EBB: Everybody. Stagehands who go out there and get a scene changed in a minute or fix a foul like that.
KANDER: Randy Graff did a reading yesterday for a workshop of
Curtains.
She got a laugh on a line that’s always been in the first act, but it was funny in a way that it’s never been before, just because she screamed it. That was her instinct. With all those talented people in the reading, I just sat there with my eyes blinking,
thinking,
How did you do that? How did you come up with that in no time?
We mentioned David Loud. Patrick Vacciarello is the musical director on the other workshop we are doing.
The Skin of Our Teeth
. He is another one of those guys—I don’t know how they do it.
EBB: You know what? When people are good at what they do, you never really know how they do it. I mean, I listen to you play the piano and say, “How do you do that?” Or take a director like Frank Galati, with whom we did
The Visit
recently at the Goodman Theater. How does he get the show to look that good, to be that clearly spoken and articulated in a way that we could only pray our material would be realized? How does someone do that with such little time and little space, and with an eleven-piece orchestra?
KANDER: But you do the same thing, Freddy. If there’s a moment that needs to be filled in, you’ll say, “Give me a minute,” and five minutes later it’s all there. It’s all rhymed and makes sense.
EBB: It just happens. That explains it as much as it can be explained. I think that people like David Loud and Patrick Vacciarello are just incredible at what they do, and our great fortune is having them work with us.
Kander and Ebb again teamed up with Scott Ellis, David Thompson, and Susan Stroman to stage
Steel Pier,
a fanciful tale about a 1933 dance marathon with a ghost as its romantic lead. The songwriters came up with a delightfully evocative score, conjuring the spirit of the era with lyrical refrains like “Things work out, you’re sure to find, / When you leave the world behind”—sung with the female chorus dancing on the wing of a biplane. The cast included Gregory Harrison, Karen Ziemba, Daniel McDonald,
and Debra Monk. As a book musical, this Kander-Ebb show ran up against a season of pop operas when it opened for its quick-to-close run on April 24, 1997. The
New York Times
reported that
Steel Pier
“reminds us that these two men represent the survival of a form of musical that no one else is writing today: filled with that youthful joy that doesn’t believe in despair or death.”
KANDER: We had a wonderful experience working on
Steel Pier
until we got into the theater. I don’t know exactly why things changed. As I recall, there was a certain amount of panicking and a certain distance from the show in the theater, whereas in the studio, we had been right on top of these people. It was very emotional and funny, and everybody’s work was really good. The making of it was really a joy for me. We worked on that piece with Scott Ellis, David Thompson, and Susan Stroman, and the five of us sat around playing “What if?” forever.
EBB: I remember we wrote “Running in Place” very late while we were already in previews for
Steel Pier
.
KANDER: The idea there was to try and make a big dance moment for Karen Ziemba, and Susan did a terrific job choreographing that scene.
EBB: The critics attacked that piece like we were getting arty at the end. We didn’t seem to be able to do anything right with
Steel Pier
. They weren’t having it.
KANDER: I think “First You Dream” is as good a lyrical moment, romantic moment, as we’ve ever written. It’s almost a perfect lyric, perfect song. There was a story there. The marathons would sometimes develop for the audience’s delight a love relationship for a couple of those poor, tired marathon dancers. Then
they would have a wedding with a tent, so the newly married couple could be alone together. In
Steel Pier
, the heroine, Rita, has a date with an exhibition pilot, but his plane crashes. He’s allowed to come back to the world to be with her for a short period of time. We were thinking of the Orpheus myth when we wrote the song, which he sings to her in the tent. The conceit is that she sees what he sees while he sings to her, so she is flying with him. He tells her not to look back, and for a long time, she doesn’t. But finally she does look and that brings them back to earth. You may not buy this, Freddy, but I’ve always felt that if she hadn’t looked, when they pulled the tent away, the couple would have been gone:
Bill
:
First you dream,
Dream about incredible things
Then you look
And suddenly you have wings.
You can fly,
You can fly
But first you dream.
First you dream,
Dream about remarkable times
Close your eyes
And see how your spirit climbs.
You can fly
You can soar
Feel the wind
Hear it roar
It’s easy now
Imagine that
But first you dream.
Rita and Bill:
Here we are
High above the rooftops.
There’s a barn
There’s a field of corn
And that little white house
Where another you was born.
Isn’t it fine?
Isn’t it fair,
Being up here
Looking down there?
Bill
:
Take my hand,
I promise that I won’t let you fall.
Don’t look back,
The looking back could end it all.
Off we go
To the sky
Straight ahead
You and I
Together now
Together now
But first things first:
First you dream.
EBB: I thought it worked, and I think “Everybody’s Girl” was a good comic song.
KANDER: That was one of those shows where it was the people that made it so special, in some ways, the casting itself. Our friendship with Debra Monk, which is now very strong, certainly began with
Steel Pier
. And Daniel McDonald became a very close friend and got married in my house out in the country.
Karen Ziemba had been part of our life before, with
And the World Goes ’Round,
and we hope that continues. David Loud, the music director, was also part of
World Goes ’Round,
and he is music director of our new show,
The Visit
.
KANDER: But that whole year with the workshop and rehearsals, every time I walked through the door of that rehearsal room I looked forward to it because there wasn’t a single person in the room that I wasn’t really happy to see. I think everybody felt that way.
