[There have been a number of articles and TV programs devoted to or featuring coverage of the creative life and career of theater composer John Kander (b. 1927) during the past few months. On Friday, 24 March, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proclaimed John Kander Day and unveiled a new street sign that renamed the block of 44th Street that runs in front of the St. James Theatre “Kander & Ebb Way” in honor of Kander and his longtime lyricist partner Fred Ebb (1928-2004).
[The renaming ceremony coincided with the first preview of the duo’s newest original musical, New York, New York, playing at the St. James. The event was held just days after Kander’s 96th birthday on 18 March. As part of the ceremony, Lin-Manuel Miranda (b. 1980), who provides additional lyrics to New York, New York, recited the words to the song “First You Dream” from the 1997 Kander and Ebb musical Steel Pier. Then, students from the Manhattan School of Music performed the title song from New York, New York.
[When I watched a report by Jeffrey Brown on the PBS NewsHour on 8 June, I decided to go back via the Internet and collect some of those pieces and post them here. I ended up with five pieces, including a lengthy New York Times profile of the composer by Jesse Green and a transcript of the joint session with Kander and his latest collaborator, Miranda, on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. I also added the review of New York, New York’s Broadway opening from Variety, the national entertainment industry publication.
[The resulting draft ended up too long to remain a single post, so I split it in two, arranged the components in chronological order by publication and air dates (except for the Variety review, which appears at the end of the collection as a kind of final word).]
“THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT: LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA/JOHN KANDER”
[The first piece in my John Kander assemblage is the double interview of Kander and Miranda by host Stephen Colbert on CBS-TV’s The Late Show. The episode originally aired on Tuesday, 4 April 2023 (Season 8, Episode 97); when the late-night talk show went into reruns because of the Writers Guild of America’s strike (see “2023 Writers Guild Strike,” 1 June 2023, and “‘AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can’t Go Quietly’” by Justine Bateman, 4 June 2023), it was repeated on 5 June.
[A few words about the transcription below: There were actually two posted transcripts, one complete—including the commercials!—and one reproducing only a section of the interview. The video of The Late Show had captions, which were also “complete,” but not always accurate. The captions, which were line-by-line—i.e., no paragraphing or other divisions—were in all caps.
[The other “complete” text was in all lower case, even the names, and also un-paragraphed—one, long passage. None of the transcripts was accurate—they often contradicted one another—so after typing them up—the “complete” transcription didn’t allow copying—I had to go back and listen to the video in a stop-rewind-and-go method to reconcile them with the recording.
[So, the result you will read below is a combination of three transcribers and my own rendering of the conversation, plus my interpretation of the punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and other typographical considerations. I’ve also added some bracketed explanatory and identifying insertions I thought would be helpful.]
Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Kander talk about their writing process, which unfolds with ease each time they start a new project, despite the significant age gap between them. Kander and Miranda’s new show, “New York, New York,” is playing now at Broadway’s St. James Theater.
Stephen Colbert: Ladies and gentlemen, my guests tonight are Broadway legends, with over 20 musicals under their belts. One of them wrote the scores for “Cabaret” [1966-68; three Broadway revivals] and “Chicago” [Broadway première, 1975-77; Broadway revival, 1996-Present; longest running American musical in Broadway history]. The other one created “In the Heights” [Off-Broadway (37 Arts/Theatre A in Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton), February-July 2007; Broadway, 2008-11] and “Hamilton” [Off-Broadway (Joseph Papp Public Theater/Newman Theater in the East Village), February-May 2015; Broadway, 2015-Present] Please welcome to “The Late Show,” Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Kander!
John, thank you for being here. Lin, always a pleasure. Welcome back.
[CHEERS and APPLAUSE.]
Look at that. You don’t get that every night.
John Kander, Lin-Manuel Miranda, lovely to see both of you. You are both giants of the musical theater world.
John, you’ve been at it a little bit longer than Lin over there. How old are you, Sir?
John Kander: 96.
Stephen Colbert: 96. Born in 1927, then?
John Kander: Yes.
Stephen Colbert: This theater was built in 1927. Yeah, you guys are twins.
John Kander: I feel so much better now,
Stephen Colbert: When did Lin come on your radar?
