John Kander: Passing Through Curtains

Published: May 1, 2010 In conversation with Frank J. Oteri at Kander's home in New York, New York April 7, 2010—10:30 a.m. Transcribed and edited by Frank J. Oteri and John Lydon Video edited by Molly Sheridan

John Kander knew that he wanted to write music for the theatre from his earliest childhood. He wrote his very first song instead of paying attention during his second grade math class and had already completed a musical for his high school. A protégé of Douglas Moore and Jack Beeson, with whom he studied composition at Columbia, Kander eventually found himself accompanying singers, conducting summer stock productions, and playing in the pit orchestra for West Side Story. One thing led to another and he wrote the music for the short-lived 1962 Broadway musical, A Family Affair which Harold Prince directed. As Kander explains:

The theater community is very small. Once you pass through a curtain which lets people look at you as a professional, you can really get to or make contact with just about anybody from one or two degrees of separation.

Later that year, Kander met lyricist Fred Ebb which proved to be the most important encounter of his entire career. Kander and Ebb sustained one of the longest lasting as well as one of the most successful of songwriting collaborations in the history of the American musical theater. Only months after they began writing songs together, Barbara Streisand recorded two of them. And a few years later they landed on Broadway with their score for Flora the Red Menace, about a Depression-era ingénue (Liza Minnelli in her debut) who unwittingly joins the Communist Party. But it was their second Broadway musical together, Cabaret, which solidified their reputation. Against all odds, they transformed Christopher Isherwood's unlikely narrative about sexual awakening amidst the rise of the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic into one of the most popular song and dance extravaganzas of all time. Says Kander:

I can remember when we were writing Cabaret and were talking about the subject, people said "That's really not a good idea." I don't remember reviews very often, but there's one line in the Variety review for Cabaret which I will always remember: "It is unlikely there will be much of an audience for this sort of thing." It all has to do with people's imaginations, what you find theatrical and what you don't.

Kander and Ebb's landmark partnership also yielded such classics of the Broadway canon as Zorba, Chicago (currently on stage at the Ambassador Theatre and the longest-running revival in Broadway history), Woman of the Year, and Kiss of the Spider Woman—all challenging shows which respectively deal with such difficult atypical Broadway topics as revenge killings, corrupt

trials, the private life of a celebrity reporter, and prison torture. In between, they found time to write songs for cabaret acts and motion pictures, the most popular of which remains "New York, New York," which has been performed by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Three Tenors. But perhaps unsurprisingly, given the vagaries of the Great White Way, not every one of their efforts has been a blockbuster. However, some of the lesser known items in their oeuvre—such as The Rink (a poignant mother-daughter face-off), Steel Pier (about rigged dance marathons in the heyday of Atlantic City), and 70, Girls, 70 (exploring the shenanigans of the residents of a retirement home)—are extremely worth revisiting. Luckily there have been recordings of all of their Broadway output as well as of Go Fly a Kite, an industrial musical they wrote on hire for General Electric.

Kander and Ebb wrote almost all of their music and lyrics together in the same room and their collaborative process was so fruitful that they did not work on projects with anyone else for the duration of their creative partnership, which only ended when Ebb died in 2004. Actually not quite, since Kander has spent the last six years finishing work on four musicals that were left in various stages of development at the time of Ebb's death:

I just channeled Fred as much as I can. I had done a lot of lyric writing before I met Fred and in our collaboration we bounced off into each other's territories freely a lot. When there were new songs to be written for these projects, at first I was nervous about it. Then I got a little more confident. Every once in a while I look up and say, "Where are you, you son of a bitch!" But I've enjoyed doing that; I got to flex my lyricist muscles a lot.

The first of these shows, Curtains, ran over a year on Broadway, while two others—All About Us (based on Thornton Wilder's zanily experimental play, The Skin of Our Teeth) and The Visit (inspired by a macabre Dürrenmatt play)—have been mounted outside of New York City. Their final show, The Scottsboro Boys (about the wrongful, racially-motivated incarceration of nine African American young men in Alabama in the 1930s), just completed a successful off-Broadway run and will be mounted on Broadway next season.

Kander, now in his 80s, once said that he would not work on anything or with anyone else until these four projects were brought to fruition. But now that all four of these shows have been produced, it seemed like a good time to talk with him about his career thus far and what his plans for the future might be. Talking to him was a time portal to a by-gone era when the Broadway musical was central to American popular culture—after all, he is one of the last surviving composers who was around during Broadway's Golden Age. But there was very little time or inclination for nostalgia. Indeed, Kander's determination, creative process, and overall positive outlook make him an excellent role model for composers of all stripes nowadays.

—FJO

Frank J. Oteri: I'm curious about where your interest in writing music for the Broadway theatre began. What was your exposure to musicals growing up in Kansas City?

