KANDER: But that wasn’t Hal the director. That was Hal the producer.
EBB: It might have killed his career. He needed that hit as much as we did.
Cabaret
was one of his early chances to be a successful director. He was also the producer, and a producer depends on theater parties, especially at the beginning of the run. We were all so desperate to succeed that we did things that we would never do today. Coming up with another punch line was one of the most difficult tasks that I have ever faced in the theater. I rewrote it as “She isn’t a
meeskite
at all.”
KANDER:
Meeskite
–an ugly person — didn’t have the same meaning at all.
Meeskite
—like
,
so what?
EBB: Whenever Joel Grey thought that he could get away with it, especially if he knew that someone important to us was in the audience, he would sing, “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” Afterwards, the stage manager would yell at him, and then he would say, “It just slipped out!”
KANDER: Decisions which are made under pressure like that—
meeskite
was one—are almost always regretted. They rarely ever serve the purpose that people intended. Can you think of a moment where we have made a change after the fact where a song was actually improved?
EBB: No. But I remember changing a lyric so we got a bigger laugh.
KANDER: That’s different. I mean changing something because people insist that you can’t do that.
Harold Prince on cutting Ebb’s controversial lyric:
During the first previews, the show would end and people would stay in the audience arguing with one another. The subject was almost invariably Fred’s lyric “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” The decision of whether to change the line was mine. I was where the buck stopped, and I said, “I am not going to jeopardize this show over this line. And you know what? If it’s cowardly of me, it’s cowardly of me, but the show is too important.” It was a pragmatic decision on my part, and I’ve never regretted that I did it. I think Freddy has always regretted that I did it, and perhaps John also. But on the other hand, a few years later when they made the film, the line was restored. The show had been a huge success and I’ve always felt that just the few years separating it from the film made things more acceptable than they would have been originally.
EBB: We changed the intent of the song with the word
meeskite.
But Bob Fosse put the original line back in for the movie. The screen went quiet, and Joel said it. The scene was shot that way because if there had been any protest, Joel could have dubbed in another line. But in the movie, the line was accepted. That reminds me that in the original
Cabaret
, when we knew Jack Gilford, playing the Jewish grocer, was scheduled to have a moment at his engagement party, and I came up with
meeskite
and wrote the song, Jack was right there in the room with us. Working that closely with a performer, we can hear the way he speaks and sings, and we can see his facial expressions. We knew what he would do with the song physically, like lifting back the covers to look at the newborn baby and saying she was gorgeous. We knew how funny he could make that moment. It’s telling that the number had to be religiously cut after Jack stopped performing it.
KANDER: He made a terrific moment of it, but it was so Gilfordesque that we finally took it out of the revival. Nobody else could make it happen.
EBB: Nobody else made it funny. You would think that Jack made the blueprint for that moment and that other people could play it because it was foolproof, but it was never the same without him. I also miss Lotte Lenya in that show. That was such a wonderful relationship we had with her, and she was the perfect embodiment of that role. There have been other people who have played that role who were wonderful, but we wrote it for her.
KANDER: She was the conscience of
Cabaret
, really.
EBB: It was Hal’s idea to cast her.
KANDER: That was an idea we all leapt at.
EBB: We wrote it with Lenya’s voice in mind, knowing that when she walked on the stage, she brought with her the validation of the period and the sound. She personified the authenticity of what we were doing.
KANDER: She said something to me once that I’ve always cherished. We were out of town with
Cabaret
and I knew what had already started to happen, that I would be accused of ripping off Kurt Weill. But the fact is that in the preparation for that show, I deliberately stayed away from listening to Kurt Weill. I said to Lenya before we opened, “When the reviews come out, I know that they’re going to say that I was cribbing from Kurt Weill, but I just want you to know that was never my intention.” She was a great sympathizer. I remember she took my head in her hands and said, “No, no, it’s not Kurt. When I’m on the stage, it’s Berlin that I hear when I sing your songs.” I thought, if she feels that way, then fuck everybody else. It meant a very great deal to me.
EBB: She told me, “You remind me of Kurt. You sweat.” She loved that I sweated.
KANDER: Lenya was such a strong person, and yet at the same time, I always felt that she was physically very fragile. She looked like those bones might break at any minute. Lenya was also very supportive of Jill Haworth when Jill got bad reviews and the show didn’t. Lenya took her under her wing and showed her all of her own old bad reviews. She was always a big fan of Jill’s.
EBB: I never understood the criticism that Jill received. Walter Kerr was brutal to her, and I never thought that was justified at all. We saw a lot of people for that role, but Hal was determined that Sally Bowles be English.
KANDER: Hal flew me to London to hear Sarah Miles early on when she was being considered for the role. That was a weird experience. She was living with a writer, Robert Bolt, and after I arrived, they were terribly nice to me and took me out to dinner. I told her, “I really just need to hear you sing, if we can sit down somewhere.” They couldn’t have been sweeter, but they always had other things to do. Robert Bolt said, “Oh, Sarah sings just
fine,” and she said that about herself too. We finally went to a little church. She didn’t have anybody to play for her, but she said, “I’ll sing for you in here.” She stood at the front of the church and started to sing. I was at the back of the church and couldn’t hear her. I kept moving closer and closer without realizing it until I was practically in her face and still couldn’t hear her. I had to report back to Hal that she was
not
a singer. But he was willing to sacrifice a lot in order to have an English girl play that part.
EBB : With that show we had a lot to prove coming off a bomb like
Flora
.
