The People's Theatre Project

 

[When I first heard CBS2 News reporter Dave Carlin, who covers breaking news stories and major events in the Tri-State Area, broadcast a story about the People’s Theatre Project on WCBS-Channel 2’s six-o’clock program on Wednesday evening, last 25 October, I was really intrigued.  I’d never heard of the project, even though it was launched 14 years earlier, and had one very illustrious name attached to it: Lin-Manuel Miranda. 

[Furthermore, it was a totally fascinating project: a new theater focused on and promoting the work of immigrant artists, to be located in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan, where playwright and composer-lyricist Miranda grew up.]

The People’s Theatre Project was founded in 2009 to build “a culture of peace through theatre,” according to its mission statement, in the northern Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood.  The founders of PTP had a vision to combine social justice with the arts.

PTP works in partnership with various community stakeholders to advocate for the artistic and cultural resurgence of Upper Manhattan and to become a significant forum for the ideas and expressions of immigrants and people of color.

That same year, the People’s Theatre Project launched a theater program for children ages 5 through 12 that became what is now the PTP Academy for Leadership, Theatre, & Activism, a multi-year, full-scholarship program dedicated to “the holistic development of immigrant youth and youth of color.”

Over PTP’s early years, it held classes, rehearsals, and performances all through the Inwood and Washington Heights neighborhoods.  From 2010 to 2016, PTP produced a dozen Forum Theatre productions that toured the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.  The goals of Forum Theatre, a kind of role-play, are to “rehearse tactics against real-life oppression, critically analyze how each tactic plays out, and creatively share ideas as a community.”

As described on a blog, a Forum Theatre scenario might begin like this:

“Who thinks they can arrange these three chairs as though one has more power than the other two?”

. . . .

From sculptures using the three chairs, we start to generate stories and eventually bring them to life in short improvised scenes about encounters with the police—a conversation, a detention, and an interrogation.

In one scene last week . . ., a young person playing a police officer pulled out a bottle of Axe body spray in order to “pepper spray” his peer playing the suspect (slightly avoiding his face for the purposes of the scene).  “Because that’s what they do!  They did it to me!” he explained once the scene was over and he could break character.  The now-scented room of young people concurred—sometimes cops do that.

Once we’ve established the reality and have seen what kinds of oppression are enacted during police encounters, we turn each scene into Forum Theatre.  “Who has another idea?  What else might this “suspect” character try?”  For the purposes of this workshop, we’re also asking “What are this character’s legal rights?”

The People’s Theatre Project’s aim is to create what it considers a more just and even-handed society by making theater by and for immigrant communities.  Some of its productions include Mariposas (Butterflies), focusing on the journey of immigrants mothers and their children, as well as Somos Más (We are more), a story about immigrants who spark a revolution in a world where assimilation is required.

In 2015, the People’s Theatre Project became a resident company of the Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center on W. 166th Street at Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights with access to two rehearsal studios and an event space.  PTP began offering its public programs on a regular basis.

After four years at the Alianza, PTP leased a rehearsal studio and administrative office in the Workspace Offices complex at 5030 Broadway, between 213th and 214th Streets in Inwood, which allowed the organization to expand its offerings into the after-school hours. 

From Summer 2015 to 2017, the People’s Theatre Project teamed with the Office of English Language Learners (OELL) of New York City’s Department of Education to bring its arts-integrated programming to immigrant students in 32 schools in four boroughs.  When PTP determined that its staff was too small and it was spread over too large a geographic area, it began a reorganization in Spring 2017.

This resulted in a fresh commitment to its community and its mission and vision, and renewed strategic priorities for the next three to five years.  In 2019, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation made a $750,000 Arts Education Impact Grant to the People’s Theatre Project for the PTP Academy.  In 2021, PTP marked the start of its second decade of making theater with and for immigrant communities, and entered into collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda and his family.  

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city and the country.  The People’s Theatre Project's staff (all retained at their full wages), board, partners, and families worked to adapt its programming to the virtual space and PTP served its community by providing resources (such as cash relief, food pantries, vaccine drives) to local residents.  It co-organized a Black Lives Matter march and a collaborative arts camp.

Programming is now back in-person and on 19 May 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the People’s Theatre Project “will own and operate a first-of-its-kind Immigrant Research and Performing Arts Center coming to Inwood.”  The announcement read further:  

Filled with a range of visual and performing arts, the center will amplify the voices of New York City’s diverse immigrant communities and cultivate work by local artists and arts organizations.  The city will invest $15 million to help PTP acquire a newly constructed cultural center . . . .

According to the official statement, the People’s Theatre Project was selected through an open request for expressions of interest conducted by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA).  In addition to the $15 million in capital support from the city for the new facility, DCLA provided $75,000 to help PTP prepare to operate the new space.

Lin-Manuel Miranda; his father, Luis A. Miranda, Jr.; and their charity, the Miranda Family Fund, have been influential in the creation of the new performing arts center.  The three-time Tony-winner, three-time Emmy-winner, and five-time Grammy-winner personally gave a million dollars to help build the center.

“The Miranda family is excited that People’s Theatre Project has been named the owner and operator of Inwood’s first performing arts and cultural center,” wrote Luis Miranda in a release.  “For too long, our artists of Northern Manhattan of all disciplines have needed local space to create, display and perform their work.  We are proud to support as they build this home for our immigrant artist community.”

