John Kander: "Last of the Golden Age Composers" (Part 2)

 

[In my introduction to the first installment of “John Kander,” I expressed my rationale for compiling this post, and said a little about Kander’s career as a Broadway (and Off-Broadway) composer, I think it’s now appropriate to put together the record on the songwriter.  So, here are some stats.

[The New York Times’ Jesse Green (see Part 1) dubbed Kander “the last of the great Golden Age composers”; CBS’s David Pogue (see below) called him “the longest-working Broadway composer in history”; and on DC Theatre Scene in 2012, Richard Seff, an actor, writer, and talent agent, labeled Kander and Ebb “the longest collaborative team in musical theatre history.”

[John Kander has written the music for the scores of 25 stage musicals, 15 of them in collaboration with lyricist Fred Ebb.  In addition, he’s composed the scores for 10 movies, including the film adaptations of his and Ebb’s stage musicals, and seven television shows.  He’s also contributed songs to another eight films and TV shows.  This doesn’t include the songs he’s composed for non-theatrical or -film performances, notably for Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.

[For his work, Kander’s been presented with at least 10 industry awards, including four Tonys, a Drama Desk Award, and a Laurence Olivier.  He and Ebb have also received numerous award nominations, which include five additional Tony Awards, two Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.

[Other honors the composer’s received include induction, with Ebb, into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1991; the 1998 Kennedy Center Honors award for Lifetime Achievement (also with his longtime songwriting partner); the 2018 Stephen Sondheim Award from the Virginia-based Signature Theater; and, in 2021, the I. A. L. Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts from the Columbia University alumni.]

“JOHN KANDER, LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA ON ‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ ON BROADWAY”
by David Pogue 

[David Pogue’s interview with composer John Lander for Sunday Morning, a program of CBS News, aired on 23 April 2023, three days before Kander and Ebb’s new musical, New York, New York, opened on Broadway.]

Start spreadin’ the news
I’m leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York

The music of John Kander and Fred Ebb, including scores they wrote for Broadway shows like “Cabaret,” “Chicago,” and “Curtains,” has won four Tony Awards, two Grammys, two Emmys – and a street named after them in Times Square. Yet Kander, now 96, is utterly uninterested in all the hero worship. “I don’t relate to it,” he told “Sunday Morning.” “I really don’t, just as I don’t relate to the fact that we’re sitting here doing some sort of interview on television.”

David Pogue pointed out, “You are now the longest-working Broadway composer in history.”

“I think that’s weird!” Kander replied. “I don’t really feel much different than the insecure man that met you all those years ago.”

Yes, Pogue worked with Kander back in 1987, when he played piano for Kander & Ebb’s Off-Broadway show, “Flora, the Red Menace.”

[Flora, the Red Menace, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s first collaboration in which a fashion illustrator in the 1930s is persuaded by her boyfriend to join the Communist Party, ran on Broadway for 87 performances in 1965. The cast featured Liza Minnelli in the title role, her Broadway début for which she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.  

[The musical was revived at the Vineyard Theatre from November 1987 to January 1988 with a new book and some new Kander and Ebb songs, under the direction of Scott Ellis with choreography by Susan Stroman.  Flora, based on the novel Love is Just Around the Corner by Lester Atwell, became an Off-Broadway hit, having had a limited run of 46 performances and generated a cult following.]

The composer always said that his music writes itself: “Music goes on in my head all the time, even while we’re having this conversation,” he said. “If I put my hands on the keyboard, they will do something.”

Which they did.

Pogue asked, “So, this is you composing right now? This is new stuff?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t mean it’s any good. It’s just there!” he laughed.

For 45 years, Kander wrote the music, and Ebb wrote the lyrics. “Freddy and I were such different people,” Kander said, “and yet, when we went into a room to work, all of that dropped away and we became one thing.”

Fred Ebb died in 2004. And yet, this week a new Kander & Ebb musical opens on Broadway. It’s “New York, New York,” very loosely based on the 1977 movie, for which Kander & Ebb wrote five songs. For this new show, David Thompson co-wrote the script, and Susan Stroman is the director and choreographer. They, like Pogue, all worked together on “Flora, the Red Menace” back in 1987. “We all look the same!” laughed Stroman.

I came here with nothing,
like hundreds before me,
and millions behind me . . . 

The musical is set in 1947, and tells five interwoven stories about aspiring musicians. “We wanted to celebrate artists who come to New York to change their lives, to be the best at what they do,” said Stroman.

“It was right after the war; New York was hopeful,” she said. “People were pulling plywood off the storefronts. There’s something about that particular time that feels like the time now in New York. You know, We are gonna pull this city back up to where it used to be.”