John Kander: I've always been kind of a musical schizophrenic. Classical music is where I lived mostly, but I was also always interested in popular music, and in theatre music particularly. My brother was, too, and my father. We now loftily call it musical theatre, but in those days musical comedy songs accounted for about fifty percent of the popular songs that the whole country knew. When that changed, I'm not exactly sure, but I grew up in a tradition of listening to a lot of that as well as listening to all the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Met. As a matter of fact, when I was in high school I had a picture of Lotte Lehmann as the Marschallin at one end of my bureau and a picture of Gertrude Lawrence at the other end. And I thought if I ever ran away from home, I'd run away to one of these two women, but I wasn't sure which, though not for a second realizing the symbolism of that. I guess that's a long-winded way of saying that I've just always been attracted in both directions.

FJO: So when you first started composing music, what did you compose?

JK: The first thing I wrote was in second grade during arithmetic class. The teacher asked me a question, which of course I couldn't answer. And so she said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I'm writing a Christmas carol." And so she came to the back of the room where I was sitting and there it was with big notes and all the words about Jesus in the manger and all of that. She made me stay after school and she played it. And they sang it at the Christmas program. This is all faint to me now, but I found out years later that she had called my parents to say, "I just want to let you know that John wrote a Christmas carol; is that all right because I know you're Jewish?" And they said that was O.K. And so that, I suppose, was the beginning of my downfall.

FJO: So does that Christmas carol still survive anywhere?

JK: I hope not.

FJO: It's interesting that for that very first composition you wrote both words and music.

JK: Yeah, I didn't know that there was anything else that you did. I certainly didn't want to do my math exercise. I'm one of those lucky people who always had something I loved to do. I thought that everybody had a passion for something until I got into college and realized that wasn't so and that I was just lucky. Music was in my life from the time I was four years old. It just seemed like a natural part of the world that I lived in. There were no professional musicians in the family, but my dad loved to sing and there were children's concerts that I went to. I got a record player when I was 10, and from then on that was all I wanted, recordings, mostly operas. But I didn't draw much of a line between opera and musical theatre. I was always attracted to the idea of words and music together telling a story. It sounds phony, but it's true. It's just something that I did and didn't think about a lot. I wrote a show for high school and a couple of other local shows, but it was just a part of life. And I assumed that my life would continue in that direction. I didn't feel special and I didn't feel removed from the world around me or my friends.

FJO: Does that first show survive?

JK: I don't know. Songs from it do. I wrote that with a friend of mine in senior class. It was the senior show and it was 1944. We were all going off to war. I remember we had written this sort of anthem called "Carry On" and all the mothers were weeping at the end of it because their sons were going off to be slaughtered in battle. We all came back. I don’t think anybody saw any serious action; I certainly didn't. But when I think back to that big emotional moment, which all of us in our class were playing to the hilt, it makes me smile a little.

FJO: So what did you do right after you got back from the war?

JK: I went to Oberlin, where I graduated in 1951. And then I came to New York, where I went to grad school at Columbia, and I've been here ever since.

FJO: At Columbia I know that one of your mentors was Jack Beeson, who is one of the great American opera composers.

JK: Yes, he and Douglas Moore. I came to New York trying to decide where I wanted to go to grad school. I didn’t particularly want to go to Columbia. I was sort of interested in Yale. But a friend of mine, a girl who had graduated a year before me, was Douglas Moore's assistant, and she thought I ought to go and talk to Douglas. It didn't interest me very much, and it certainly didn't interest him very much. But as a favor to her, he said, "I've got ten minutes before I go to the country." So I had an appointment with him and we talked for almost two hours and became great friends. And I stopped looking. I wanted to go to Columbia and Douglas and I struck up a friendship. Jack Beeson was my first composition teacher. And they became my surrogate family in New York. We always said that Jack was Douglas's legitimate son and I was Douglas's illegitimate son, because of the directions that we went in. But I was then still sort of schizophrenic musically, and Douglas one drunken night said, "You know if I had it to do all over again, I think I'd write for Broadway." And that was the kind of kick in the ass that I needed to help me focus on the direction that I wanted to go.

FJO: When you say schizophrenic, what other kinds of music were you writing?

JK: I was writing some chamber music, a couple of orchestral pieces, and a one-act opera that was my thesis. When I look back on it, it's like every composer I'd ever heard went into my head and stayed there. It was second-rate Stravinsky and second-rate Menotti, maybe not so second-rate but recycled; it didn't have any voice. Much later on, maybe ten or twelve years ago, I started writing art songs where I think maybe I've found a little bit more of a personal voice.

FJO: I'm curious about what happened immediately after this epiphany inspired by Douglas Moore's drunken proclamation. I know that you wound up being a rehearsal pianist for West Side Story.

JK: That's the end of a long story. I had an assistantship in the Opera Workshop at Columbia when I was getting my master's, which essentially meant playing and coaching singers. So I supported myself that way when I got out. Everything sort of leads to something else: I was playing a lot of auditions as well as coaching and that led to me getting a job in summer stock as an assistant conductor. I had studied conducting at Columbia.

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FJO: How frequently would you meet?

JK: If we were working on a show, we'd work every day.

FJO: Including weekends?

