Musical Mondays: Kander & Ebb 2
after Cabaret
Before we leave Cabaret, let us note that Kander and Ebb wrote one excellent song about money for the stage and another, equally excellent, song about money for the film. ‘Sitting Pretty’ also uses the word ‘nincompoop’ more or less plausibly:
“But I'm not a nincompoop
I've got an income you
Put in the bank to accrue
Yes, me
I'm sitting pretty…”
a lesson Alan Jay Lerner obviously ignored when writing Coco (“up goes the income / and out go the nincompoops…”)1
And ‘The Money Song’ is positively Brechtian:
“When you go to get a word of advice
From the fat little pastor
He will tell you to love evermore.
But when hunger comes to rap,
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat at the window […]
See how love flies out the door...”
Difficult to go anywhere but down from Cabaret, but it’s not to say they didn’t try. Indeed, they wrote three Broadway musicals in four years at a fairly solid B average, which would be pretty good for most people. First up was a trip to 1920s Quebec for The Happy Time, which came with “an evocative Kander and Ebb score.” That’s presumably a compliment by John Kenrick, although he doesn’t specify what it evokes. The show ran 286 performances, was nominated for ten Tony Awards and became, somehow, the first Broadway musical to lose one million dollars (those being the days, as Dr Evil will tell you, when one million dollars was one million dollars).
Nobody really liked it, nobody really hated it; the book took most of the flack and Gower Champion’s Tonys for direction and choreography suggest they must have been half-decent. According to allmusic.com, the “best [Kander and Ebb] could do was a toothless batch of musical greeting cards.” That’s a bit harsh. It’s not difficult to listen to the score, even though it may be a tad bland or, handing over to the acerbic Ethan Mordden, “in [its] less interesting numbers a dispirited attempt to give Champion what he wants while knowing that no-one else wants it, including the audience.”
But the opening was charming, despite the slightly odd scansion (“and if you should ask me why / the reason I ask you this is that / I want to remember you remembering…”), there are a couple of pleasant chorus numbers and two genuine show-stoppers. ‘A Certain Girl,’ as in the below video, for three generations:
and ‘Life of the Party,’ which is a great solo even without the backing of the boys given in the show.
“Of course it’s nice to see the streamers are flung / to know the guest-list is appealingly young / but if you want the bell to really be rung / you’d better have me there / the Life of the Party.”
The lead, Robert Goulet, was no great shakes as an actor but could sing beautifully, as he had demonstrated as Lancelot in Camelot. Playing his father, David Wayne was nearly a Broadway legend (he won a Tony for Finian’s Rainbow) and it is to Goulet’s credit that he held his own.
Mordden calls it “a superfluous show.” Ebb called it “The Glass Menagerie at Radio City Music Hall,” which is almost vicious. Still, it’s not too bad and it kept the duo going onto their next project, which arrived on Broadway in late 1968 (six weeks after Happy Time’s demise), ran slightly longer (305 performances), reunited them with Cabaret director Hal Prince, gathered eight Tony nominations (although none for the score, embarrassingly) and was described by Mordden as “one of the ugliest, most life-denying pieces of evil shit ever perpetrated as a Broadway musical.”
Well. That’s awkward.
I have read Zorba the Greek and remember nothing other than not liking it as much as I felt I was supposed to have liked it. It is nonetheless interesting in any number of genres, but this is cultural and literary analysis outside the remit of Musical Mondays. The important phenomenon is the 1964 film, Zorba the Greek, which caught a wave of anti-heroism and seizing the day in response to an indifferent (or even cruel) universe. Zorba the musical was hailed as ‘life-affirming’ in a very ‘60s Falstaffian way: drink, make love, don’t have your spirit crushed by [the Man / the system / the Church - you get the point].
The first sung lyric is “life is what you do while you’re waiting to die,” which may have a certain grandeur but also, perhaps depending on one’s philosophical inclination, a certain nihilism. (I am reminded of Chesterton’s insistence that the carpe diem religion is the philosophy of unhappy men). There is also a distinctly Forster-esque scent of the Mediterranean, the belief that liberation is to be found amongst the sun and sea and stones.
[Sidebar: why has there been no good musical adaptation of a Forster novel? It’s not as though they’re complicated]
To my surprise, Bloom & Vlastnik include Zorba in their 101 Greatest. What it wants to be is a full-length expression of ‘L’Chaim’ from Fiddler, but with Life Itself in place of God, a sort of Hymn to Vitalisme. Stop thinking and start living! Hence Zorba’s opening number:
“I pound on a table, I leap on a chair,
I crawl up a mountain,
to breathe in the air,
By now I’ve stopped counting
How often I’ve been there,
But each time is the first time”
There is something Chestertonian about this, the principle that one should not take life for granted. (Only when I spent a few days at Quarr Abbey did I realise that worship is all for the first time. I’ll write about this epiphany some other time, if you’re interested). What Zorba doesn’t seem to have is the Chestertonian sense of gratitude. Zorba’s perspective “is amoral and anarchic… he defines freedom as not giving a flying heck about anything that happens… it’s a stupid and selfish viewpoint.”2
Still, it’s Kander and Ebb. Zorba is not a score to which I return, but ‘The Butterfly’ is fine, especially if you like obvious metaphors, and ‘No Boom Boom,’ for the ageing madam, is fun:
“There they were,
My admirals, the image of romance,
From England, Russia, Italy, and France.
