EBB: I wouldn’t have given up the richness of that experience for anything. It’s just too bad the actors didn’t get more of a run out of it. I used to watch
The Rink
from the wings, and I never do that. There was such a feeling of camaraderie. There were seven of us, and we all huddled together and watched the numbers from the wings.
KANDER: The show ran most of the year.
EBB: Because we had those two ladies in it.
KANDER: People always get up at award shows and make speeches saying this show or that was such a loving experience. Usually they’ve forgotten or they’re exaggerating. But this was the real thing, an extraordinary experience for all the people involved. I remember Jason Alexander backstage after the reviews came out, crying and saying, “They killed our baby!”
EBB: It was exactly that kind of feeling.
KANDER: The only thing that makes any sense to me is that at the time the show opened, we were still too close to the period of the sixties and seventies. Frank Rich particularly took great offense at how we were dealing with that generation.
EBB: He wrote something rather snotty. We had a song in it called—
KANDER: “All the Children in a Row.”
EBB: In the middle of that song, we dramatized Liza’s character and her boyfriend—
KANDER: Who was a hippie.
EBB: The boy said to her at one point—
KANDER AND EBB: “Where’s Cambodia?”
EBB: It was intended to be gentle and funny.
KANDER: Oh, I thought it was touching and Scott Ellis delivered the line perfectly.
EBB: As in
Flora
, the characters in
The Rink
were caught up in a political cause about which they didn’t know a hell of a lot. That’s all I meant by that line.
KANDER: He was such an innocent.
EBB: He was a simple boy, and Cambodia seemed an exotic place. But Frank Rich went off on it scathingly. I think Frank Rich is a wonderful writer and most likely a very astute and bright guy. I was kind of annoyed that he didn’t understand the real intent of that line “Where’s Cambodia!” Then he went off on Terrence McNally and the whole show.
KANDER: I must have told you, after the reviews came out, Terrence went back to see Liza, who was crying because Frank Rich barely mentioned her in his review. She said, “He dismissed me in two sentences.” And Terrence said, “You’re lucky. He dismissed me in two very long paragraphs.” He really savaged Terrence.
EBB: There was one line about Liza at the end, “Also appearing was Liza Minnelli.” It was unbelievable. We had been delivering to the audiences, and the previews all went well. There was an effect at the end that is still one of the most beautiful moments that I ever saw in our shows, where all the scenery disappeared.
KANDER: They ended up transported out to the boardwalk.
EBB: And technically, the show worked. Everything was fine until we opened.
KANDER: Nobody can explain it, the experience when everything goes terrifically in previews, and you don’t allow yourself to be deluded too much, but you think the audience is really loving it. Then opening night comes and the next thing you know you’re dust.
EBB: That was one show that had enthusiastic audiences until we opened.
Cabaret
, on the other hand, had really dull, disbelieving, negative audiences.
KANDER: Until they were told.
EBB: After they were told it was a big hit, they were pushing each other out of the way to get into the theater. So it works both ways.
KANDER: With
70
,
Girls
,
70
, during the weeks of previews the audiences were really hysterical with laughter. But once the bad reviews came out, we couldn’t get anybody to laugh at the same jokes, the same performances.
EBB: The intimidation factor is enormous. Before
The Rink
closed, Liza was in bad shape and there was an intervention to get her into treatment.
KANDER: Intervention. Sounds like a musical, doesn’t it?
EBB: She had missed a lot of performances during the run.
KANDER: Liza had really counted on that show to change her career, to allow her to be the actress that in fact she was and is. When that didn’t happen, when the bad reviews came in, then bad stuff started happening with her. I think that hurt her tremendously. I don’t know what other troubles were going on inside of her before that, but I know that she started having real problems after those reviews came out. I’m sure that reaction contributed to her addictions. I thought of her during those troubled times as like the Marilyn Monroe character in Arthur Miller’s
After the Fall
, when she asks for pills and her husband tells her basically, “I won’t be the one to give you death.”
EBB: After
The Rink
, all Liza could do was go home and sew a sequin on her backpack.
KANDER:
The Rink
was a role where she didn’t have to play Liza, and neither the public nor the critics wanted that. That had a tremendous effect on her, and she has never since, with all of her ups and downs, ventured too far from the image of Liza. Her success in London and New York this year [2002] is wonderful, but in a sense it’s all about how marvelous it is that we’ve got the old Liza back. That’s what they wanted.
EBB: That’s what everybody wanted. It’s funny because now I would have no interest in delivering that with her the way I did once. That whole arena of concerts doesn’t interest me as much. If I were to do it, I would want to do an evening where she sits on a stool and just sings Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf. But she can only get away with so much of that material in her concerts. She still has to go to “New York, New York” and “Cabaret” and the numbers the audience expects. It’s a pity because she has done wonderful work as an actress, like
The Sterile Cuckoo
. I think she should be doing projects like
Come Back, Little Sheba.
Ah, hell, sometimes the critics confuse me and really hurt, and then all you can do is take cover, and, oh yes, take umbrage.