JK: No. I like to go to the country. The normal pattern was going to Fred's house at about 10 or 10:30 [A.M.] and we went until about 3 [P.M.]. We were very different people in terms of our interests and personalities and friends and maybe even outlook on the world. But when we got in that little studio room of his, we became almost like one person. It was amazing, because that never changed.

FJO: What I find so remarkable about your collaboration is that all those years neither of you ever worked with anyone else.

JK: It just didn't seem like a lot of fun. I did some movie scores. Fred did some special material occasionally. But the idea of doing a project—I don’t know; I think we kinda got spoiled, because of the way we wrote. It's not a way of working that you can export. A lot of people don't work that way and would be very uncomfortable working that way. When Fred and I were working together in the room anything was possible. You didn't have to worry about making a fool of yourself—a bad joke, a really lousy melodic line. We were free in there. And I think that one of the things that made it possible for us to do good work when we did good work was the fact that we allowed ourselves to do bad work and tear it up. We didn't work with a censor over our shoulders. We could try anything.

FJO: Was there ever something that one of you thought was good work and the other thought was bad work?

JK: A final product?

FJO: No, something while you were working.

JK: Yes. But if either of us had a passion for it, the other person would go with it. It was like an unspoken rule.

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n we were wood idea."

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nt home, it's pearlier era.

oman of the Yeone, Lauren Baander and other

for decades he here and nd The Rink arhen you wrotBut the only Girls, 70. Hoperfectly na

ear (1981): (lefacall, Ebb, Harr members of t

at this pointnow. Even Sre all about te it the sounlater show oowever sinc

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t. But Steel

nd of of e e

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70, Girls, Kander anthe presenafter only

ke Allegro.

n Me and Julasted longelmost totallyan exotic wa

ut by having poser to evois.

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porary in the

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he pieces of of remove. I aling with co

remove, it aying to be pa

nd it has to dit realisticall

y do not suddhat have livell are at somew exceptionsith those wonporary comeow Boat bec

hat is exotic t

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Steel Pier and Ebb shBroadway2004.

ced off into projects, at look up and

my lyricist mu

emember reawork on a n

four of the uad been brous next?

he moment Iamed Greg Pamber piecesou could do iuse just four

ors in all threand did a littw people listhe second oand thinkingg right now?I had been d

y the idea of ny appealed thed this frieniter and we sng—once Sco

(1997) was thehow to be prod

y before Fred E

each other's first I was n

d say, "Wheruscles a lot.

ading somewnew project wnfinished Ka

ught to life; n

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doing with Frdoing sometto me. And snd of mine wstarted. So thottsboro get

e last Kander duced on Ebb's death in

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territories frnervous aboure are you, y

where that yowith someonander and Ebnow they hav

with a younme very, veryort stories—g room. Theys and the sam

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we're halfwmber standing

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who is a shorthat's s itself work

ght. I think thudience. But

are in the stanthe audience

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n having a vemoving to Brur process wr the past six

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d Fred as muore I met FreWhen there wgot a little mbitch!" But I

al Kander and ng to Broadwa

n the writers Try to think otory which towere written

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n both The Vut of town and now The

ful run on Ofxt season. I'mpleting these

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more confidenI've enjoyed

Ebb show, Theay next season.

as well as itof how manyook place in n.

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Visit and All and Curtains

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FJO: You mentioned writing art songs. I know that Renée Fleming sang a wonderful song that you had written for her.

JK: We're back to fun again. It's hard to imagine not writing, so it's what I do. It's what I've done since second grade. Someday I'll stop, because I'll die, but I can't ever imagine not feeling or thinking musico-theatrically, and by that I mean songs which have a certain theatricality to them as well.

FJO: So to get back to your observation that if you do what you do as well as you can, things will happen and people will notice—

JK: —I don't know that things will happen. I was very lucky. As a pianist and sometime conductor, I played well and I enjoyed coaching, and some things came from that. If I had had to go knock on doors, I would have starved to death.

FJO: So what would be your advice to people starting out now who want to create the kinds of work that you've done.

JK: It is so much harder. When Fred and I were starting out, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were already established and Steve Sondheim was just starting and Jerry Herman had just started. We were all allowed to fail. We were part of a generation where there was so much being done that if people thought you were talented the chances are that they would listen to your work and maybe hire you. It's so much more difficult now. Theatre is so expensive to produce.

The only advice I could have for anybody is if you really love something, if your passions are what sustain you through life, then you just have to find some way to survive and to support your passion. I have an actress friend who loves the theatre. She is a great actress. Her name is Debra Monk. And she once told me that she told her agent that if she could have five lines in any movie she'd say yes and earn a living so she could support her habit, which is playing in the theatre where you can often not make any money. You have to find some way, if you're a composer or if theatre is what you love, you have to find some way to support yourself while you're doing it. We had it easy. My generation had it really, really easy. Hal Prince used to produce a musical for $160,000. They all did. And if a show ran for a year it was a success. That's not true anymore. These are different times. And the music business is different. But all I can say is if you love something, don't let go of it.