[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).]