Some of the songs come from the movie (including “Happy Endings” and “But the World Goes ‘Round”); some are Kander & Ebb songs that have never been heard before (including “A Simple Thing Like That” and “I’m What’s Happening Now”); and some new songs feature lyrics or additional lyrics by another famous Broadway talent: Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of “In the Heights” and “Hamilton.”

[The verse above, with lyrics by Miranda, is from the opening number of New York, New York, “Cheering for Me Now.”]

He saw an early draft of “New York, New York”: “I was just so knocked flat by the show itself, a beautiful love letter to New York,” said Miranda. “I just said, ‘Whatever else you need, like, please let me know.’”

“For which we are not sorry!” laughed Kander.

Miranda described his job as “to be as fast as he is and just, you know, match him beat for beat.”

One new song, “Can You Hear Me?,” is set in Grand Central’s whispering arch, an architectural quirk that lets you hear a whisper from 30 feet away:

When I heard you sing, it changed everything
Can you hear me?
Could you ever be with a wreck like me
Can you hear me?
Could I ever be a part of the song inside your heart? 

As for that song . . . what we all know as “New York, New York” is not the first version Kander & Ebb wrote in 1977. The movie’s star, Robert De Niro, didn’t like their original song, and asked that they try again. “Some actor was gonna tell us how to write a song?!” Kander exclaimed. “Anyway, we went to the piano, and the first thing that happened on the piano, with nothing in my head, was [the vamp]. And inside of that vamp is, Start spreading . . . and so we wrote that song in 45 minutes – I think partly because we were so pissed off!”

Their second attempt became world famous. 

But Kander says he doesn’t get what all the fuss is about. “I listened last night to that audience kind of roar when that song happened,” he said. “I just don’t understand it.

“Here’s what I understand: I understand making stuff, and making stuff with your friends. I understand that every once in a while, you will make something that you love. And the sizzle inside your guts when that happens is something that nobody can take away from you.”

[David Pogue is a technology and science writer and TV presenter. He’s an Emmy-winning correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, which he joined as a correspondent in 2002, writing and hosting stories on technology, science, the environment, and show business.]

*  *  *  *
“BROADWAY COMPOSER JOHN KANDER
ON HOW HIS LATEST MUSICAL IS A LOVE LETTER TO NEW YORK”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[This is the transcript of the PBS NewsHour interview of Kander conducted by arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown.  I watched it when it was broadcast on 8 June 2023, as I noted in the introduction to Part 1 of this post, and it started me on the Kander Project, so to speak.]

Geoff Bennett [“PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor]: Broadway’s big night, the Tony Awards, will be held this Sunday.

The new show “New York, New York” is a top contender, nominated in nine categories, including best musical.

The composer of its music, John Kander, is separately being honored with a special award for lifetime achievement in the theater. Quite a life, extraordinary achievement, which continues.

Jeffrey Brown joined Kander at the piano in his New York, New York, home for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: The new Broadway musical “New York, New York," set shortly after World War II, opens with a song called “Cheering For Me Now,” in which we meet characters who’ve come to New York with uncertain futures, but big dreams.

The show is a love letter to a city. And for its 96-year-old composer, John Kander, it captures the wonder of working with others to create something new.

John Kander, Composer: I have lived a long time. And one of the good things I can tell you about living a long time is that you keep finding out things and learning things about not just your own life, about life itself, or what really matters.

And I found myself, at the end of the workshop of “New York, New York,” saying to the company, in thanking them, that one of the greatest pleasures in life was making art with your friends.

Jeffrey Brown: Kander, who grew up in Kansas City, was himself one of those people who came to postwar New York to make it. He did big time, and it was through the collaborative process, as half of one of musical theater’s greatest teams, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, creators of such blockbusters as “Chicago,” which premiered in 1975.

A 1996 revival is now the longest-running show on Broadway. Another classic, “Cabaret” from 1966, later a film starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. They wrote 16 Broadway musicals in all and thousands of songs, including a certain anthem that pretty much everyone on the planet must have heard and most can sing along with.

(MUSIC)

Jeffrey Brown: It was originally written for the 1977 film drama “New York, New York” directed by Martin Scorsese. And, as the story goes, when star Robert De Niro didn’t much like the first version Kander and Ebb brought them, the two went off and did what they did best, sat at the piano and got to work.

John Kander: We went home pissed off.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, about — about what . . .

John Kander: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: That De Niro didn’t like your song.

John Kander: It is true. And we went into this little room where we work with Freddy and sat down and said, well, let’s do it again.

And my hands, while — probably what we were talking, went . . .

(MUSIC)

John Kander: And with Fred, immediately inside of that vamp is . . .

Jeffrey Brown: The first . . .

John Kander: And produced then the very first lines.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, Kander says, music is always playing in his head even as we talked. His job, improvise until he finds the good parts, while Fred Ebb, who died in 2004, was doing the same with an endless string of words.

