EBB: He’s an amateur musical performer in addition to being a detective.
KANDER: He’s played leading roles at his little local community theater, and now he’s thrilled to have landed in the middle of Boston’s Colonial Theater to investigate the murder. It’s a terminally silly piece.
EBB: We wrote a song called “What Kind of Man” for a
scene after the musical comedy opens in Boston and members of the company listen to the reviews. After hearing how one critic has panned the show, the company members sing about critics:
What kind of man would take a job like that?
What kind of slob would take a job like that?
Who could be mean enough?
Base and obscene enough?
To take a job like that?
What kind of man would take a job like that?
What kind of clown would put you down like that?
Who could be vile enough?
Bulging with bile enough?
To take a job like that?
Oh, what kind of low-down dirty bum?
Oh, what kind of swinish, scurvy scum
Loathsome as they come.
I wonder …
What kind of man would take a job like that?
What kind of snake would drive the stake like that?
Who could be jerk enough?
Hard up for work enough?
To want a job like that?
What kind of man would want a job like that?
What kind of putz would squeeze your nuts like that?
Who could be low enough?
Needing the dough enough?
To want a job like that?
EBB: The tone suddenly changes after a member of the company reads a good review from the
Harvard Crimson
:
What kind of genius has a mind like that?
So perspicacious, wise and kind like that?
Far from his mother’s knee
She must be thrilled to see
How he grew up to be
Such lovely company.
Others are stinkers,
There are a few heavy thinkers,
So it lifts up your heart
To meet a man like that.
KANDER: That last part was an afterthought because we didn’t know how to end the piece. Our hearts were in the first part. As I’ve said, we really always have a good time when we’re writing, but this kind of song, which is full-out nasty and vitriolic, is a very special kind of good time.
EBB: Those are funny rhymes. It’s a show that is mostly about words and jokes.
KANDER: I think the book and lyrics are funny, but musically I have a lot of work to do. The question with
Curtains
is whether the humor is so theatrically focused, so show business oriented, that it may not be funny to other people. I’m curious about that. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a show that will work practically in a commercial theater.
EBB: You never know. I hope something happens with it, but if not, at least we’ve had a good time working on it. We’re writing about what’s classically wrong with the theater, and your opinions about critics and show business personalities are sort of eternal.
Zorba
and
70, Girls, 70
K
ander and Ebb teamed up with Harold Prince again on
Zorba,
working from a script by Joe Stein that was based on the Nikos Kazantzakis novel. Utilizing a conceptual approach similar to that used in
Cabaret
, Prince unfolded the story as a tale told by café entertainers. Kander and Ebb’s score effectively adapted Greek folk music to the expectations of their Broadway audience. Writing deftly for character and situation, the songwriters were attracted to the show’s dark Cretan atmosphere. They instilled their score with fire (“Life Is”), humor (“No Boom Boom”), and tenderness (“Happy Birthday to Me”).
With a cast that featured Herschel Bernardi and Maria Karnilova, the show opened at the Imperial Theater on November 17, 1968, and played for 305 performances.
Zorba
was ultimately too dark for most Broadway audiences. A revival in 1983 attempted to be more upbeat and was more successful commercially, thanks primarily to its star, Anthony Quinn. Quinn was joined by Lila Kedrova, who won a Tony when she stepped into the Karnilova role as the fading French courtesan, Madame Hortense. The revival was directed by Michael Cacoy-annis, who had also directed the 1964 movie
Zorba the Greek
, in which Quinn and Kedrova played the leads.
KANDER:
Zorba
began while we were working on
The Happy Time—
EBB: And sharing a house in California. The infamous Rhonda Fleming place.
KANDER: Hal Prince asked us to read
Zorba the Greek
.
EBB: That tome.
KANDER: We read the book and then Hal called to find out what we felt about it, and what we felt initially was not good.
EBB: And it was very long, a long tome.
KANDER: Hal said, “Wait a minute, let me describe the opening scene for you.”
EBB: You know how that little old lady on
Golden Girls
says, “Picture this!” Then she tells the story. Hal was like that, very excited. “Picture this! This is how the opening is going to be.”
KANDER: By the time he finished describing the opening, he had us.
EBB: We thought it was fabulous, and he called it a “bouzouki parlor.” But there is no such thing.
KANDER: Yes, a bouzouki circle, which doesn’t exist.
EBB: He made it up and we bought it because we didn’t know any better.