There they were, my brave quartet,
Dressed in their navy blues,
With feathered hats, and golden braid,
And patent-leather shoes.
They were just about to fire… on Crete!
When on my knees, in my pink chemise,
I instructed them tout suite!
By saying…
Please sir, little admiral, no Boom-boom!
Please sir, pretty admiral, no Boom-boom!
This evening when it’s dark,
I’ll let you come to my room,
But first you have to promise,
No Boom-boom!”
And, of course, the whole thing is marinaded in ouzo. People who’ve never visited Greece, like me, tend to think that the Greeks, sitting amongst sheep, goats and fish, await any opportunity to launch into choric dance, singing ai-ai-ai at a surprisingly high pitch. Zorba does nothing to correct this assumption.3
(Coincidentally, Zorba opened a few months after Illya, Darling closed. 1968 was a very Greek year on Broadway).
Happy Time and Zorba were qualified successes, or perhaps qualified flops, but nobody blamed Kander and Ebb. Nobody really blamed them for their next show, which was a genuine flop: 70, Girls, 70 opened in April 1971 and closed in May 1971. The number of performances didn’t even reach 70, Girls, 70.
Most of the ordure was showered upon a confusing book, which made it obscure whether the characters were characters in the show, or actors performing in a show-within-a-show, or both. But “the score was delightful,” according to Ken Mandelbaum; it was “a tuneful score” according to Mordden. If not precisely wild enthusiasm, this is approval of a John Kander score, after all, and it is enjoyable. And listening to the score obviates any book confusion, so long as you’re not trying to follow the plot. The only problem, in a line I’ve quoted before but can’t resist quoting again because it’s so wicked, is that “in real life, old folks do not dance and delight. They babble incoherently and ploddingly block your way in the aisles.”4 And any real old folks’ libretto would be four hours long to account for the mishearing and repetition.
Not that Fred Ebb was denying reality:
“Home to me is pulled-up linoleum,
The creaking of the bannister,
The squeaking of the chair.
Home to me is trapped in the elevator,
Knocking on the radiator,
Tripping down the stair”
And he nailed the stresses of modern living, even in the pre-Starbucks5 days of 1971:
“The trouble with the world today, it seems to me,
Is coffee in a cardboard cup.
The trouble with the affluent society
Is coffee in a cardboard cup.
No one's ever casual and nonchalant,
No one waits a minute in a restaurant,
No one wants a waitress passing pleasantries
Like ‘How're you, Miss?
How're you, Sir?
May I take your order please?’”
And a genuinely life-affirming musical-theatre anthem that deserves to be far better-known. It’s sung in the show by a ghost, which is appropriately eccentric:6
“There's lots of chaff but there's lots of wheat,
Say ‘Yes.’
You might get mugged as you walk the street
But on the other hand you might greet
That handsome stranger you've longed to meet,
Say ‘Yes.’
Don't say ‘Why,
Say ‘Why not?’”
And one of my favourite lines in all of musical theatre, even if it’s a slightly inside-baseball joke, from ‘Go Visit Your Grandmother’:
“Just you be nicer than he is,
Go give the little lady a laugh.
You went to Fire Island this summer,
For God's sake, show her the photograph!”7
Not the original Broadway production, obviously
And, in ‘See The Light,’ Kander and Ebb appear to be channelling both revivalism and ‘The Story of Jenny’ from Lady in the Dark, which is no mean feat.
Given, dear reader, that you’re engaging, creative and intellectually-curious, I’m sure you can find time in your busy days to listen to these three Kander & Ebb scores. 70, Girls, 70 might actually be the best, but as we know there is no justice in this world and certainly not on Broadway.
Next week with Kander and Ebb we’ll meet the great musical-theatre declaration that there is, in fact, no justice in this world; or, at least, not in Chicago.
Regular readers will know I’ve complained of this lyric before, but there seems no reason not to do so again.
Mordden, Open a New Window
To be fair, everyone knows that ‘tragedy’ means ‘goat-song.’
Mordden, obviously.
Starbucks’ first outlet actually opened in March 1971, but in Seattle.
British readers might like to know that the link is to the Original London production, sung here by Dora Bryan.
If you don’t get the joke, ask someone to explain. Just be careful who you ask.