Signature Theater Celebration (front row, from left) Natascia Diaz, Chita Rivera; (second row) David Margulies, John Kander; (back row) Terrence McNally, Eric Schaeffer, Will Chase, Michael Minarik, Hunter Foster, Mark Jacoby, George Hearn

MUSIC MAN

At 81, legendary musical composer John Kander continues to create great music.

By Michael J. Bandler
Illustration by Megan Halsey

In the first act of Curtains — the musical mystery by John Kander and Fred Ebb that premiered on Broadway last year—a songwriter estranged from his wife and writing partner sings, “

I can’t pretend, I miss the music, I miss my friend.”

It fits seamlessly into one of the sub-plots of the show. And it mirrors the sadness of a partnership dissolved.

“I wrote that song myself,” composer Kander says, “after Fred passed away.”

Ebb was the wordsmith of a team that survived for more than four decades and created some of Broadway’s most heralded musicals, including Cabaret, Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman. He died in 2004, leaving four unfinished shows, of which Curtains is one. After grieving over his professional loss, Kander went back to work on the show, writing both the words and lyrics for two new numbers.

Kander, a Kansas City native, says it was his musical upbringing that most influenced him, “Music in our house was a very enjoyable and valued thing.

“My father had a big singing voice, my brother liked to sing and my aunt and grandmother both played the piano. When I became musically active as a tiny kid, it was very much communally enjoyed and ingrained in the family. We had a big piano in our house and when I found it at the age of four, that was the beginning of my downfall!”

When he wasn’t singing with the family or immersed in schoolwork, he spent much of his time in the dark at movies, engrossed in serials that were the rage in the ’30s. He remembers when a road company of Pins and Needles, a pro-labor union musical revue, came to town. It was his first exposure to the art form that would become his life.

TEAMING UP Collaborations in musical theater are an unpredictable phenomena. Some teams write Tony-winning musicals, then break up. Some composers may collaborate with directors and actors, but create music by themselves.

Kander and Ebb, arguably, have been one of most successful composing teams in the history of musical theater. From the beginning, they shared an affinity for certain elements of plot, mood and sensibility. Most of their shows, for example, revolve around theater or performance: Cabaret, The Act, Chicago, Steel Pier. Many also involve down-and-out characters and their will to succeed.

“I don’t know how to quite describe our attitude toward that idea, because literally, we never talked about it,” Kander says. “It was just there—often when somebody is really down, they find the energy and courage to go on. But I’m afraid of making that sound sentimental.”

The two came together in the early ’60s through a mutual acquaintance, and their first Broadway musical, Flora, premiered in 1965. It was, Kander recalls, “A case of instant communication.”

How did two men—one a with a Midwestern background, the other from the streets of New York City—find a mutual outlook on life, conveyed through music and song?

“We were very different people. Our social lives were different. We’re also both very thin-skinned. The miracle of our collaboration was that whatever was going on personally with the two of us, when we got into that room and started to work, it was always fun. Writing was a pleasure. Sometimes we wrote very fast and tore it up very fast. We created an energy there, it was not conflict. In that room, while working, we could say anything to each other without getting upset. In there, something about the sheer joy of creation and collaboration worked for us for 42 years.”

The team also embraced people’s dreams for change. Kander points to a brief reprise of their signal anthem in Curtains, “Show People,” that, he says, sums up the evening, as the company embraces the Boston detective on the murder case who is also passionately in thrall with theater.

“A character sings to him, ‘There’s a special kind of people known as show people,’ and he answers, ‘We live in a world full of dreams…Sometimes we’re not certain what’s false and what’s real, but we’re never in doubt about how we feel.’”

As for the performance element, Kander credits his late partner. “He was a superb performer himself. Anybody who ever saw him found him unforgettable. Maybe because of this, it seems that a lot of themes in the plays that we work on involve performing.”