KANDER: The opening had a wonderful look. The stage was filled with smoke, and you heard the sound of instruments behind the curtain.
EBB: And the whole cast was lined up—
KANDER: In a circle with the dark lady in the middle. The entire cast was sitting there, saying, “What do we do now?” They finally decided to tell the story of Zorba. A few of these characters telling the story were always onstage watching.
EBB: Hal loves observing on the stage, where people are placed around and just watching the action. In
Zorba,
he used that device throughout.
KANDER: I thought Hal’s staging was superb. We never
fully appreciated how wonderfully he directed that show until we saw what Michael Cacoyannis did to it when he staged the revival. I sent a note to Hal when we went into rehearsals for the revival, saying, “I finally realize the flypaper that you were walking on.” Cacoyannis had also directed the film. In Hal’s original show, we were very careful about keeping away from the movie. There were lines that had to be taken out of Joe Stein’s script because they were in the screenplay.
EBB: We were under some legal stricture.
KANDER: As I recall, it had to do with the fact that Mrs. Kazantzakis and Cacoyannis were not on good terms. But she was a supporter of the stage piece. It was the novel that guided us, and Kazantzakis’s letters, which contained wonderful material from the real Zorba.
EBB: There were moments in that show, I think, that are among the best-realized musical moments in our careers, such as when Maria Karnilova as Madame Hortense is dying, and Hal gave her a moment where she’s on her deathbed. But she gets up and she’s like a girl again, singing the song “Happy Birthday to Me.”
KANDER: And at the end of the song, she goes back to the bed—
EBB: And dies. That was absolutely killing for me, breathtaking. I think we managed to come up with a decent musicalization there, but even without that, it was a stunning idea.
KANDER: Karnilova was marvelous doing it.
EBB: In the revival, Lila Kedrova played Madame Hortense. She was lovely, but I found her a little taxing because her English was very limited. I think on the screen she could get away with it because you were practically in her mouth, and if nothing else you could lip-read her part.
KANDER: She was very good in “Happy Birthday.”
EBB: That’s just a good moment, and you’ve really got to
act well, and she could do that. She could act everything we gave her.
KANDER: But Karnilova for me was way superior. She had a moment in the original production after she sings the song “Only Love,” and she had a cross with an umbrella, and the music goes on a long time. She just crossed to stage right and you couldn’t take your eyes off her. She had that compelling quality which only a great dancer can have. That I will always remember.
EBB: “The Crow” was another rich moment, where all the old ladies realize that she’s sick. It was a ritual in Crete that the neighbors pick the house clean when they know somebody is dying, and Hal staged that beautifully. There were moments like that, and yet overall, I didn’t take as much pleasure in the show as I did in some of the other pieces we’ve written.
KANDER: Well, you turned on it when it didn’t do well.
EBB: Maybe I did. I’ve admitted how success-oriented I am.
KANDER: But I think you’re right about one thing. The best-realized element in the show was the conception of Madame Hortense. The whole business when she’s singing to Zorba and Nikos about the past with the song “No Boom Boom,” and Hal had the four admirals standing behind the Victrola singing. Hal had a real take on that piece, though I think the original set was heavy.
EBB: The whole show was heavy, you know, tomelike. The scale of the show was enormous. When the Leader sang “The House at the Top of the Hill,” she really
was
at the top of a hill. There was nothing expressionistic about the design. It was all very literal.
KANDER: There was a national touring company of Hal’s production and we had the chance to do some revisions, and then Chita played the dark lady who we called the Leader. Those changes made a world of difference.
EBB: But the guiding conception came from Hal. I know
that when we wrote “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die,” he loved how brazen it was. When we did the revival, there was a major issue about how we could no longer do the song because it was too dark. But we had done it that way, and I don’t remember anybody getting up in the opening number and walking out, saying, “Hey, I’m depressed. I don’t want to hear this.” But I was pressured into changing the line. Even Joe Stein, who wrote the book, turned on me, saying, “It puts the audience in the wrong frame of mind.”
KANDER: You know who else didn’t like it was Sheldon Harnick.
EBB: And we heard Arthur Laurents didn’t like it either. We had quite a few bright people who we respected saying, “For God’s sake, change it.” So I wrote, “Life is what you do till the moment you die.” Which is softer. I always hated myself for that. I’m sorry I didn’t dig in my heels and say no.