KANDER: I think Liza’s a wonderful actress for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that she invents so much and makes it sound real. Terrence said once, “Liza can turn emotionally on a dime onstage.” I don’t know if she will ever be allowed to be the superb actress that she really is. Hopefully, she will later on. But she shouldn’t at this point in her career allow herself to
Liza on “Liza’s Back”:
Look at “Liza’s Back,” the song they wrote for my recent tour. Fred said, “You come out and you say the truth. Don’t hide behind anything. You have nothing to hide behind. You know what I mean. There’s nothing wrong with what happened to you. It happened to you. So you talk about it before they do.” I said, “Before they do?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. You talk about it!” I said, “Yes, Freddy, you’re right.” The song was so funny, hilarious, and the people appreciated it because out of my mouth comes the truth. I think Fred’s lyrics are ingenious:
I took my bottles of pills
And I flushed them away,
And I emptied the booze,
And I went to A.A.
Hey, London, Liza’s back.
London, Liza’s back
And that’s okay.
And I went to a class
To get ready to dance,
And I dieted hard
’Til they took in my pants.
Hey, London, Liza’s back.
London, Liza’s back
And it’s okay …
be a media freak. Liza should be a serious artist because she is one. I think it’s unfortunate because there is a real actress missing that never had the chance to blossom. It wasn’t her fault with
The Rink
.
EBB: She couldn’t help being deeply disappointed by
The Rink.
All of us were. I remember nights when I had to take her to the emergency room of a hospital, once because she said someone stepped on her foot. She played the show in a cast for a while. That was all very weird.
KANDER: Chita could always tell at the beginning of the show whether she was okay or not. I never saw Liza fall apart onstage.
EBB: It was hard on Chita.
KANDER: Particularly because she is so disciplined.
EBB: Chita didn’t like playing it with an understudy, and I didn’t blame her. Everything in the show was put on both of them very carefully. A. J. Antoon had turned in a brilliant job directing.
KANDER: I thought his staging was gorgeous.
EBB: It was scholarly, the way he dissected that script and gave motivations to the actors. I wouldn’t have changed a word, and I liked our contributions except for a couple of glaring exceptions. And you couldn’t look up there and say, “Oh, God, I wish we’d cast it better.”
KANDER: There was terrific bonding in that little company.
EBB: It was a pleasure to go backstage because everybody loved everybody.
KANDER: That’s what I meant with what I said about Jason in tears. It was like they had taken this thing that we all loved and protected, and they killed it.
EBB: He was standing behind me one night during a preview performance. We were watching Chita and Liza doing a scene, and we looked out into the audience together. There were
a lot of happy faces out there, and we were thrilled. He said, “God, we’re gonna open soon.” Then he squeezed my shoulder and said, “How could they not like this?”
KANDER:
Steel Pier
was also a show the critics attacked. But that was another one of those experiences like
The Rink
, during which it was a love fest.
EBB: [
laughing
] It shows you that we shouldn’t do those.
With a libretto from Terrence McNally (based on Manuel Puig’s novel),
Kiss of the Spider Woman
reunited Kander and Ebb with Harold Prince. Once again the team took on material that appeared to defy the musical form, but
Kiss of the Spider Woman
managed to counterpose totalitarian repression with camp in its male leads: a macho political prisoner (Valentin) and a gay window dresser (Molina) who is obsessed with movies. This controversial and startlingly artistic show developed from a 1990 workshop at State University of New York, Purchase. The show traveled to Toronto and London in 1992, then opened in New York the following year and played for 906 performances.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
earned seven Tonys, including Best Score for Kander and Ebb and Best Actress for Chita Rivera. The journey from workshop to Broadway exemplifies the perilous commercial realities of today’s musical theater, with the show’s corporate producer, Live Entertainment, declaring bankruptcy in 1998.
KANDER: On
Kiss of the Spider Woman
, Freddy, you came up with the idea. You said to me, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and I said, “Yes!” immediately. The next person we spoke to was Hal Prince. We said the title, and Hal said, “Yes!” immediately. Everybody
after that thought it was the worst idea they had ever heard, except for Terrence McNally. When we suggested that he do the book, we said the title to him and he also knew immediately what it was. No one else could imagine why anyone would want to tackle such a grim story. A musical about torture, homosexuality, and death?
EBB: There was no question this was going to be difficult material. It’s hard for people to latch onto your vision and share your enthusiasm when the subject matter is difficult. I had read the book and seen the movie. I was more impressed with the book because I wasn’t all that convinced by the Academy Award performance of William Hurt.
KANDER: It was the book that was the turn-on.
EBB: The book was much more involving to me, and it was because of the book that I approached you.
KANDER: It’s easier to work from a book when you can really go inside the mind of the character. Immediately we saw musical, theatrical, possibilities in it to write and entertain us. It was perfectly obvious to the three of us that not only do you have the exotic locale of a South American prison, but you’re spending half the evening inside of somebody else’s fantasy, and if that isn’t a clear message to do something musical, I don’t know what would be. What seems unlikely musical material to many people often seems like very likely material to us. When you initially suggested
Kiss of the Spider
Woman,
the first thing that came to mind was that this is a man who lives in his imagination, a man who’s summoning up movies—how much more musical can you get than that? I think these pieces that are kind of bold—and particularly if they are exotic on top of it—are much easier to write than a little story about boy meets girl in New York. I don’t know how to do that.
EBB: With
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
we had another advantage in that the novel’s author, Manuel Puig, worked with us for
some time before we started. Just absorbing him—his personality and insights—gave us a lot of clues into how to write “The Window Dresser’s Song” and others like that. Manuel Puig himself was so flamboyant.
KANDER: When he talked about doing a tango, all of a sudden—