KANDER: What is much more dismaying to me is the gigantic musical, the big spectacle. If
Mamma Mia
wants to happen, it’s a modest little musical and some people adore it. I don’t think it’s nearly as destructive as
The Lion King
, as beautiful as those costumes are.
EBB: I actually don’t think of
The Lion King
as a musical. It seems more like a Radio City Music Hall show to me, like a great big parade of costumes.
KANDER: But writers like us don’t go to those—
EBB: And want to go home to write another
Lion King
. I did want to write another
Guys and Dolls,
though. And
South Pacific
. And
The King and I.
And
Forum
. I’m not inspired to want to do much of what we are seeing in the theater now. At some time in my life, I must have had the arrogance to believe that I could possibly do as well as those shows I mentioned if I kept trying and learning and working. That was my goal.
The Lion King
would never have been my goal. Nor would
Mamma Mia.
I don’t get those. They go over my head, and I saw
Mamma Mia
three times.
KANDER: Why?
EBB: Because I kept looking for the virtue of it. I kept asking myself, why is this show so successful? What kind of chemistry is this?
KANDER: Freddy, that’s like looking for the caviar in a peanut butter sandwich.
EBB: I feel there is something that can be learned from all successful productions. We just have to figure out what it is. Why is it happening? As far as the impact of that show, the audience was never less than ecstatic every time I went. They were jumping up and dancing. There were wild middle-aged men running down the aisles.
KANDER: It was all about their youth, Freddy.
EBB: So that may be what we come away with. I remember one show I saw recently that really impressed me as being first-rate. The Manhattan Theater Club’s presentation of
The Wild Party.
KANDER: I agree with you on that one.
EBB: I admired that piece in every way. I thought that scenery was marvelous, the direction apt, and the boy who wrote the score—
KANDER: He got killed for writing that show.
EBB: Andrew Lippa.
KANDER: Something else has happened in recent years. You can see things that are not only pieces that you admire but that are created by talented people, and the hardest thing today is to have those be accepted. We always go back to the old story of how
Flora
flopped and without hesitation Hal said, “Let’s go to work on
Cabaret.”
EBB: We survived
Flora,
and Jerry and Sheldon could survive
The Body Beautiful
and go on to
Fiddler.
KANDER: But where is Andrew’s next show? That kid really has what I think of as a remarkable gift. He wasn’t trying to be fashionable. His writing on that show wasn’t cluttered. It wasn’t overextended. It wasn’t bloated. It was just talent.
EBB: The writing was so clear that I wanted to come home and be Andrew Lippa.
KANDER:
Urinetown
is not a piece that I love, but I came away thinking these people are very talented and I can’t wait to see their next show.
Nine
was another score I wish that I had
written because it was done so well. I thought it was extraordinarily inventive and wonderfully melodic. At the time I hadn’t met the composer, Maury Yeston, but I think I called or wrote to tell him his work really dazzled me. When I hear something I really respond to like that, it makes me feel like being a composer again. It’s energizing rather than depressing, as it can be. Every once in a while something like that will happen. But I don’t think the commercial theater is set up to nurture young talent. I think that is the most telling change that we have seen in recent years. Our generation of writers like Steve Sondheim, Bock and Harnick, Jerry Herman—
EBB: We had the opportunity to fail.
KANDER: To be lousy.
EBB: I don’t think anybody has that freedom today. The failure of that show for Andrew Lippa would seem to preclude the possibility of his getting another one, though I hope not.
KANDER: If Andrew had written that show in 1964, he would have already had two more shows on and had a chance to grow. The only way you can grow is to see your work out there. Another type of popular show that disheartens me is the “sung through” musical. I think of it as fake opera. The
Les Miz
kind of show.
Miss Saigon.
Sung speech is often presented simply because it sounds artistic. But there is a difference between real opera and fake opera. It’s like pornography—you know it when you see it or hear it. To me sung speech seems terribly pretentious and it also deludes audiences into thinking they are having a deep experience. I hear a lot of scores, and many of them are sort of extravagant takeoffs or imitations of
Les Miz
or some big gothic production. We’re in funny times in terms of what the Broadway musical is. Much of it has to do with the perceptions of producers and theater owners as to what will sell. I went to see
Hairspray
the other night, and I had a good time, but again it didn’t make me want to write.
EBB: I did want to write. I wanted to write and tell them to
go home and listen to Frank Loesser, which would be good advice for anybody.
KANDER: But it’s a huge hit, Freddy. We’re in a
Hairspray
era right now. The critics adore it and the audience does too. It makes me feel a little disconnected.
EBB: There’s no way for us to relate to it. It’s the same sort of phenomenon as
Mamma Mia.
If you are a young writer today and you ask yourself what you have to do to succeed, those are your role models.
KANDER: Maybe in recent decades we’ve all taken it too seriously. In the early seventies, critics started writing about musical theater in very serious intellectual terms, sometimes suggesting that the musical was America’s great gift to the theater world. In some ways I think it’s unfortunate that we ever started to think that way. It used to be that shows were just entertainments. Entertainment is not a bad word. It’s something Shakespeare knew very well.