KANDER: We were both against it. We needed a Hal on the revival. Cacoyannis wanted to make sure that he did everything differently than Hal did.
EBB: I don’t think Cacoyannis gave a hoot about anything. I never understood his opening in the revival. It rained up there for some reason.
KANDER: To give a big entrance for Quinn.
EBB: But Cacoyannis changed the opening in such a way that the song seemed irrelevant, whereas originally the song was the backbone of the philosophy of the show. Which was not ours but was Kazantzakis’s—“Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” That was what Zorba was saying. “The world’s a life sentence, you were born an imbecile.” In many of our shows, the script has called for some statement of what life is. When I write the lyrics for a number like that, I don’t have to agree with the song I’ve written. The song doesn’t have to express my philosophy at all, but it does have to be the philosophy of the character
who sings it. That opening song in
Zorba
was “Life Is.”
Cabaret
contains those same two words. The philosophies of the two songs couldn’t be more different, but the characters are also totally different:
Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.
Life is how the time goes by.
Life is where you wait while you’re waiting to leave.
Life is where you grin and grieve.
Having if you’re lucky, wanting if you’re not.
Looking for the ruby underneath the rot.
Hungry for the pilaf in someone else’s pot.
But that’s the only choice you’ve got!
Life is where you stand just before you are flat.
Life is only that, Mister.
Life is simply that, Mister,
That and nothing more than that.
Life is what you feel till you can’t feel at all.
Life is where you fly and fall.
Running for the shelter naked in the snow.
Learning that a tear drops anywhere you go.
Finding it’s the mud that makes the roses grow.
But that’s the only choice you know.
Wait!
Once again.
Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.
This is how the time goes by.
Harold Prince on
Zorba:
I think
Zorba
is something of a masterwork, I always did. They did a revival with Tony Quinn, I have to tell you I didn’t care for it. I think they compromised a lot of stuff but, God help us, they did make some money, which they didn’t make in our version. I think our version suffered from two things. One, its opening number was unconventionally dark. It remains one of the best opening numbers I’ve ever heard. Two, we made the critical mistake of casting the leads with two people who had played opposite each other in
Fiddler on the Roof
, and so it tended to make it seem like a Greek version of
Fiddler on the Roof
. The project was brought to me by Herschel Bernardi, who had been Tevye in
Fiddler.
Now he wanted to play Zorba, and he was wonderful. It’s just that I think people decided, “Oh, it’s a lesser
Fiddler.”
I think it’s amazing, and, parenthetically, I read a lot of mail that has been collecting over forty years and has been put in books for me to see, and there’s a whole section on
Zorba,
which is extraordinary because it is letters of praise from the damnedest people saying this is a masterwork. So that’s why I chose the word. I was very proud of it.
KANDER: Working on the revival was terribly frustrating because there was a kind of allegiance between Anthony Quinn and Cacoyannis. It was hard to get through to them, and Cacoyannis had a difficult time communicating with the rest of the cast.
EBB: He never made anything clear to the actors. I think he liked us, and personally I liked him. But I thought he was a little volatile and hard to reach. It was my observation cast members had a lot of trouble with him.
KANDER: Anthony Quinn had a problem that would have
been comic if it weren’t for the fact that you had to deal with it all the time. Anthony Quinn was rhythm-deaf the way some people are tone-deaf. But he had seen the movie so often that he really believed he could dance, and the fact is from the waist down that’s not Quinn in the movie. But like people who believe their own publicity, he thought of himself as someone who could dance.
EBB: It was him saying, “I can do anything.” Unlike someone like Lauren Bacall, who said what she couldn’t do: “I cannot sing in that range and won’t be able to deliver that song.” Quinn, on the other hand, would say, “Choreograph me. Give me anything.”
KANDER: Sure, why wouldn’t he? He looks at the movie and says, “Boy, I’m really dancing up a storm.” It was difficult to conduct because of his rhythm problems. We had to orchestrate little safety measures in the score so when he would not feel it rhythmically, he could get through it.
EBB: I don’t believe he ever did anything musical before that show
KANDER: But he did quite a lot of stage work. He was a real stage actor. Graciela Daniele had to choreograph for him. The famous Zorba dance. When you are choreographing for someone who can’t count and has no sense of rhythm, it’s nearly impossible. It came down to something so primitive in the song “The First Time.”
EBB: His opening number.
KANDER:
[singing]
“I sniff at a woman …” Da, da, da—da, da, da.