John Kander: I can remember that exactly. I went to see an Off-Broadway production of “In the Heights” because a friend of mine was in it. I didn’t know anything about him [indicating Lin-Manuel Miranda], and I saw this miracle on the stage. And I stayed behind to – I’m not a very aggressive person, but I did stay behind because I wanted to meet him and find out who was responsible for this. [LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE.]
Well, that’s really true.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: That’s really true and he invited me to lunch and I was so scared – ’cause here I am, eating lunch with the guy who wrote some of my favorite musicals, and we sat down around the corner from your house, and the first thing he said to me was, “Do you ever feel when you’re writing a song like you have no idea what you’re doing?” and that immediately, like, leveled the playing field and then we just started talking about songwriting. We are still talking about it 15 years later.
John Kander: And it’s funny, our series of luncheons were something that just sort of evolved. I learned a lot from him, and still am. And we became fast friends. And so, here we are.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Here we are, inside the TV.
Stephen Colbert: There it is. There you go.
Well, so you guys started working together after those lunches and now you’re working on “New York, New York.” What is that about?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: “New York, New York” is . . . well, it takes its name and the barest slivers of plot from the original [1977] Scorsese film, starring Robert de Niro and Liza Minelli. But it really is a love letter to New York City.
It takes place just after World War II and it’s about musicians coming to the city – citizens coming from all over the world to become themselves in New York. That song that John so brilliantly writes, they are looking for their major chord which is music, money, love, not necessarily in that order.
Stephen Colbert: Let’s talk about the title song. John what do you remember about writing “New York, New York”? I know that the form of the song that we all know and love now is no longer the original form of the song.
John Kander: Thank God. [LAUGHTER.]
Stephen Colbert: I would agree. I have heard the original.
John Kander: You have?
Stephen Colbert: I have.
John Kander: You must be killed.
Stephen Colbert: I heard that Terry Gross interview.
[Gross is host of an interview-based radio show distributed nationally by National Public Radio. Her program, Fresh Air, aired a segment with Kander on 17 March 2017; it was broadcast on WNYC, the NPR outlet in New York City.]
I think you did a good job on that rewrite of that song. How did it come about?
John Kander: Well, Fred and I . . .
Stephen Colbert: Fred Ebb, your writing partner for so many years.
John Kander: We went down . . . . We were assigned to write a score for what we called “New York, New York.” Martin Scorsese was directing it and Liza Minelli and Robert de Niro were in it. And we went down to Marty’s office and we played our score. I think there were seven, eight songs, something like that. He and Liza were very complimentary.
And we started to go home. Over on the couch was somebody we hadn’t met, and that was Robert de Niro. All we saw of him was an arm that went up. Scorsese said, “Excuse me just a minute. Robert de Niro wants to speak with me.”
He went over and sat on the couch with him and then I saw two arms doing that. [Demonstrates raising an arm and waving.] And then Scorsese came back and in the most embarrassed way said that de Niro feels that the title song, which is associated with him, is not as strong as “The World Goes ’Round,” which is associated with Liza’s character, He really could hardly get the words out. He said, “Would you guys mind going back and taking another crack at it?”
Stephen Colbert: How did you feel about that?
John Kander: Freddy and I, in our politest stiffness, said, “Of course.” [LAUGHTER.]
Stephen Colbert: Of course they lied. [LAUGHTER.]
John Kander: Anyway, we left and we went back to Freddy’s apartment, and we were so pissed off that some actor was going to tell us how to wrote . . . .
Stephen Colbert: Some actor. “Bobby d” somebody or other.
John Kander: Anyhow, we went into Freddy’s study and in 45 minutes wrote this other song that we know as “New York, New York,” and we took it back, and they got to it and liked the song.
The point of it all is that de Niro was absolutely right. The original song we wrote was so embarrassing.
Actually, Sam Davis, our music coordinator, sneaked it into the underscoring.
Stephen Colbert: So it is somewhere in this musical?
John Kander: I’m not telling you where.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: By the way, I think that’s the secret of the song’s success and why it has become a New York anthem. Because they wrote it while they were a little pissed off and I think every New Yorker is a little pissed off.
Stephen Colbert: Who do you think you are? I’ll show you greatness.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: That has just a little “[BLEEP] you” in it. A little “bam, bam, bad-uh-duh” [scats the song’s thematic beat].
Stephen Colbert: The line “If you can make it there” . . . it’s one of the most famous lines in the song and one of the most famous things associated with New York now. What is the moment you realized you had made it?
