “One Short Day,” where we wanted to get an idea of how the Wizard was using propaganda to create his alternate facts. We expanded that song, but other than that, there was no additive reason to do a new song. In the second movie, there were a lot of reasons to either revise, expand or do entirely new work in order to tell the story successfully.
SONNENBLICK The songs are so seamlessly integrated — both in terms of the storytelling and these pivotal moments for the characters — but musically too. I am just so curious since we’re on the call together and I get to ask Stephen questions.
Please, go ahead.
SONNENBLICK When you’re thinking about the sound of the new songs [like “The Girl in the Bubble”], when you’re finding what Glinda sounds like, I’m so curious what that process is like.
SCHWARTZ I was thinking more of the characters than I guess the overall sound of the score itself. Glinda has these two voices. She has a pop voice that is more genuinely who she is, and then she has her soprano, which is the public face that she wears. Because this song is her turning point, because she’s leaving behind the young woman, the girl, to use the title that she is, and she feels she can no longer do that. Then she had to change in both voices, if you know what I mean. I knew at some point I felt we needed to integrate the soprano. Then I felt because she’s stripping away a lot of artifice that the music needed to be very simple, almost a folk song in terms of its melody.
It always feels like the sort of harmonies come up from the ground and up through her, and that’s what I was going for in “No Place Like Home.” That it just felt more… it’s so hard to talk about these things. The low-end power of Elphaba I felt should come into that song. These aren’t decisions that you hold at arm’s length, as Mark can tell you, and you work it all out intellectually, and then you go and fulfill that intellectual theory that you’ve come up with. It’s very instinctive, but it is about trying to have the characters inside you and see through their eyes and have the music reflect who they are at this particular moment in the story.