Human Magic
Composer Zina Goldrich Brings ‘Ever After’ to Phoenix Theatre Company
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photographer Justin Schuman
On weekend afternoons in New York, Zina Goldrich’s parents hosted jam sessions that drew some of the finest musicians of their generation — Billy Taylor, Grady Tate, Eddie Daniels, Roland Hanna. Her father, a physician who spent Monday nights playing trumpet with the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones Big Band at the Village Vanguard, kept a household where music wasn’t an occasion. It was just the air.
“I was just a kid, and I was like, ‘It’s too loud,’” Goldrich says. “But it all sunk in and I loved it. It’s the best way to grow up I can ever think of.”
It sunk in, all right. Fifty years later, Goldrich is one of American musical theater’s most distinctive composers — a writer whose scores carry what she describes as “a lot of jazz voicings, flat nines, sharp thirteens, all sorts of wonderful things like that.” She didn’t choose that vocabulary so much as inherit it, the way children absorb a first language before they know there are others. And this May, she brings the culmination of nearly two decades of creative labor to Phoenix Theatre Company’s Stephenson Theatre: “Ever After,” a full-scale musical based on the 1998 Drew Barrymore film — a revisionist Cinderella story with no fairy godmother, no magic wand and no shortage of ambition.
Goldrich’s path from that living room to this stage winds through an education assembled from multiple traditions. She began classical piano studies young, absorbed pop from the radio, then trained at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York under composers including Maury Yeston. Later, she completed a graduate program in Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television at USC, where she studied with Oscar-winning film composer Jerry Goldsmith. Her first professional job was playing keyboards on the world tour of “A Chorus Line” — a fitting entry point for someone whose career would be spent, in various capacities, working from inside the music outward.
That instinct runs through her years as a working pit musician, something few composers of her standing can claim. She played keyboards on Broadway for “Avenue Q,” “Oklahoma!” and “Titanic” — sitting inside an orchestra, night after night, playing someone else’s score until she knew it from within.
“If you love a score, hearing it from inside the orchestra changes everything,” she says. “When you play something eight times a week, you get deep into it. You discover different things every night, which is wonderful.”
What she discovered, more than anything, was a fundamental lesson about restraint. Music in the theater has a dramatic function, and that function often requires stepping back. Underscoring that draws attention to itself has already failed.
“A lot of the time, you’re writing music for a scene but you have to stay out of the way,” she says. “You never really notice that when you’re watching a show, because if you’re paying attention to the underscoring, it isn’t doing its job. It has to support the drama without calling attention to itself.”
It was Yeston — her mentor, with whom she worked on “Grand Hotel” and “Titanic” — who crystallized that lesson most clearly.
“Knowing when music gets to take center stage, and knowing when to stay out of the way,” she says. “There are comedy songs where your job is to land the jokes — it’s not about the most intricate, fascinating melody you’ve ever written, although you still want to write something musically satisfying. Your main objective is to serve the lyric. But then there are moments where — like when the prince sings his big love ballad, ‘Right Before My Eyes,’ — that music had better be gorgeous and memorable. You need to do your job.”
She has been doing her job on “Ever After” since 2007, when the show had its first New York reading. Since then, it has moved through workshops, a world premiere at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse in 2015, a sold-out run at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2019, a pandemic, a new book collaborator in Kate Wetherhead, a 2023 concert staging in Minnesota and a 2025 workshop in New York. Now Phoenix.
Goldrich saw the film the day it opened, pregnant with her daughter, her mother and sister alongside her.
“There were a lot of people who were very excited to be there,” she recalls. “We had the best time. It was just a wonderful, feel-good, smart telling of the story, and that’s what we hope we’ve done with the musical as well.”
The source material — written by Susannah Grant, Andy Tennant and Rick Parks — retells the Cinderella story without a trace of the supernatural. Danielle de Barbarac is not a girl waiting for magic to save her. She’s an orphaned farmer’s daughter in Renaissance France, fiercely intelligent, who disguises herself as a noblewoman to free a servant friend and accidentally catches the attention of a prince. Leonardo da Vinci serves as a witty mentor. In this telling, the fairy godmother is a genius.
“We like to talk about the power of human magic,” Goldrich says. “It’s not that there’s no magic in the show — there is. It just comes from the power of love. And Leonardo da Vinci is, in our story, the Fairy Godmother. And he’s pretty magical.”
Scoring a fairy tale that refuses to behave like one demands a particular kind of musical honesty. The score cannot reach for enchantment as a dramatic shortcut — it has to carry the emotional weight that magic would otherwise provide. Goldrich’s most direct tool for that is contrast: letting the music say what the character won’t.
“Sometimes a character doesn’t know that she’s lying to herself, but the music is telling the audience how she’s actually feeling,” she says.
She points to “Who Needs Love,” a number in which Danielle, having already met the prince, learns that her stepsister spent time with him — and responds with elaborate, chatty denial. The song is her protesting too much. It’s very “I just don’t care.”
“But when you get to the bridge, the lyric goes ‘love — and its raging fire, and its wild desire, and its drunken haze,’” Goldrich says. “And you’d think, given her attitude, the music would be detached. But the music is so passionate and rhapsodic that you know she’s lying. You just know. That’s the fun of it — the music is telling the audience what she’s feeling even though she won’t admit it to herself.”
This is what nearly 20 years of development buys: the accumulated wisdom of knowing which moments are working and which aren’t — and the patience to act on it. Some songs have barely changed since the first reading. “My Cousin’s Cousin,” which Danielle sings when the prince first encounters her as she tries to slip away, has survived every workshop and production untouched.
Others have shifted — not scrapped, but relocated. “Is There Anything Leonardo Can’t Do?” was originally staged at the ball. Now it opens the court to da Vinci near the show’s start, reframing the whole production’s relationship to its most whimsical character.
“It’s a celebration of him either way,” she says. “We’re just trying it in a different place to see if it works better there.”
The Stephenson Theatre, which Phoenix Theatre Company opened in 2025 as one of only two new regional theater houses built in the country that year, gives “Ever After” infrastructure it hasn’t always had: a full fly loft, an orchestra pit, 500 seats with clear sightlines in every direction. Goldrich visited during local casting and knew immediately.
“That place is gorgeous,” she says. “There’s not a bad seat in the house. I looked around and thought, there’s just no better place we could do this. We’re very excited that they’ve taken a chance on a really big musical.”
What she’s hoping for when the curtain comes down on opening night is simple, and also the hardest thing in theater to achieve.
“Our job as theater creators is to make the audience feel something,” she says. “The worst thing that can happen is that you leave and you don’t even think about what you just saw. But if you go home and you remember bits of it — ‘I liked that song,’ or ‘I loved that scene where they argued,’ or ‘I loved the song when they first met’ — that’s what I hope for.”
She loved writing it. That much is clear. It took a village, and a Vanguard, and the better part of two decades. But the music, as it turns out, was always there — waiting, in the vocabulary she learned before she knew she was learning anything at all.
‘Ever After’
May 6–June 21, 2026 // See website for times // Dr. Stacie J. and Richard J. Stephenson Theatre // Phoenix Theatre Company // 1825 N. Central Ave., Phoenix // $60+ // 602-254-2151 // phoenixtheatre.com