EBB: I remember that we had trouble with the opening number, which we wrote first and was never really right. “Willing to Ride (Here I Go Again).” The audience didn’t really get into it as much as I would have liked. But it’s all perception. My perception of the number was that it should have made the audience more responsive. The reception was respectful but the song never got an enormous hand.
KANDER: It wasn’t the best song in the show.
EBB: I didn’t know how to fix it.
KANDER: There was one thing that hurt us, though I don’t mean this is the reason the show failed. At the beginning of the show, the pilot, played by Daniel McDonald, sort of rose up and went offstage without explanation. That confused people, and then we got a lot of advice from people who suggested that we had to have an airplane crash and we had to see the pilot with his jacket burning. Then the show became more and more and more literal, so the whole thing turned into
Touched by an Angel
, which was a big mistake.
EBB: I think they thought it was silly having this dead guy as the hero. KANDER: That was perfectly obvious.
EBB: It was the wrong show at the wrong time. It was done differently later, when they cut that whole beginning and just told the story straightforwardly.
KANDER: But you shouldn’t find out that he’s dead until the second act when the girl, his partner in the marathon, finds out.
EBB: It worked much better without that business at the beginning.
KANDER: There was panic going on about how the audience doesn’t understand the beginning of the show and we have to make it clearer. Still, there was something else, and I don’t know if it was the set or our mistakes, but there was an emotional distance in the theater that was not there in the studio.
EBB: We never connected with the audience, really, except a little bit with her song, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of reaction. I thought Susan’s dances were wonderful. My God, she staged a jitterbug that was fabulous, but the audiences seemed to overlook the miraculous pieces like that.
KANDER: When we were in the big studio and had bleachers up and small audiences, there was great enthusiasm and everybody would be in tears at the end.
EBB: You know what happened, we had to manufacture a story to accommodate that dance marathon milieu. We really wanted to do
They Shoot Horses
,
Don’t They
? and when we couldn’t get the rights to do that, we kept the marathon idea and constructed the story around that. I guess the effort looked a little desperate. I don’t have a hell of a lot of affection for that show.
KANDER: Oh, I do, and I have terrific affection for those characters. The love story moved me tremendously.
EBB: I wasn’t moved. You are way more romantic than I am. I appreciated it, and I loved my collaborators and the cast. Everything you’re supposed to love, I loved. But I don’t think the show ever worked, and I don’t completely disagree with the criticism that was leveled at it for being slight, though it was powerful-looking. I watched the ending of the first act every day because I loved it so. What was it called?
KANDER: That was the sprint.
EBB: All of them ran around in a circle. It was a custom in a marathon and I just loved that we put that on the stage.
KANDER: There was an emotional moment in that piece that really killed me every time, when Daniel McDonald as the pilot doesn’t know that he’s dead. He’s just finding this out, and the girl who he’s in love with has fallen down. Suddenly, he just instinctively puts his hand up—
EBB: During the sprint.
KANDER: And everybody stops. He looks at his hand and realizes that he has that kind of power to be able to do that—I mean, I’ll get teary just describing this, believe me. Then slowly he got everybody to move back several bars of music.
EBB: They moved in reverse.
KANDER: We played the music in reverse, and they very slowly went back. Then he let his hand go again, and everybody picked up where they left off, and she made it. It was the moment of recognition, and I bawled like a baby every time.
EBB: The sprint was Susan and Scott at their best.
KANDER: The show had a marvelous cast.
EBB: And a wonderful libretto idea.
KANDER: I felt differently than you about
They Shoot Horses
,
Don’t They?
It seemed obvious that we should try to get the rights, but it’s a story which has always seemed to me a bit unrealistically dark and bleak.
EBB: So you went for a ghost story where a dead man comes back! Unrealistic?
KANDER: I mean emotionally unrealistic.
EBB: I thought it was terrific.
KANDER: They researched and had speakers come who had been in marathons, and the fact is those marathons were not these terribly dark, bleak, desperate things. There were people who were there to get their moment in the sun.
EBB: But that was the movie’s take on it.
KANDER: And also the novel’s take on it.
EBB: I liked that. I thought there was an element that was desperate and hideous, the exploitation of people to win a couple of bucks if they could stay on their feet. We tried to get the rights because the story really intrigued David and me and Scott and Susan. I didn’t know you didn’t care for it.
KANDER: I wasn’t going to object to it. I loved the idea of the milieu. There was a kind of Kansas City jazz that I was aware of growing up, and when we wrote
Steel Pier
I found myself going back and listening to some of those recordings to just absorb that sound and atmosphere from the thirties. My grandparents took me to Atlantic City when I was six, the same year that
Steel Pier
takes place, 1933.
EBB: When the rights to
They Shoot Horses
weren’t available, we started on our own libretto.
KANDER: This was another project that evolved the way that
And the World Goes ’Round
did, with Scott, Susan, and Tommy. We loved them, and then we wanted to be together again.
EBB: I would do it again tomorrow.
KANDER: You bet.
EBB: I love them, and I think they’re wildly gifted. I would be very happy and proud to work with them again. But that has nothing to do with my opinion of
Steel Pier
. Because everybody did their job.
KANDER: You’re right, even with our differences of opinion. But the romantic element of that piece thrilled me.
EBB: Ugh.