(Luis Miranda is a political strategist, philanthropist, and advocacy consultant who lives in Washington Heights.  He was born in Puerto Rico and served as an advisor for Hispanic Affairs to Mayor Ed Koch.) 

The new Immigrant Research and Performing Arts Center, to be known as The People’s Theatre: Centro Cultural Inmigrante (immigrant cultural center), will rise at 407 W. 206th Street at Tenth Avenue in Inwood, and is expected to open in 2026. 

The center will be in a new, mixed-income, mixed-use building, developed by a joint venture of LMXD, an urbanist development company focused primarily on mixed-income and mixed-use residential projects; MSquared, a women-owned real estate impact platform focused on creating mixed-income, mixed-use projects that promote affordability, sustainability, and diversity; and Taconic Partners, a New York City real estate developer.  The design is by the woman- and immigrant-owned architecture firm WORKac and theater and acoustics consultant Charcoalblue.

On the floors above the cultural center there will be affordable residential rental units, part of a separate project with a more than $400 million price tag.

Construction on the Centro Cultural is actually already underway, but a ceremonial ground-breaking took place on 25 October 2023, with Lin-Manuel Miranda in attendance, along with New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Other guests at the ceremony included elected officials, including U.S. Congressman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), who represents Inwood and Washington Heights; New York State Senator José M. Serrano (D-South Bronx); New York Assemblyman Manny de los Santos (D-Fort George), whose district includes Washington Heights; Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo (D-South Bronx); Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine (D); New York City Councilwoman Carmen de la Rosa (D-Inwood); and Deputy Speaker of the New York City Council Diana Ayala (D-East Harlem).

Also appearing were appointed city officials and representatives of corporate benefactors of the project.

Hochul and Miranda got a tour from former director and theater teacher Mino Lora, PTP’s Dominican-born co-founder and its executive artistic director.  “It's a 19,000 square-foot cultural center,” Lora said.  “There are rehearsal rooms, sound booths, dressing rooms, green rooms and art gallery space, and a state of the art theater. So ‘Centro Cultural Inmigrante’ will be coming in 2026 to serve our community and citywide artists.” 

The center will also have a flexible midsize theater, a smaller performance space, rehearsal studios, a soundproof practice room, and gallery space.  It will be PTP’s first permanent home in its history.

"This is a joyous day,” proclaimed Miranda, “this a real dream come true for the many artists who grew up in Washington Heights and Inwood and now will get to make theater in the actual neighborhood where they live.”

“It is for immigrants,” Lora affirmed.  “So we have social workers across the city who refer unaccompanied minors to us and we work with them to build their skills through theater.  Some of the young people who performed today came as unaccompanied minors a few years ago.  Separated from families, crossing the border by themselves, and here they are sharing those stories.”

“As someone who grew up a few blocks from here, to have a theater in our neighborhood is incredible.  A Latina-owned, Latina-run theater in Inwood, woah,” exclaimed Miranda.

Aside from growing up in Inwood, Miranda set his first Broadway success, In the Heights (Off-Broadway: 8 February-15 July 2007; Broadway: 9 March 2008-9 January 2011; film released: 9 June 2021, Tribeca Film Festival), in Washington Heights, the neighborhood to the south which is part of the community PTP serves.

Among the participants of the ground-breaking ceremony were three young performers, members of the People’s Theatre Project who will soon find an artistic home at the cultural center.  One, actress Vida Tayabati, said with hope: “I am Iranian.  We have people from China, Korea, Africa, all over, different places.  We are gathered here at PTP having the same goal, showing that we can collaborate together, we are the same.”

Tayabati, who came here from Tehran about 11 years ago, added. “You get to work with people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different points of view, it’s beautiful.  It's just going to be for us, as a home, we need a home.  As artists, here, so we can come together, work together.  It's just going to be amazing for us.  For all of us.”

The performances that will take place in the cultural center will focus on immigrant experiences in New York City.  Live music, dance performances, film screenings, and civic and community events will take place on its stages and its performance spaces.  

For children and families, the center will offer classes, festivals, student matinees, and field trips.  PTP will also partner with the New York Public Library to provide space for literary programming and research exploring the historical intersection of immigrants and the performing arts.  The center is expected to draw at least 28,000 people annually.

The People’s Theatre Project’s mission will be accomplished through a combination of efforts:  production, which includes the development of devised and playwright-driven original theater, all by immigrants and artists of color; education, which provides free access to high-quality arts education through the multi-year PTP Academy for immigrant youth, and partnerships with schools and libraries across the city for immigrant New Yorkers of all ages; and advocacy, in which PTP staff and artists collaborate with elected officials, community leaders, and other organizations to champion immigrant rights, racial equity, LGBTQIA+ rights, and equitable arts and culture funding in New York City and beyond.

“As the largest Latine theater in New York City and the city’s first Dominican-managed cultural institution, the People’s Theatre Project’s new home will be more than a performing arts center—it will be a tribute to the diverse artists, cultures, and communities that define our great state,” Governor Hochul said.

“I look forward to cutting the ribbon on this beautiful space in a few short years,” concluded the governor.

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”].)]

John Kander: "Last of the Golden Age Composers" (Part 1)

 

[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).]