KANDER: We wrote many Berlin songs before Joel Grey came into it, but we wrote more after he was involved. It helped me enormously to have people like Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford in the back of my mind. As you know, Jack was a great buddy of Zero Mostel’s. I had done stock with Zero back in the fifties when there were many places he couldn’t work because of the blacklist. I was conducting, and I’ll never forget this. He was in
Kismet
playing a scene with Bill Johnson, and Zero had a piece of business that was hilarious. It got a huge laugh that lasted fifteen seconds. By the end of the week, it lasted ten minutes, and he went on and on ad-libbing to the point that Bill Johnson knocked him to the floor of the stage. I mean, Bill really hit him. Zero went down with a thud, then got right up, and the scene went on as if nothing had happened. There are two comic geniuses I’ve worked with in my life. Zero was one, and Beatrice Lillie was the other. It was awful for the writer, but they could take any piece of business and invent and invent.
EBB: I imagine some writers consider themselves lucky to get those laughs that they haven’t really earned themselves, that are delivered for them by another personality.
KANDER: Zero was very hard on Jack Gilford, wasn’t he?
EBB: In
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum
. But Jack never complained about anything. He once told me,
“There’s no controlling Zero. He actually took me by the shoulders at one point and turned my back to the audience so he could do a piece of business. I couldn’t even see what Zero was doing. I only knew I was facing scenery when I should have been facing an audience.” He did that time after time. The trouble with Zero was that very few people stood up to him.
KANDER: He was an awesome physical presence.
EBB: People were afraid of him.
KANDER: You know how he was controllable? He was very controllable musically. He had a great respect for music, and in my dealings with him if I said anything to correct him, he would do it instantly. Working in stock, there was a director who was nasty to one of the kids in the chorus. One time when he was being especially unpleasant, Zero stopped the rehearsal and picked him up by his necktie. Zero said, “I don’t ever want to hear you talking to a member of this company like that again.” That was all there was to it. Zero did have a sense of justice.
EBB: When he lived in my building, the San Remo, we had an elevator strike once, and the tenants had to sign up for doorman duty. I signed up to be a doorman, and Zero signed underneath me and put an arrow next to my name with the line, “When he works, I’ll work.” We were on one night together, and he was just darling. Humble and sweet. A great conversationalist. When he came to see
Chicago
in premiere, I remember how gracious he was about praising us for our work. He was almost teary about it. That was a Zero very few people got to see because when he was up on the stage he was just a buffoon, but when he was off he was a gentle, funny man.
KANDER: Zero said something memorable when we were doing stock together. Before the last show, he threw his great, beefy arm around my shoulder and said, “Kander, I want you to do me a favor. Every morning when you get up, I want you to look in the mirror and say, ‘My name is John Kander and I’m a
talented man, and fuck ’em all.’” I was pretty timid in those days and I can’t tell you what that meant to me. I told him later outside the theater when
Chicago
opened how I always remembered that advice. Then he went around telling everyone, “I’m responsible for his entire career!” But I feel the same as you do. I loved him, that wonderful, impossible bear of a man.
EBB: We were extremely fortunate with the revivals of both
Chicago
and
Cabaret
, the most recent ones, but the fact is if I go see
Cabaret
today, I know I would want to change things. I saw
Chicago
recently and there were moments where I thought I could have written a better line, where I didn’t think a number was as good as it ought to be. Among other things that you taught me is to leave well enough alone. Don’t mess with it. I have to let it be because I may in fact ruin a number by refusing to leave it alone.
KANDER: Whenever you have a revival, you always find things that you want to change. When
Cabaret
, the show, first came out, it was considered highly innovative and it later influenced other shows. But by the time the first revival was mounted in 1987, it no longer seemed new to people. Even with some changes in the score and staging, it was more or less a re-creation of the original production.
EBB: Many people had already been exposed to it with the movie.
KANDER: In a way, Sam Mendes’s current production is like a renewed experience. The show suddenly seems innovative and daring in the way the original production seemed. But this same production in ten years would probably look very tired if we remounted it.
EBB: It would probably look tame in ten years.
KANDER: Sam’s production was done in London in 1993 at the Donmar Warehouse before it came to New York—
EBB: But I don’t think seeing it at the Donmar you would
for a second have thought the show would become the kind of hit that it has become. Sam’s artistry was not all that apparent to me then. I could see the production was very well done, but I thought the leading lady was terribly miscast, and I didn’t like it a hell of a lot.
KANDER: Oh, I did, though she was all wrong. I thought Sam’s concept was just brilliant, but it was made immensely better by Rob Marshall when it came to New York, and it was essentially the same concept. In the original
Cabaret
, we actually had two different orchestras. Within one large orchestra, there was the cabaret orchestra, and whenever we were doing a number there was a certain number of instruments that we used for that particular piece, and whenever we were doing integrated songs for scenes outside the Kit Kat Club, the orchestra was a different orchestra. That was all deliberate.
Orchestrally, I think this current production of
Cabaret
is ingenious because the orchestrator, Michael Gibson, created an orchestration which has more instrumental parts than we have performers. The entire cast is now the orchestra. All the performers have to play an instrument, and if one of the actors who is performing that evening plays the harp, she has a harp part, and if not, she will play another instrument. I don’t know how Michael did it even though we talked about it endlessly. You can recast that show all over the place and still have an orchestra and be able to switch instruments.
One of the reasons I don’t orchestrate is that I’m not very good at it. I can orchestrate if I have to, but not wonderfully. It’s also very time-consuming. You can’t stay home and orchestrate and go to rehearsal and write. All that you can do is supervise. Michael is like a musical right arm. What I get from him is exactly what I intend musically instead of someone coming in and trying to improve me. We will often talk on the phone, and he may say something like, “I hear an oboe here.” Then both of us will imagine
hearing that, and I may say, “That sounds good, but what if we tried …” We go back and forth that way. Since
Woman of the Year,
Michael has done most of our shows and we have a wonderful relationship. I assume Steve Sondheim has a similar kind of relationship with Jonathan Tunick.