Lin, let’s start with you.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: I always say I’ll never make a bigger leap in my life than going from substitute teacher at my old high school to Broadway composer, which was the leap I made when “In the Heights” made it from Off-Broadway to Broadway. I was still sobbing.
Stephen Colbert: You weren’t even a permanent teacher.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: I relied on teachers at my old high school to get sick five times a month and then I could pay my rent.
So that was the biggest leap I’ll ever take in my life.
But I think the moment was kind of . . . I think the moment you realize you’re a New Yorker is when you can walk into your bodega and they just start making the order because you are there every day.
Stephen Colbert: They know.
John, what is your . . . what’s your sense of being a New Yorker, John? Do you have a thing you associate with really being a New Yorker?
John Kander: Yeah. Some of it I think is . . . I was saying in the other room, something I didn’t realize until today. I think I have always been a New Yorker, even when I was growing up in Kansas City. [LAUGHTER.]
Stephen Colbert: What is that ineffable thing?
John Kander: Okay. This is the substance of the show, really, and it’s something I believe truly, deeply.
I think that New York City is the greatest social experiment that the world has ever seen. [APPLAUSE.]
Stephen Colbert: What are the elements of the experiment?
John Kander: I think everybody lives in New York and everybody’s natural enemy lives in New York. Truly. And the fact is, for the most part, they don’t kill each other. And if you think of other big cities in the world . . . you think of London and all of the people who live there from all over the world and the English. Think of all the people in Paris and all of the people from all over the world who live there and the French. In New York, there is only others. [APPLAUSE.]
[COMMERCIAL BREAK.]
Stephen Colbert: We are back with two of the biggest names on Broadway, the composers of the new musical, “New York, New York,” John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
You say that you you've been writing since you were quite small. I want to get to what your first song was in just a moment.
Lin, do you remember the first song you wrote?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think it was into my Fisher-Price tape recorder. It was called “The Garbage Pail Kids Are In Town.” It was about all the different Garbage Pail Kids [a series of sticker trading cards produced by the Topps Company, originally released in 1985] because I collected Garbage Pail Kids cards and they were coming to town.
Stephen Colbert: John, what was your first song? Do you remember?
John Kander: Yeah. It was it was a Christmas carol I wrote when I was in second grade. I didn't find out until many years later that my second-grade teacher, Miss Mathews, had called my folks and said, “I just want to tell you that John wrote a Christmas carol. Is that all right? Because I know you're Jewish.” [LAUGHTER.]
Stephen Colbert: What did your folks say? Was that okay?
John Kander: That was fine with them. They tried to explain to me that there was more to it than that. [LAUGHTER.]
Stephen Colbert: You wrote for so many years. You wrote for over 40 years with your partner, Fred Ebb. What is it like to continue to compose and create songs without him? What are the challenges and what are some of the discoveries you made?
John Kander: Well, after Freddy died in 2004, there were some left-over projects which I vowed to finish. And I began to work with other people, with myself, and I think I found out that I couldn't not write. And that's really the whole secret.
It's like a habit that you just can't get rid of, and I've been really, really lucky that I get to play in the sandbox with people like him. [Points to Lin-Manuel Miranda. APPLAUSE.]
Stephen Colbert: Lin, I know that you have been inspired by John and Fred Ebb and I understand that you wrote “The Room Where It Happens,” extraordinary song from “Hamilton,” as a love letter to them. How so?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yeah, that’s my song in “Hamilton” that’s my little hat nod to Kander and Ebb. It's a very different style from the rest of it because, and again, we've had many conversations about how we don't recognize our own styles.
I told John this and he said, “What are you talking about?” The only real tell is at the end of that song. If you listen, it goes . . . the great Leslie Odom, Jr., sings, “I want to be in the room,” and then he goes, “click, boom, pshhh,” and that’s “All That Jazz” [from Chicago]. That is a straight-up “All That Jazz” steal. And that’s my little love letter to them.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK.]
Stephen Colbert: We are back with the great John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
John, who were some of your heroes? You are a hero of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Who were some of your heroes when you were coming up and first create your music?
John Kander: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern.
Every generation had its own – not just musical heroes but influences and what really kind of dazzles me, when we work together, that we are separated by not just two generations, by three generations. And yet the actual process of writing and working is almost absurdly easy.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yeah.
Stephen Colbert: Really? Even though sometimes when you approach a . . . start a song, you think, “I don’t know what I’m doing”?
