In 1998, DreamWorks Pictures released its first traditionally animated feature film: “The Prince of Egypt.” Written by Philip LaZebnik with additional material by Nicholas Meyer, the movie tells the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus as a musical, set to a score by Tony Award nominee Stephen Schwartz.
The movie took home one Academy Award, for Schwartz’s original song “When You Believe,” and was adapted as a stage musical, which bowed in London’s West End at the Dominion Theatre on Feb. 5, 2020. Beginning on Dec. 5, 2023, a capture of that London staging will be released via multiple video-on-demand services, including Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube and BroadwayHD.
“The idea [for ‘The Prince of Egypt’] was first brought to me when DreamWorks was just starting as a studio,” Schwartz explained. “Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg talked to me about the idea of doing the story. It was Steven’s idea to view it from the perspective of a brother story, that it was about these two young men who love each other and yet are torn apart by what their destinies are and their personal responsibilities, and then how can you deal with the differences that you have — really significant differences — through love rather than through enmity?”
