Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz (24 page)

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Authors: Greg Lawrence,John Kander,Fred Ebb

BOOK: Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz
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EBB: He would get up and do a tango.
KANDER: That’s my first visual memory of him.
EBB: Dancing in Hal’s office. Or he would do a samba. As writers, we tried to absorb his energy and joy and love in our work. We inherited that, or you could say we inhaled that.
KANDER: Hal arranged that collaboration. Puig was originally going to write the libretto for the show, but that didn’t work out, really, although he stayed with it. English was a second language, which put him at some disadvantage writing a script. We never used Manuel’s libretto, but he came to Purchase with us, and he was our conscience. He saw the show with the script that Terrence McNally wrote, and as I recall, Manuel was very supportive of the direction we were going and his comments were always very pertinent.
Hal Prince on Manuel Puig:
Puig was flamboyant and innocent, and his personality reflected everything that’s in his material. The only problem was he lived part of the time in Buenos Aires and the rest in Rio and Cuernavaca. The absence of propinquity made it impossible for him to write the book. You need to be really there for each other while you’re creating a musical.
KANDER: But that same year we were in Purchase, Manuel suffered this terrible, ridiculous death. It was a freak thing that should not have happened.
EBB: He apparently had a heart attack after an operation. I’ll never forget having met him, as fantastic a human being as you would ever want to meet.
KANDER: He was really out of a Puig novel.
EBB: Yes, like he invented himself. When you put that personality on the stage in the hands of a brilliant actor like Brent Carver, you look good as a songwriter because it seems like you know more than you do.
KANDER: If you put Puig in that cell and call him Molina, that’s what the story would be.
EBB: That’s what I think too.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
had quite a long history. As a workshop at SUNY Purchase, it was a disaster.
KANDER: The idea of the “New Musicals” program at Purchase was to do a Broadway-size musical in a Broadway-size house. It was very luxurious for us to do a full production and to be able to look at it as if it were a workshop, rather than doing a tiny production. That was a great idea.
EBB: It was shot down.
KANDER: But it’s still a great idea.
EBB: Hal is one of the great pioneers of musical theater and he is constantly looking for ways to promote what we do. You know, he didn’t leave us for Hollywood and we didn’t leave
him
for Hollywood. I think there is something admirable about people who stay in the theater without any particular aspirations beyond that.
KANDER: I think that’s true. With
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
we were all in a state of outrage because the
Times
did a really terrible thing that nothing anyone could possibly say could justify. They insisted on reviewing the show even after seventeen people went down to the
New York Times
offices to ask them not to do so. These were not just people connected with our show but to other shows that were coming in and were going to be part of the workshop process in Purchase.
The Secret Garden, My Favorite
Year,
and a new musical by Erica Jong were also being planned for Purchase. We all begged the
Times
not to review the show.
Harold Prince on the
Times
review of
Kiss of the Spider Woman:
The
Times
should never have gone to Purchase. Over the years of my career, the media has come to think of theater as another news story. Now they wonder why we have so many events and so little real theater. That’s what news reporting is about: events. There is no isolation anymore while you fix a show. You can’t go to New Haven or Boston, find yourself in trouble, roll up your sleeves, rewrite, restage, recast if necessary, and FIX without reading in the New York press what trouble you’re in on the road. It’s mean-spirited and trivializing. And the theater has suffered.
EBB: For us, it was like David against Goliath, and the
Times
was Goliath. It was grossly unfair to have the show reviewed by such a prestigious, influential newspaper, and by Frank Rich, no less. Not only did we get a reviewer but a really tough guy who hadn’t particularly been a fan of ours. The
Times
considered it a news story, and also since we were charging admission, they argued that they should review it. It was most unfortunate because Frank Rich did come, he did not like it, and he did print his review. Because of the show’s lackluster performance, we had to kill the whole project temporarily. More and more the theater is in trouble because it’s all about reviews like that. It’s about obscene amounts of money and critics who say, “Please take risks,” but the shows that take risks usually don’t win audiences. So it’s a kind of catch-22.
KANDER: The workshop at Purchase was quite unique because you could put on a production and change it every night if you wanted to. The audience knew that, and you could sit and get feedback. During that period, you could learn about your
show, then close it down, rewrite it, and go for a Broadway production. If we had not had that experience, the show would not have become what it did, and I wish to God there was someplace that you could work like that today. We were lucky because we did have a chance to see where we had gone wildly astray and later got picked up. We had been trying to tell two different stories at once, and the audience didn’t follow it.
EBB: We did practically everything wrong. We made error after error, not only with the libretto but with the score. We wrote a couple of songs that were humiliating. We had a tap dancer in it, and I remember him because one night he went out to do his big tap number and forgot to put on his tap shoes.
KANDER: Right, he actually went out onstage and discovered that he didn’t have any tap shoes.
EBB: So we had not only a bad number but a guy who was unable to perform without his shoes.
KANDER: We wrote song after song for one moment in
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, and I don’t know how we ever came up with the last one.
EBB: Which was—
KANDER: “Where You Are.” When we’re stuck like that, the collaboration helps, just patiently working it out between us and drawing ideas from the libretto:
 
When you feel you’ve gone to hell in a hand basket
And the world in which you dwell’s no paradise.
I’ve some counsel I can give, you need but ask it.
I’m so very glad to share this good advice:
 
You’ve got to learn how not to be where you are.
The more you face reality, the more you scar.
So close your eyes and you’ll become a movie star.
Why must you stay where you are?
 