The team’s solidarity and love of performing carried over into their relations with actors. Kander told friends that when he walked into the rehearsal room for Steel Pier, “There wasn’t a single person I was not happy to see.” The affection is also apparent with the past and present cast of Curtains.

THE VISIT Now, nearly two years after Curtains tested in Los Angeles, Kander is overseeing The Visit, the second of those four musicals and one of his darker creations. The show, based on a tale of revenge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and starring Chita Rivera, is being tested at the Signature Theatre, a prestigious theater company in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. The show premiered first in Chicago in 2001, where it underwent restructuring and is now ready for larger venues.

While The Visit isn’t based around any kind of show, Kander says there is a dreamlike quality to it. “The whole piece, in a way, is a fantasy. The townspeople, somehow, are not quite real. There’s something about the place. It’s not quite Kansas—let’s put it that way.”

The story: A rich lady returns to her now-impoverished hometown, reunites with the man who was her lover and while reinventing herself, reinvigorates the town. It is, the composer suggests, “The Merry Widow turned on its head.” In fact, he says, the score is filled with Viennese-style waltzes, and though greed is at the story’s core, the musical is romantic and filled with light. “Something positive in the fact that at the end of the piece, the characters are cleansed,” Kander says.

The Visit resembles most of the team’s classic work—particularly Cabaret and Chicago— in its use of modern themes in a different era.

“Dürrenmatt, in his play, made up a village and a society that seemed to be contemporary but wasn’t,” Kander says. “That appealed to us. The fact is that 90 percent of musical theater, from early operas on, is in atmospheres that are not contemporary with the audience.”

CHANNELING A FRIEND In some way the collaboration between Kander and Ebb is still alive, suggests Karen Ziemba, one of the stars of Curtains,

“Now that John is writing his own lyrics, he’s channeling Fred in many ways. I feel that he probably had a lot to do with influencing Fred in his writing, as Fred influenced John’s musical writing.”

Over the years, Kander and Ebb also composed film scores. And, of course, besides the movie versions of Cabaret and Chicago, the team created that classic paean to a great city, “New York, New York,” for the film of that name.

What is the essence of Kander’s musicality—besides his affinity for the piano that surfaces in lush, sweeping musical measures?

“Like any good music,” Ziemba says, “it’s hard to sing. It’s very much in a speaking voice, and then you go really high. Being an aficionado of opera, John was raised on sustained endings to songs. That gives the music a soaring quality.”

GREAT WHITE WAY Virtually from the outset, Ebb and Kander were considered serious craftsmen.

“I always felt the best compliment anybody could give us was that we were professionals,” Kander says. “I always thought of us as trying to be good carpenters. I feel very strongly about craft—let’s put it that way. And Fred did also, very much. We tried never to betray our sense of craft.”

They didn’t always bask in critical plaudits. One thing Kander’s learned, over the years, is that “sometimes you get clobbered for work you think is your best, and sometimes you’re praised and get awards for things you know are not.” With Curtains, for instance, “we got clobbered by a lot of critics for doing exactly what we set out to do.”

One of the curiosities of their career is that a tough-minded 1975 musical, Chicago, wasn’t embraced by the critics. It had a decent run just shy of 1,000 performances but was left in the dust at awards season by A Chorus Line. In the fall of 1996, it returned to Broadway and was a much bigger hit. It’s still going strong some 4,700 performances, a Hollywood film and all those DVDs later.

“It’s really weird,” Kander says. “It reopened with the same score, the same book and some of the critics who didn’t like it the first time liked it this time around.”

With The Visit opening in Arlington, and with Curtains a sure bet to run at least through the summer in New York, Kander has two projects left unfinished after Ebb’s death—a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, which has been staged and workshopped several times at regional theaters; and Minstrel Show, which still awaits its first public workshop.

“So there’s plenty to do,” Kander says. “As much as I miss Fred, it’s like he’s still here, looking down, and saying, ‘Get to work!’”