John Kander: He could — and this is brilliant. Haven’t been a lot of people — I don’t know a lot of people who can do this. He could improvise in rhyme and meter in the same way that I could do . . .

(MUSIC)

John Kander: Without thinking, seemingly without thinking.

Jeffrey Brown: So, you’re writing — you’re improvising at the keyboard and he’s improvising with the rhymes in his head. And, somehow, it comes together.

John Kander: Right. It is mysterious, because it’s — I think it is so deeply unconscious for us.

Jeffrey Brown: The new “New York, New York” musical, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, another longtime Kander collaborator, is loosely based on the earlier film, with new characters and storylines.

At its heart, a young musician, played by Colton Ryan who lost his brother in the war, and a singer played by Anna Uzele facing racial discrimination as she struggles for opportunities. Many of the songs are older ones by Kander and Ebb. Seven were written with a new partner and friend, contemporary Broadway giant Lin-Manuel Miranda, who joined the cast and production team in a rousing 96th birthday song for Kander.

John Kander: We have a good time working together, and it reminds me a little bit of Freddy, because he is — Lin is very fast, and I’m very fast.

Jeffrey Brown: Fast as, like, the ideas are coming quickly?

John Kander: Yes, it’s — and, again, the ideas can be terrible.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

John Kander: And nobody is a bad person because they have it, but so you write it, and then you change it.

Jeffrey Brown: So, there is a lot of craft to songwriting, right?

John Kander: Yes. That is the word. I think we are all carpenters.

Jeffrey Brown: Knowing how to put it together.

John Kander: Yes, it is one thing to want to make art. It is another to do it, and that is craft. You get better at it, hopefully, as you work, or not.

The rehearsal room is for me the safest place in the world, because you can do anything. You can be so terrible. But it is private.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

John Kander: And, eventually, you end up in the rehearsal room with something that’s as close as you can get to what you intended.

Jeffrey Brown: Even with “New York, New York" now on Broadway, Kander, who lives with his husband, Albert Stephenson, was about to leave after our talk to join a workshop session for a potential revival of the Kander and Ebb 1990 musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” He is very much still at it.

John Kander: My mother had a great phase, which no — none of us understood until later in life. She said, you do the best you can. A horse can’t do any better.

Jeffrey Brown: A horse can’t do any better.

John Kander: I understand now what that means. In other words, if you’re writing a show, you do the best you can, sometimes without thinking of the ramifications.

Jeffrey Brown: You are 96 and still working. What is the secret?

John Kander: Well, are you supposed to stop doing the things that give you pleasure? Who wrote that rule?

Jeffrey Brown: No one wrote that rule, certainly not for John Kander.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York, New York.

(LAUGHTER)

Geoff Bennett: Wow.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.

[As arts correspondent, he’s profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
“‘NEW YORK, NEW YORK’ REVIEW: NEW KANDER AND EBB MUSICAL
IS A LOVE LETTER TO BIG CITY GUSTO”
by Naveen Kumar 

[I wanted to end the Kander post with a review of New York, New York, and what could be a better gauge of the musical’s reception than Variety, the entertainment industry’s own newspaper out of Los Angeles.  Naveen Turner’s notice was published on the show’s opening day, 26 April 2023.]

If there is a megawatt star in “New York, New York,” the new musical from Broadway titans John Kander and the late Fred Ebb (with additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda), it’s right there in the title. Aside from the occasional f-bomb and pantomimed scurry of rats, the show that opened at Broadway’s St. James Theatre is a love letter to Manhattan so unabashed that its vibe might be best expressed in cityscape and heart-eye emojis. Cynical? These New Yorkers? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Though inspired by the 1977 film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, “New York, New York” is more accurately described as a musical-length rhapsody on the dreams crooned out in its title song, made famous by Frank Sinatra and naturally performed here as a big-band finale turned audience singalong. A crowded cast of characters has come to chase their dreams, and most of them want to be musicians. 

The sensory splendors of director and choreographer Susan Stroman’s production — a tap line across an unfinished skyscraper, nighttime snowfall in Central Park, umbrellas blooming in a rainstorm — conjure boldly romantic and relatively timeless visions of the city. Set at the end of WWII and debuting at another time of tenuous renewal, “New York, New York” radiates an infectious optimism, as if hoping to deliver an antidote to a city and to an industry still in beleaguered recovery.

It has much of what Broadway lovers would want from such a musical, including songs by Kander and Ebb (some written for the film and others from their vault) plus half a dozen more written for the show by Kander in collaboration with Miranda. Jazzy, buoyant and infused at times with Afro-Cuban beats, the score makes a winning play for familiar pleasure centers and delivers a few memorable highlights, especially as its characters find musical success. Less distinctive and far lighter on verve than “Chicago” or “Cabaret,” the score reflects songwriters in a hopeful and affectionate mood.