You’ve got to learn how not to see what you’ve seen.
The slice of hell you call your life is harsh and mean.
So why not lie beside me on a movie screen.
Why must you see what you’ve seen?
 
And if you find that you land in jail,
A little fantasy will not fail.
It’s just as simple as “ABC.”
Come up here.
Play with me.
Play with me.
 
You’ve got to learn how not to do what you’ve done.
The pistol shot can’t kill if you unload the gun,
So, build a palace where you’re the Shah
And we’ll embrace in that Shangri-La.
If you run away
Some matinee
From where you are.
 
KANDER: With writers like Peter Stone and Terrence McNally particularly, they will write a scene knowing full well that we are probably going to steal from what they have written, that we will incorporate material in the score that comes directly from the book. Terrence will go to great lengths, as a matter of fact, sometimes writing a whole speech expecting us to musicalize it, as was often the case in his book for
Kiss of the Spider Woman
.
EBB: Terrence was always amenable and encouraging whenever we pilfered moments from his book.
KANDER: Terrence is very musical. He can sense when he reaches a point that is probably going to need music. It’s not that he writes lyrics. He just indicates to us that this is a moment that is probably going to be expressed musically.
EBB: We try to write in the rhythm of the libretto where a particular scene can suggest what needs to be done rhythmically in a number. That was certainly the case with
Kiss of the Spider Woman.
KANDER: Garth Drabinsky is the person who saved us on that show. He came to Purchase and saw it. I don’t know what went on between Garth and Hal, but eventually Garth as producer thought that there could be life in it. Then we spent the better part of a year reworking it. Hal had given Garth the biggest success of his life, which was
Phantom of the Opera
in Toronto.
EBB: If it were not for Garth Drabinsky,
Spider Woman
would never have opened. There is no reason in the world that show would have come in even with our names on it. But Garth had this steadfast belief in the project and in Hal’s ability to bring in a winner. Unlike many other people, Garth did put his money where his mouth was. He was the knight in shining armor and will always be a hero of mine. He took us on and gave us everything that we needed. If there was a song that had to go and we needed to replace it with another number, a process which can be expensive with the orchestration and rehearsal time, he didn’t balk at anything. You sensed his love for the creative process and the creators. He took us to Toronto first, where we started to put it into shape and Chita came into it. Then we went to London, where I became quite fond of it.
Harold Prince on bringing
Spider Woman
to Broadway:
Never underestimate the incredible satisfaction of having a show so savagely received two years earlier, and then taking it and coming back to the same New York arena and having a triumphant reception. That’s unique in my life and wonderful.
EBB: I remember our first performance of
Kiss of the Spider Woman
in New York. I ran backstage at the end and there was Hal Prince all by himself. We immediately hugged and kissed simply because we were so thrilled. Whether the show was going to be a success or not really didn’t matter. It was just that we had finally made it as good as we knew how to make it. Hal said, “Fred, it doesn’t get much better than this!”
And the World Goes ‘Round
and
Steel Pier
W
ith an Off-Off-Broadway revival of
Flora, the Red Menace
, Kander and Ebb began a series of collaborations with three up-and-coming musical theater talents: director Scott Ellis, librettist David “Tommy” Thompson, and choreographer Susan Stroman.
Flora’
s book was rewritten by Thompson, while Kander and Ebb wrote several new songs and reinstated songs that had been cut in the 1965 production. The revival opened at the Vineyard Theater on December 6, 1987, and ran for forty-six performances, with Veanne Cox and Peter Frechette in the roles originally played by Liza Minnelli and Bob Dishy.
 