John Kander: But you never know what you’re doing.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: But we go there together.
Stephen Colbert: That’s a lonely place to be alone. What is that feeling like when you realize you’ve gone from not knowing to knowing something? How does that happen? What is the mysterious moment when the blank page turns into not an accusation but a possibility?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: We talk about that all the time actually.
John Kander: In the first place, you never know much. You really don’t.
But something begins to happen and if you’re working with another person, you begin to pile idea on idea – and it’s an adventure. And if you don’t put some god up there telling you that’s no good, you can go ahead and just do it.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yeah, and his hands are really fast. A lot of what writing is to us is us just eating bagels and talking about what’s on TV and then at a certain point, we will turn to the piano and talk about the idea we have. His hands will start going and I will just start trying to write words to keep up with what’s coming out of his hands and the first song we wrote together, the opening number of “New York, New York,” we wrote in about an hour and 15 minutes.
I filmed us singing through it for the first time and there’s a moment where we are looking at each other. [BLEEP] this exists now! [APPLAUSE.]
John Kander: He just said something really important I think a lot of people don’t understand with people who make art, tf you will. One of the great . . . one of the great things about making stuff is something is there that was not there before. I can’t tell you what an ego trip that is.
Stephen Colbert: John, thank you so much for being here. Lovely to talk to you. Lin, as always, thank you. “New York, New York” is on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. Here you go. Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Kander!
[New York, New York was nominated for Tony Awards, handed out on Sunday, 11 June, in nine categories, including best musical. The ceremony was held uptown at the United Palace, 175th Street and Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights.
[Of the nine nominations, New York, New York won one award, Best Scenic Design of a Musical to Beowulf Boritt (who also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Scenic Design of a Musical).
[John Kander was separately honored with a special award for lifetime achievement in the theater, presented by his latest collaborator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. For the awards show, which substituted performances for spoken speeches, jokes, and introductions, the cast of New York, New York performed the musical's opening number, “Cheering for Me Now,” and the title tune, “New York, New York.”].
* *
* *
“A MAJOR CHORD,
UNDIMINISHED”
by Jesse Green
[On 9 April 2023, New York Times review-writer Jesse Green published this lengthy profile of Kander in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday paper.]
John Kander, composer of ‘Chicago’ and ‘Cabaret,’ is making a brand-new start of it with ‘New York, New York.’
It’s not that John Kander wasn’t touched by John Kander Day. The composer of the song “New York, New York” — played at every Yankees home game and known worldwide from its first five notes — was obviously moved when the city’s mayor handed him a framed proclamation in front of the St. James Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Nor was he jaded, he later said, about having that block of West 44th Street, from Broadway to Eighth Avenue, christened Kander & Ebb Way in recognition of his work and that of Fred Ebb, his longtime lyricist, who died in 2004.
Still, of Kander’s thousands of songs, seven movie scores and 20 major musicals, including “Chicago” and “Cabaret”, not one bar was written with the idea of getting a piece of pavement named for him. If Ebb, with his brasher, needier personality, would have eaten up the honor, Kander seems at best to withstand it, embarrassed by too much attention or praise. He is so militantly unassuming that the highest compliment he will pay himself is the one his mother used to offer: “A horse can’t do any better.”
So on March 24, as a choir sang and a crowd cheered and his friend Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ebb’s beautiful lyric for the song “First You Dream,” Kander, who had turned 96 days earlier, was thinking less about what was going on outside the St. James than what was going on inside it. There, a few hours after the ceremony, his 16th new Broadway musical, “New York, New York” — named for “that song,” which he doesn’t even like — would offer its first public preview. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman [b. 1954], it is set to open on April 26.
Though the plot is only tangentially related to that of the 1977 Martin Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, the stage musical, with a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, naturally includes its big numbers. Others are from the Kander and Ebb trunk, some never previously performed onstage. But much of the score is new. Six songs are collaborations with Miranda, who said the problem with writing lyrics for Kander is “just keeping up” as the melodies pour out, sometimes via voice memo at 3 in the morning. The rest, whether swingy or Schuberty or uncategorizable, are by Kander alone.
