Charlie Smalls It Seems Charlie Smalls, Tony Award-Winning Lyricist

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Charlie Smalls It seems Charlie Smalls, Tony Award-winning lyricist and composer of The Wiz, was born to music. He began playing piano at age three and was giving concerts by five. His mother, a trained musician, tried to dissuade him from pursuing it; she had struggled and was never able to have a full music career. Undeterred, he received a scholarship to study music from the Henry Street Settlement, began training at The Juilliard School when only age 11 and attended the High School of Performing Arts. In 1961, he graduated from Juilliard and began a varied performing and composing career, creating music that has been called “robust and irresistible.” He played with the Air Force Band, was a pianist with the New York Jazz Repertory Company, performed on The Monkees and toured with Harry Belafonte, Hugh Masekela, Esther Morrow and others. Smalls began working on The Wiz in 1970, dedicating three years to completing the score. In 1975, when The Wiz opened on Broadway, Smalls garnered national acclaim. He told the Los Angeles Times, in an interview about his Wiz fame, “That music—maybe you’d call it ‘sophisticated funk’—is a combination of all the music I ever knew.” He went on, “I wrote it all from my heart. The lyrics—they’re my life story. I became the characters to create the characters. I used everything that happened to me on my way here. And believe me, some of it wasn’t so good before it got turned into a song. I’d take a bad thing and make a song out of it.” When asked to sing something from the show, he launched into the Scarecrow’s opening number, “Now that I know that I wasn’t born yesterday / That I’m fully grown I can stand on my own / Nothin’s gonna get in my way / ’Cause I know I’m gonna make it this time.” Sadly, Smalls died at the age of 43 of cardiac arrest during emergency surgery in August of 1987. At the time of his death, he was still performing and working on a new musical. —Dawn Monique Williams An edited version reprinted from OSF’s 2016 Illuminations, a 64-page guide to the season’s plays. For more information on the play, click here. To buy the full Illuminations, click here. Members at the Donor level and above and teachers who bring school groups to OSF receive a free copy of Illuminations. .

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