 
EBB: Scott Ellis, David Thompson, and Susan Stroman brought us the revival of
Flora, the Red Menace.
We didn’t solicit it.
KANDER: That was Scott’s idea, and he introduced us to David and Susan. They are now part of this theater family that we’ve built up.
EBB: It was a charming production in a small, intimate space.
KANDER: Hal came to see it, and I remember he said something very generous to the effect of “Maybe this is how we should have done it in the first place.”
EBB: It was one of those experiences when you don’t do it right the first time and you have a chance to do it over again. We fixed that show and that was the most rewarding part of it for me. We put quite a few of our songs back into the show.
KANDER: Tommy Thompson wrote a whole new book using the songs that we had cut.
EBB: He actually restored what we had written originally.
KANDER: We put back “The Kid Herself.”
EBB: And “Keepin’ It Hot,” which was a tap-dancing number that Mr. Abbott cut.
KANDER: We put back some characters and created a new one.
EBB: And we wrote some new songs.
KANDER: The Communist character that Peter Frechette played was much stronger than it had been when Bob Dishy performed that role. The show was much closer to the spirit of the novel. I don’t know that there was even a line of dialogue left from the old book.
EBB: I remember Sondheim came.
KANDER: Oh, he did. I don’t remember that.
EBB: Yes, he sat in the very first row, and it was a very small theater. We had one scene where Peter Frechette was on a cot and he had a number, “Where Did Everybody Go?” The lyric was “You look as though you know, so why won’t someone tell me.” He was supposed to deliver that to the audience, and he turned to look and he stared right into Stephen’s face. He was right there. I’ll never forget that. Peter couldn’t help himself and hesitated for a moment. Afterwards, Stephen said nothing. He didn’t talk to us at the end and he didn’t speak to anybody. I have no idea what he thought.
KANDER: I never heard that story. Veanne Cox, who was playing Liza’s part, was really nervous. Veanne sings very well, but to have to sing that score in front of Liza one night when she
came scared her to death. But Liza was terrific with her. Liza often goes out of her way like that just to make people feel good about themselves.
EBB: The production didn’t go anywhere or get picked up, but it gave us a chance to see the show again.
KANDER: Some friendships started from there that continue to this day, and the show did well.
EBB: We created a little talk with that show.
KANDER: There were good reviews, but that was another love fest. Incidentally, the musical director of that show, David Pogue, was a pianist and a composer, and he also wrote the book
Macs for Dummies
. David taught me about computers, and he played the score for that show. He has a regular column in the
Times
computer section.
EBB: You know, I still use my Smith Corona. I’ve never written on a computer.
KANDER: You’re scared of them. You’re scared of electronic mechanical things.
EBB: I hate them.
KANDER: Computers are a tremendous help for notation in many ways. It’s slightly shorter, but it also means you can save all the versions you’ve done. It used to be, like back when we first wrote
Flora
, I would just get finished copying down a whole arrangement for a song with ink or pencil, and you would call me in the country and say you had two lines that you wanted to change.
EBB: Funny you should mention that because we just finished a song and I had an idea for a change last night, a really good line. I hope you can accommodate me.
KANDER: Fine. The point is, in those days when you would say that, I would curse you—
EBB: Curse me?
KANDER: Because it meant that I would have to erase the
whole page and do it over. Now I just click it into the computer and save the old line in case I want to go back to it.
EBB: Curse me? Very nice. I’m grateful for computers, I just don’t want to use them because it’s true that I’m absolutely in terror of them.
KANDER: For some reason I’ve really always liked them. Maybe it goes back to when I was taking electric plugs apart when I was a little kid.
EBB: You look at those things and can figure them out. Not me.
KANDER: In terms of music writing, a score looks so much better on the computer than my handwriting or most composers’ handwriting. There are also all kinds of side benefits. For instance, if you want to transpose a song from the key you wrote it in for a singer or for you, all you have to do is punch a button. It’s automatic. There’s another benefit when it comes to proofreading. When I put the music into the computer, I can play it back at any speed I want and can hear the mistakes I’ve made.
EBB: A lyric isn’t all that big a deal. So you put it on a new piece of paper.
KANDER: It used to nauseate me when we wrote them out. My hand would start to cramp because we were writing everything longhand, essentially. I would get up and clean the entire house rather than face having to do it. Now it takes time but I enjoy the process. Other people feel differently. I have friends who love doing it longhand, who love their own notation, and it’s beautiful notation.
EBB: I like the time it takes to type a lyric. You have to stop and think about it. I don’t like electric typewriters particularly because they’re too fast. I like the old way—you hunt and peck, and as you go along, you’re editing yourself. Curse me?
 
 
Kander and Ebb again worked with Scott Ellis, David Thompson, and Susan Stroman on an Off-Broadway retrospective revue,
And the World Goes ’Round: The Songs of Kander and Ebb
. This anthology of twenty-two Kander and Ebb songs included numbers from their shows and movies as well as special material. The cast featured Bob Cuccioli, Karen Mason, Brenda Pressley, Jim Walton, and Karen Ziemba. Produced in association with Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, the show opened at the Westside Theater on March 18, 1991, and ran for 408 performances.
 