At an age when most artists are resting on their laurels, or beneath them, Kander, the last of the great Golden Age composers, just keeps going. Other than arthritis in his hands, he is unimpaired physically; he trots up and down the three-story spiral staircase to his studio faster than I dared when I spent a few hours there with him. To the annoyance of his husband, Albert Stephenson, and everyone around him, he eats dessert regularly and generously, with no ill effect. “I do my chores, too,” he said: washing the dishes and making the bed, tight as a drum, as he was taught at Camp Nebagamon when he was 10.
Well, lots of people remain spry seemingly forever. What worries artists, and especially composers, is the possibility of drying up creatively. Even musical theater titans like [Richard] Rodgers and [Irving] Berlin succumbed to harmonic meekness and rhythmic sclerosis as they approached their 70s. Certainly after Ebb’s death, and after fulfilling a promise to shepherd as many of the team’s unfinished musicals to Broadway as he could — “Curtains” in 2007, “The Scottsboro Boys” in 2010 and “The Visit” in 2015 — Kander might have been expected to coast into retirement on tributes and revivals.
But no: Even before that job was finished, he’d jumped back into the water. In 2013 came “The Landing,” in 2017, “Kid Victory,” and in 2018 a dance play based on the Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle.” All three pieces, produced Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, were experimental in a way you might expect from someone at the start of a career, not seven decades into it. And now, even as “New York, New York” opens, another show is aborning.
So it seems almost Sisyphean that while a music assistant is busy digitizing Kander’s archive and preparing the paper assets for eventual donation to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the man himself is sitting nearby at a keyboard, cranking out more every day.
That’s not the right phrase, though. Even if he were in fact profoundly lazy, as Ebb insisted and Kander does not deny, composing is hardly drudgery for him. It’s more of a geological process, water rising from an aquifer, desperate to be tapped. If he doesn’t let the music out through his hands — or block it by listening to somebody else’s — it might drown him.
Which means he is always listening: Music plays in his head, he said, “like a radio you can’t turn off.” It began, he believes, some 35,000 John Kander Days ago, when, as a baby in Kansas City, Mo., he contracted tuberculosis. Isolated on a sleeping porch and able to sense his family only when they approached the screen door, he learned to associate the sound of footsteps coming toward him with the imminence of loved ones. “I think I began to organize sound in my head then, out of necessity.”
Footsteps go both ways though. If, as he said, a “residue of loneliness” remains from that experience, it’s a loneliness for which “the most fortunate antidote” has been companionship and collaboration. Though many people assumed that Kander and Ebb were a couple — their 45-year partnership was more intense and monogamous than many marriages — the men were not socially close. But he and Stephenson, a dancer in Kander and Ebb’s “The Act,” have been together since 1977, married since 2008. Some of Kander’s loveliest songs were written not for any show but for him.
As for collaboration, it’s no accident that Kander surrounds himself with a rotating roster of familiar names. “Next to the greatest sex you can imagine, making art with your friends is as good as it gets,” he said. He’s worked with Stroman six times, Thompson eight times and Washington, a featured performer in “The Scottsboro Boys,” twice. Half the music team are old Kander hands too, making the March 14 sitzprobe [German for ‘seated rehearsal’; first run-through of an opera or musical in which the orchestra and singers rehearse together and the singers sit or stand at microphones, but don’t perform any actions or movements] — the first rehearsal with the cast and the orchestra — a reunion and, as it happened, a party. You haven’t really heard “Happy Birthday” until a Broadway chorus of 37, accompanied by 19 crack musicians, sings it in a crowded, reverberant room.
“There are a lot of really gorgeous places to be on this earth,” Kander told them, “but none as gorgeous as this.”
That a love parade attends him wherever he goes — I’m part of it, having worked for him 40 years ago, sleuthing for a lost score — doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. At the sitzprobe he spoke rarely but made his points. Wanting a song called “A Simple Thing Like That” to be “less waltzy,” he suggested removing the triangle from the downbeats. For “Light,” one of the new Kander-Miranda songs, painting in ethereal music a portrait of Manhattanhenge [see Manhattanhenge 2023: Where & How to See It | AMNH], he asked for a more unpredictable spacing of the dissonant chords that bring it to such a startling close. And “Gold,” a flamboyant conga sequence, needed more schmaltz. “Lower your standards,” he instructed the orchestra.
As that sampling of song types attests, “New York, New York” tells many stories, about people from many backgrounds. The main one is the troubled romance between a Black singer (Anna Uzele) and an Irish musician (Colton Ryan). Secondary ones concern a Polish refugee and his violin teacher; a Cuban drummer and his mother; and a Black trumpet-playing G.I. Most have come to New York after World War II to make art or save their souls — or both at once. As a new song called “Major Chord” puts it, they seek the trifecta of “music, money, love.”