EBB: I don’t think many people writing today even know basically what constitutes a rhyme.
KANDER: I hope this isn’t old-fogeyness setting in, but many contemporary lyrics don’t rhyme not because they are intentionally not rhyming but because the people writing the lyrics don’t know the difference.
EBB: They often don’t hear the rhymes. Here’s one of my favorites even though it’s an old song—but then again, I’m an old songwriter. In “Lady of Spain,” the line “I adore you” is supposed to rhyme with “first saw you.” But that’s not a rhyme. It’s an incongruous sound, and you have to be a New Yawker to even make it work: “sore you.” In terms of rhyme and prosody, our generation learned from all our predecessors, and not just Oscar Hammerstein, as brilliant as he was. I think Cole Porter’s rhymes are not only ingenious, they are always correct. He is quite remarkable just from that standpoint alone.
KANDER: But with popular music, if you go back to songs
from the twenties and thirties, for the most part the grammar was correct, and for the most part the rhymes and prosody were also correct.
EBB: It may be old-fashioned, but I also find that to be true. That is how we were taught to do what we do.
KANDER: By tradition. It’s what we grew up hearing. If you listen to “Sweet Adeline,” it’s a song that rhymes. The sentences are sentences. The most basic song would have had good grammar and straightforward lyrics expressed musically in such a way that you could hear them and understand them. I think that it is the change that is more remarkable than the tradition, and as far as I can tell the change happened not because people decided that they wanted to change but because of a lowering of standards in teaching English, and, of course, the music business also changed. In 1966, while I was unpacking in my hotel room in Boston, I heard “What good is sitting alone in your room …” on the radio.
Cabaret
hadn’t even opened yet, but already the title song was a hit. I think that was probably the last year that Broadway show tunes regularly became popular hits.
It’s not that great songs were no longer being written, but the music and theater worlds had changed. When popular music stopped caring about theater music, people who wrote for the theater stopped trying to write for that market. What was the point of trying to lay in a bunch of hit songs for a show if there was no one willing to record them? Rock groups figured out they could make more money if they wrote their own material rather than depending on professional songwriters. After
Cabaret,
songs from musicals ceased to be the music that the music business wanted to promote. There wasn’t enough profit in it, and so little by little popular music and theater music parted ways.
EBB: I never felt overly concerned about the invasion of rock and
Hair
in that era as far as the impact of popular music on Broadway and on our careers was concerned. But I felt dismay
that some executive at a record company decided that this is what the public wanted to hear, and suddenly it was mostly rock and roll and more frivolous songs that were making it. That was somewhat disheartening, but I always felt we had a fairly secure idea of what we wanted to do, and as long as we were being asked to do it, what was the problem? We were asked to do
Cabaret, The Happy Time, The Act, The Rink
. Those shows came to us, and so why be resentful of other musical styles? It’s like the old line about another man’s wife—you have to stay in your own backyard.
KANDER: I remember when “Send in the Clowns” became a pop hit, and all of us pricked up our ears, thinking that maybe things might be changing, but they weren’t. It was an aberration.
EBB: They had a pop icon singing it. You can’t sit down and say, We are now going to write a popular song, or a top-ten song, or even a showstopper. You can’t bring that kind of goal into the writing process because it won’t happen and it’s a ridiculous thing to ask of yourself.
KANDER: Why try to be somebody else? What is the point of that? It often happens these days that performers attempt to change their whole presentation and musical style in order to sound more contemporary. “Contemporary” is a word that sometimes confounds me, but basically it means you’re alive today. Usually, it seems to me, that kind of stylistic change doesn’t work. It may be fun for an audience to hear performers stretch into some other musical form, but that is not really where they live. In our case, we can only speak our own language and write in our own style, as we always have.
EBB: And hope that someone produces us. We’ll see what happens with the next one. I think we’ll get on. As the French say,
Qui vivra verra —
He who lives will see.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material. All rights are reserved; used by permission.
Alley Music Corporation and Trio Music, Inc.: “A Quiet Thing,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1965; “Cabaret,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1966, 1967; “I Don’t Care Much,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1963, 1964; “If I Were in Your Shoes,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1963; “If You Could See Her,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1966, 1967; “Life Is,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1968; “My Coloring Book,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1962; “Please Stay,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1967; “Sing Happy,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1965; “Take Her, She’s Mine,” music by Paul Klein, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1961; “What Kind of Life Is That?,” music by Norman Martin, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1962; “Yes,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1971
Kander & Ebb, Inc.: “Colored Lights,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1983; “Don’t ‘Ah, Ma’ Me,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1983; “First You Dream,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1977; “Liza’s Back,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 2002; “What Kind of Man,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 2003; “Where You Are,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1990
Norbeth Productions, Inc., and Stephen Sondheim: “All I Need Is the Boy (Girl),” music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, copyright © 1959, 1960
Unichappell Music, Inc. and Kander & Ebb, Inc.: “Cell Block Tango,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1975; “Class,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1975; “Please, Sir,” music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, copyright © 1977