 
KANDER: We had such a good time on
Flora, the Red Menace
that Scott, Tommy, and Susan Stroman came to us with the idea for a revue. We gave them access to everything we had and they decided what songs they wanted to use. We didn’t make those choices.
EBB:
And the World Goes ’Round
was a perfect experience, I thought. We did very little except contribute everything that we ever wrote. They did everything else as far as putting the show together and programming it.
KANDER: All we were was avuncular. They had staging concepts for just about everything.
EBB: Oh, it was a pleasure to look at. They were all songs that we had written, like “Colored Lights” from
The Rink
. “Maybe This Time.” “Money.” “Cabaret.” “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
KANDER: And from
Woman of the Year,
“Sometimes a Day Goes By.”
EBB: “I Don’t Remember You” from
The Happy Time
was also in it. “Pain” was one of my favorite songs in the show, and we originally wrote that for Chita Rivera’s act, which she did with four boys. The best of anything is based on truth, of course,
and art is truth. Chita often said how painful dancing was. Dancers are always in some kind of pain because they work so hard and use so many parts of the body. I think that piece of material was true to that world exactly.
KANDER: It also included a sadistic choreographer who was based on Ron Field.
EBB: Or Jerry Robbins. It was like a little musical and was done originally at the Grand Finale at West Seventy-first Street.
KANDER: It was also done wonderfully by Gwen Verdon and Liza and Chita.
EBB: Oh, that was a terrific night they gave us at Avery Fisher Hall [
November 12, 1978
]. The three girls—Liza, Chita, and Gwen—performed “Pain” and tore the house down. Quite a few of our friends appeared in that show. It was to raise funds for AMDA, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. It also was a tribute to us, but that was tough because again I have a problem being celebrated that way. I remember at the end, we went onstage and—
KANDER: Yes, we introduced our mothers. My mother got up and shyly sat down again, and your mother got up—
EBB: And she’s still bowing today. My sisters Norma and Essie were pulling on her dress, telling her to sit down. My mother said, “I’ll sit down when I’m good and ready!” That was a memorable night.
KANDER: We were both scared to death.
EBB: Oh yes, we always are. That was the first one of those events of any real size.
KANDER: I think it was the best of those occasions.
EBB: You’ll never get better talent than that. Lenya sang for the last time.
KANDER: Jack Gilford was in it.
EBB: And Robert Goulet. I wish we had that night on tape.
KANDER: Something happened that prevented them from
taping it, so there is no record of that night. It’s becoming clear to me that there are certain people—I don’t want to say they’re our actors—but they are actors that we have worked with a great deal and for whom we have enormous personal feelings. In that sense, ours is not the usual transient theatrical situation. I’m thinking of people like Deb Monk and Karen Ziemba, who were both in
Steel Pier
.
EBB: Chita is one of them too. If we had a repertory company, we would have a nucleus of people like that.
KANDER: If we were casting people who we’re really fond of and want to be around, those people would be in it. Almost unconsciously, when we start a project, we start looking for roles for those people.
EBB: We’ve been around a long time. Liza’s voice was always in my head, and if there was a part for her, I always wanted her to do it.
KANDER: Liza was a special case.
EBB: Because she was a star early on, so it wasn’t like you could just throw her into something.
KANDER: Rob Marshall is one of ours also. We’ve worked with him a great deal since he started off in
Zorba
.
EBB: These are all people we like to have around.
KANDER: Not only are they talented, but they make you feel good to be working with them. We’re all, I think, concerned with each other’s lives, and that’s great. We like working with people we know and like both onstage and behind the scenes. It’s very incestuous. Friends like Liza, Chita, Susan, and Rob are like family for us. We go through their highs and lows with them and they go through ours.
EBB: They are exceptional friends and remarkable people as well. I don’t know how often you find that—the talent and the humanity all in one. I’m a little leery of actors ordinarily, but they transcend that.
KANDER: These people have lasted with us. Karen Ziemba and Brent Barrett have known each other forever. I guess they met on
And the World Goes ’Round
, and they have great fondness for each other. That chemistry came out on the stage whenever they performed with each other.
EBB: I love just seeing two people onstage who I like so much.
KANDER: I went backstage after they did
The Pajama Game
together and the conductor, Rob Fisher, came out and said, “Our babies are up there.” I knew what he meant. There are very few things more exciting for me than seeing people who we started off working with at the beginnings of their careers and over time watching them become more and more developed and mature and successful. That’s a thrill. Maybe that’s one of the things that age and experience give you. You really learn to surround yourself with people who are really talented.
EBB: Every musical really should be a mutual admiration society. You should be able to sit down and say, “Oh, we have a David Loud as our music director who I admire more than anyone, and there’s an actor who I admire playing that role, and he admires the way that you write and the way the lyrics will sound.” When everybody admires everybody, out of that, I think, can come real quality.
KANDER: I think that’s absolutely right. When we speak of collaboration, it’s not just collaboration with the director and choreographer. It’s everybody.

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