The book by David Thompson, co-written with Sharon Washington, includes a diverse sprawl of urbanites beyond its leading lovers, a booze-soaked, flailing musician played by Colton Ryan (the film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen”) and a self-assured, aspiring Black singer played by Anna Uzele (“Six”). There’s also a Black trumpeter and veteran who laments the hypocrisy of post-war discrimination (John Clay III), a young violinist who escaped Europe and wants to attend Julliard (Oliver Prose), the teacher he begs to help him and whose son hasn’t yet returned from the war (Emily Skinner); and a Cuban mother and her queer, bongo-playing son (Janet Dacal and Angel Sigala) who live under the shadow of an abusive patriarch.

There are still others between scenes, including a maid who gets whisked onto the opera stage to deliver a full-throated aria during a dreams-really-do-come-true sequence in the second act. It’s a lot of striving to pack into a single show, and demands a similar sort of tolerance for too-muchness as New York itself does. But it’s all rendered with spectacular stagecraft, including Beowulf Boritt’s soaring and dynamic interplay of fire escapes, alleyways and iconic landmarks; evocative projections co-designed by Boritt and Christopher Ash; and lighting by Ken Billington that captures certain snapshots in the day that any New Yorker would say defy description. 

That New York upstages any drama on stage in “New York, New York” may be inevitable to its inspiration and design; all of its characters simply want to make it here, though two of them also sometimes want love. Ryan’s bandleader is big-hearted, goofy and a bit sideways, like a wise-cracking Old Hollywood star, an accent he strangely affects when he sings with otherwise suave appeal. And Uzele’s star-on-the-rise is self-assured and tough, knowing she can’t afford to fumble opportunities the way her screw-up white lover does. The “Six” star fares less well as the role’s vocals call for greater sophistication, and chemistry between the pair can hardly be said to propel the story.

But the production’s zealous faith in New York — in its mythology of endless possibility and renewal — is near impossible to resist. Anyone who’s managed to carve out a place for themselves here, after being told they didn’t belong elsewhere, will likely feel a pang watching characters who are social outcasts and immigrants strive and achieve, despite being sketched in loose detail. Their triumphs, and the restless energy of the city, are vividly embodied in the dynamism of Stroman’s production, in the fluidity and grace of its agile choreography and the churn of its stage pictures and interludes.

And there’s a forward-looking nostalgia to “New York, New York” that feels alive to the peculiar and half-dazed mood outside its doors. New York has always run on a mix of blind faith bordering on delusion, and the people who flock here are full of it. Clichés, like stale bodega coffee, exist for a reason. They keep the city going even after it’s crashed and burned.

[After I saw the Late Show episode with John Kander and Lin-Manuel Miranda (posted in Part 1 of “John Kander: ‘Last of the Golden Age Composers’”), I e-mailed my friend Kirk Woodward, whom ROTters will recognize as a great friend of this blog.  I touted him onto Stephen Colbert’s interview because Kander said some things about his approach to songwriting, especially in collaboration with a lyricist—first Ebb then Miranda—that I thought would interest him.  (Kirk, as most ROT readers will know, is, among his other accomplishments, a theater composer and lyricist himself.)

[He watched the video of the segment and afterwards remarked of the 96-year-old composer, “Terrific.  And Kander’s 96, right?  Just amazing.  Wonderful.”  After I told him my plans to blog on Kander, Kirk responded, “He’s remarkable.” 

[I agreed that Kander is definitely remarkable.  For the transcript of the Colbert show, I had to rewatch the segment all the way through.  He’s still sharp, I observed—his memory, his articulateness, his intuition and insight.  To hear Miranda tell it, he has trouble keeping up with Kander when they work together—and he’s only 43, less than half Kander’s age!

[As a kind of coda to this look at the ongoing creative career of John Kander, Kirk recounted this little anecdote:

I’ve never spoken to Kander. but I stood near him a few years ago.  He was at the exit of an off-Broadway theater presenting something he . . . had written—I think it may have been those one-act musicals.  He was friendly and talking pleasantly with everyone.  Just the way you'd hope.

[(The one-act musicals to which Kirk referred were The Landing, presented at the Vineyard Theatre from 23 October to 24 November 2013.  The Landing, written with Greg Pierce, was Kander’s first show with a new collaborator after the death of his partner of 40 years.  It was comprised of three playlets connected by the theme of people who must confront what it means to get what they think they want.)

[From the various interviews and reports of the Broadway musical man, I’d say he lives up to the hope.  He may be a one-off, but he’s proof that one can be a creative genius—I don’t think I’m overstating—without being an egotist or a tyrant.  (Kander’s counterpart in the acting category is surely Tom Hanks, a NewsHour session with whom was posted on ROT on 22 May 2023 [“Tom Hanks, Novelist”].)]