“Maybe you get one, maybe you get two,” Stroman said. “But it’s hard to get three.”
Still, Kander adds, summing up the theme, “New York is where you have the best chance of being who you see yourself as.”
He would know, having come here for just that reason, in 1951, after college and military service. The banners welcoming his transport ship from the Pacific — “Welcome Home! Well Done!” — immediately made sense: This was where he was meant to be.
The “well done” part he does not take as seriously; his service was mostly spent playing piano for officers and at one point running $400,000 [about $6¾ million today] worth of Canadian Club whisky to Manila — along with 11 cows.
Yet “well done” surely applies to him now. “He lives his life correctly,” Stroman observed. Perhaps that’s why no one speaks invidiously of him, even though few major chords are as undiminished as his. Music, he has abundantly; money, in spades — “Chicago” alone, the longest-running American musical ever on Broadway, has grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide. And love, absolutely, even if it had to wait until his 50s. “Happiness is one of the last things you learn, if you ever do,” he said.
That he is adored by younger colleagues is partly because he serves as a beacon of the possibility of lifelong growth. (Taking them to lunch when they are barely known, as he took Miranda, doesn’t hurt either.) Stroman marvels at the muscle of his musical storytelling, built up by decades of doing it. “If I say to him ‘I imagine a girl walking down the beach and she meets the love of her life,’” she said, “he can leap up to the piano and that is exactly the story you hear in his melody.”
But for Kander, aging as an artist is less about the expansion than the concentration of skill. “By the time [Giuseppe] Verdi [1813-1901] wrote ‘Falstaff’ [1893], when he was almost 80,” he said, “he had learned to do in 16 measures what in ‘Nabucco’” [1842] — 50 years earlier — “would have taken him a big aria and a cabaletta and all that. There’s nothing wasted, no decoration, just the thing itself. I’m not lucky enough to have had that experience a lot, but I recognize it when I see it and it almost makes me laugh.”
There’s that modesty again, reflexive but also pragmatic. Stroman summarizes the two biggest things she’s learned about collaboration from Kander as “no bad ideas” — which actually means plenty of them, freely offered and freely rejected — and “leave egos at the door.” Kander wants his drama onstage only.
“What we do is a craft,” he insisted. “I mean you can have a great inner talent, and a lot of people do, but without craft it’s very hard for the talent to emerge. Also the reverse is true. You may not feel particularly inspired by a commitment you’ve made, or a moment you’re supposed to create, but you still have to write those 12 bars to cover someone crossing the stage.”
Even worse, you might have to write a second version of “New York, New York.” When De Niro complained that the first was too “light,” Kander and Ebb, in a snit, tossed off the famous one in 45 minutes. “Which does the job and audiences like it and De Niro was right and it’s a great piece of luck,” Kander said ruefully. “But I just don’t get it.”
At the sitzprobe, they got it. When the brass and saxes swung in big at the top of the tune, the cast reared back, as if hit by a tornado. Tears of something like joy flew from their eyes, if not from Kander’s. When I later forced him to name some songs he’s actually proud of, he admitted only to ballads, not Ebb’s beloved “screamers.” “I Miss the Music” from “Curtains.” “I Don’t Care Much,” written as a dinner boast between coffee and dessert. And a new one, set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station, perhaps inevitably called “Can You Hear Me?”
Off the top of my head, I could name 30 others he ought to include.
“I appreciate that, but it’s independent of me. My fingers find something, as if they have little brains of their own. The keyboard is my friend, since I was 4. Being an artist is much more like being a carpenter than like being God: Something will happen. Or you tear it up. And start again.”
A horse can’t do any better.
[Jesse Green worked in musical theater during the 1980s, and in 1983 he helped John Kander find the lost score for “The Happy Time” (Los Angeles, 1967; Broadway, 1968).
[He is the chief theater critic for the New York Times. His latest book is Shy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with and about the composer Mary Rodgers (see the post “Shy by Mary Rodgers” on Rick On Theater on 1 November 2022, with reports by Kirk Woodward and others). Green is also the author of a novel, O Beautiful (Available Press, 1992), and a memoir, The Velveteen Father (Villard, 1999).]
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