Musical Mondays: Kander & Ebb 4
not as good but pretty good
The career of John Kander and Fred Ebb after Chicago would suffice to place most songwriters into the top of the second tier, perhaps even the bottom of the first. After The Act and Woman of the Year came The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Steel Pier and The Visit before Ebb’s death in 2004, followed by Curtains and The Scottsboro Boys (although The Visit didn’t stagger onto Broadway until 2015, fourteen years after it opened in Chicago).
It is advisable to open well. According to Mark Steyn, in Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, “Kander and Ebb always do the opening number first” - to state what the show is about, like the introduction to an essay - which “may be why, alone among the major Broadway writers of the last 30 years, they’ve never had a major disastrous humiliating floperoo.1 Come smash hit or modest success, their shows open with numbers that set the tone, the atmosphere, the time and place brilliantly.”2
Cabaret and Chicago open with ‘Wilkommen’ and ‘All That Jazz’ and their scores are maintained at a consistently high level. It is somehow all the more disappointing when the opening is the best song in the show, which is part of the problem with The Rink. ‘Colored Lights’ is both nostalgic and revealing, worth quoting at length:
“I remember that I turned to Sam and said -
Or was it Fred?
- Well, anyway.
I should be up and yet I’m down instead.
Something’s missing, Sam;
Something’s missing, Fred.
Something’s missing here.
Where are my colored lights?
Beats and bleachers and colored lights
Passing smiles, ‘round and ‘round
Thumping oom-pah-pah organ sound.
Noisy boys, long and lean.
Giggles of girls in the mezzanine.
Filtered through colored lights,
Gold and amber and green.”
“A peach of an image, wistful and nostalgic.”3 Clearly, nothing has gone right for this woman since adolescence.
Liza Minnelli was the daughter, Chita Rivera the mother and the rink was the Symbolic Past. And the rest of the score is okay, but the “sourness and unpleasantness of the material” apparently deterred audiences.
Several years passed before their third entry in Bloom & Vlastnik, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993). A revolutionary and a gay window-dresser share a cell in a Latin American prison - stop me if you’ve heard this one? It wasn’t particularly funny but it did have Chita Rivera again as the dresser’s fantasy woman / B-movie actress / mother replacement, a heroic homosexual lead character and a Latin American dictatorship to hate. All boxes ticked!
It’s “a piece of integrity and seriousness, of purpose and idea.”4 It addresses themes of innocence and guilt, culpability and contingency and the fine fine line between optimism and fantasy.
When I was at AMDA, ‘Marta’ was the go-to song for all tenors. It is rather wonderful:
“There's a cobblestone street
And a little red door
And three flights up is Marta
Waiting there is Marta
And I still can see us lying together
Talking, smoking, lying together”
(It’s actually a good exercise for actor-singers, because of the temptation to just ‘sing nicely’ and the counter temptation to over-act every little detail).
And there’s the revolutionary’s anthem, ‘The Day After That’:
“And the world that gives us pain
That fills our lives with fear
On the day after that
Will disappear
And the war we've fought to win
I promise you, we will win
If not tomorrow
Then the day after that
Or the day after that”
Kiss of the Spider Woman ran 906 performances and swept the Tony Awards. Steel Pier (1997) ran 76 performances and didn’t. ‘Everybody’s Girl’ confirmed that Fred Ebb really wanted to be Cole Porter for the post-’60s:
“You won't be disappointed
I'm also double-jointed
I'm everybody's girl
Though it leaves a lot of fellas
Cursin’
I'm a person
Needs disbursin’”
I could never be a cowhand’s girl… you wanna know why?
And I have great affection for ‘First You Dream’ because it was the chorus number for our AMDA Musical Theatre showcase:
“You can fly
You can soar
Feel the wind
Hear it roar
It's easy now
Imagine that
But first you dream”
Also because the arrangement, by the wonderful Bill Cox, printed the lyric
There's a barn
There's a field of corn
as
Theresa barn
There's a field of corn
and I have, ever since, wanted to create a character called Theresa Barn.
Fred Ebb died in 2004, which made Curtains (2006) posthumous, but it was essentially a Kander & Ebb show. A cute conceit about a musical-loving detective, played by Frasier star David Hyde Pierce, called in to solve a murder among the cast of a musical, it ran over 500 performances. That said, it would be a brave soul who volunteered to get up and sing something from Curtains without expecting anything more than blank curiosity. Debra Monk, who sang ‘Everybody’s Girl’ in Steel Pier, was back with ‘It’s a Business,’ a very similar (but funnier) number, structurally speaking, about the realities of the world:
“Gorky schmorky
Money misspent
You won't survive Yom Kippur
You'll never get through Lent
I once knew a producer
Whose pretension knew no bounds
In the business
(In the business)
He mounted Samuel Beckett
I don't mean it like it sounds
It was business”
God bless Debra Monk and whomever illegally made this recording!
If he hadn’t already been dead, Ebb might gave died of a broken heart (or possibly exasperation) when The Scottsboro Boys (2010) folded after only 49 performances. Ok, a musical based on the 1931 rape trial of nine African-Americans was probably a hard sell in much the same way that the excellent Parade (1997) curled up and died after a couple of months, but New York audiences (of all people) like to make a virtue of their progressive bona fides. (On the other hand, it is difficult not to suspect that the sell-out run in London’s Young Vic was partly fuelled by a sense of moral superiority).
The Broadway production was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won none, coincidentally matching Chicago.
The Visit opened in Chicago in 2001 and arrived on Broadway in 2015 (a delay that can’t have done anything for Fred Ebb’s state of health), where it ran for less than two months. Better to rack up the flops at the end of a glittering career, I suppose, but I really find the score of The Visit dreary. I have nothing against Mitteleuropean culture, in fact I rather like it, but I’m not so keen on a score that sounds like a Hapsburg mausoleum.5
If Kander and Ebb had done nothing but Cabaret or Chicago they would still have contributed more to musical theatre than most Broadway writers. Memorable, witty and pointed, they brought depth and humour to the stage. Of everyone we’ve looked at in these pages (‘pages’), their catalogue is up their with the best.
Well, true to the extent that nobody blamed them for 70, Girls, 70. Steyn’s book was originally published in 1997, so he wasn’t to know that Steel Pier, Scottsboro Boys and The Visit would collectively rack up less than 200 performances.
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, p19
ibid
Bloom & Vlastnik
The original cast included Roger Rees, who was dying of brain cancer at the time, which - although it’s macabre to the point of cruelty to notice - doesn’t help the OBC.