DISTINCTLY,

KANDER AND EBB:

A glimpse into the illustrious partnership
of John Kander and Fred Ebb

By: Emily Parrish

Musical Theatre History
Brenda May Ito
31 March 2014

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On October 7, 2010, a highly controversial musical opened on Broadway at the Lyceum
Theatre. The Scottsboro Boys is about the infamous Alabama trial where nine black teenagers
were accused of raping two white women in 1931. About a month after it opened, a group of
protesters gathered to close the show. The controversy stemmed, not from the subject matter
itself, but rather, how it was presented. The Scottsboro Boys uses a minstrel show format,
complete with an interlocutor, a minstrel line, and a cakewalk. The choice is a daring
commentary on the society of the time and effectively shows how the boys were doomed to
receive an unjust trial due to the rampant racism alive in 1930s Alabama.
Despite the controversy, the musical is celebrated throughout the theatre community and
it has been lauded as a masterpiece. A critic for Time magazine said The Scottsboro Boys turns
a grim true-life story into a soulful song-and-dance show. It leaves you disturbed, entertained,
and just a little bit prouder of Broadway.
The musical marks the final collaboration between the legendary songwriting team of
John Kander and Fred Ebb. Their partnership lasted nearly forty-two years, ending in 2004 when
Fred Ebb died of a heart attack at age seventy-six. The two were never strangers to controversy
and are celebrated for creating innovative and provocative musicals (Leve).
When the composer, John Kander, and the lyricist, Fred Ebb met in 1962, thanks to their
mutual music publisher, Tommy Valando, the United States was in a state of flux. The political
climate was more volatile than it had ever been before, with the Cold War and the conflict in
Vietnam. Kander and Ebb were both coming off of their professional musical theatre debuts as
critical and artistic failures, Ebb with a clumsy book for Morning Sun, and Kander with his
involvement with the disastrous A Family Affair.

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Despite having hardly anything in common, Kander and Ebb hit it off immediately. Ebb
recalls the meeting as a case of instant communication and instant songs (Colored Lights).
One of the most important aspects of their partnership, and perhaps the reason why it lasted for
over forty years, is because the two enjoyed working together. It sounds so simple: partners who
like to work together. Kander says:
The really lucky thing is that when we first began to work together we fell into
a way of working that allowed us to enjoy what we were doing. We never made
an intellectual decision about that. We just fell into a way of working that was
pleasurable everything afterward is hard as hell. But even when theres trouble
out of town and concepts change or songs change, the act of writing is never
unpleasant for either of us. (Colored Lights)
This philosophy helped them create some of the most iconic and groundbreaking pieces
of musical theatre. However, as the saying goes, Rome wasnt built in a day, and it took time for
them to establish themselves as innovators of the form.
Their first collaborations were stand-alone songs, such as Sara Lee, My Coloring
Book, and Maybe This Time, a song that would eventually make its way into one of their
most groundbreaking musicals, Cabaret. Their first foray into musical theatre was intended as
more of a test-run. The two wrote the score for Golden Gate, a musical about the rebuilding of
San Francisco after the devastating earthquake in 1906, with a libretto by Ebbs friend, Richard
Morris. Unfortunately, the musical was never produced. However, Kander and Ebb used the
score to audition for Hal Prince to write the score for Flora, the Red Menace. On May 11, 1965,
Flora, the Red Menace opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre. Featuring a book by George
Abbot and Robert Russell and the Broadway debut of Liza Minnelli, this spoof on communism

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was a flop, but it provided Kander and Ebb with their first Broadway score and began a string of
collaborations with the celebrated Hal Prince and the fabulous Liza Minnelli.
Throughout their career, Kander and Ebb were not afraid to explore different forms of
musical theatre. Rather than follow the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of linear storytelling
which had been utilized in the writing of musicals since the opening of the groundbreaking
Oklahoma! in 1943, they experimented with non-linear and provocative forms of storytelling. In
1966, Kander and Ebb found their voice and changed musical theatre forever.
With Cabaret, Kander and Ebb worked with Hal Prince and Joe Masteroff to create what
is now known as the first non-realistic, non-linear concept musical (Mordden). Using John Van
Drutens play I Am a Camera, based off of Christopher Isherwoods novel Goodbye to Berlin,
Cabaret launched a new era of musicals.
Cabaret is unique because it is basically two musicals in one. When Kander and Ebb
wrote the score, they wrote two versions of the score: a traditional book-musical score and a
cabaret score. Hal Prince and Joe Masteroff wanted to combine the two and mix the realistic
book scenes with a metaphorical cabaret. While the book songs move the plot along, the cabaret
songs comment on the book as well as create the mood of the musical. To connect the two,
Kander and Prince created the Emcee, a character who exists only in the cabaret to bridge the
gap between the two realities.
Set in Berlin in the late 1920s, just as the Nazi party was gathering momentum in
Germany, Cabaret tells the story of Cliff Bradshaw, an American writer who spends his nights in
the Kit Kat Club, a seedy nightclub run by a nefarious Emcee. There, he falls in love with the
British performer, Sally Bowles. As the society falls apart around them, so does any hope for the
characters to have a happy ending. Cabaret ran for almost three years, received eight Tony

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awards, and inspired a hit film and seven revivals on both Broadway and Londons West End. It
is a landmark piece of musical theatre and a perfect example of how Kander and Ebb explore
serious issues through the lens of American popular culture (Leve).
From 1968 to 1974, Kander and Ebb contributed scores to three Broadway shows that
can be classified as commercial flops. Despite their charming score for The Happy Time, the
show was overproduced and ended up becoming one of the first musicals to lose over a million
dollars. The same year, they also provided the score to the Hal Prince helmed Zorba. They used a
similar approach that has worked so well in Cabaret and were able to make Greek folk music
accessible for the average theatre patrons. Unfortunately, the dark material kept it from
recouping its investment. The biggest flop of the three was 70, Girls, 70, a musical about
septuagenarians that was ill-placed in a Broadway theatre. It was a fun musical that Kander and
Ebb enjoyed working on, but it was a critical and box-office failure.
On June 3, 1975, the original production of Chicago opened on Broadway. Kander and
Ebb worked with the legendary Bob Fosse to create another concept musical, similar to their
biggest hit, Cabaret. This time, instead of a cabaret, Kander and Ebb wrote the story in the style
of vaudeville. The first production, directed by Fosse was overly stylized and received mixed
reviews from the critics and audiences alike. The material was bogged down by Fosses staging
and the production was overshadowed by the success of A Chorus Line, a musical that owes its
format to, none other than, Kander and Ebb. Despite this, it was still profitable and ran for a
little over two years.
In 1996, Chicago received a concert-staging at City Center Encores! It was a stripped
down version of the show, with choreography inspired by Fosse, but with minimalistic staging. It
was so successful, the book was revised and brought back to Broadway. Minimalism worked

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well for the show and the brilliance of Kander and Ebbs score was not overwhelmed by the
extravagant staging of Bob Fosse. The revised version won six Tony awards and is currently the
longest-running revival in Broadway history.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kander and Ebb wrote the score for musicals such as
Woman of the Year, The Rink, the revue And the World Goes Round, Kiss of the Spider Woman,
and Steel Pier. Many of these were moderate hits, however Kiss of the Spider Woman became
their most influential musical to premiere since Chicago in the mid-70s.
Kander and Ebb took a risk with Kiss of the Spider Woman. Not only did the source
material seemed to be impossible to translate into a musical, but a rocky workshop process made
a transfer seem unlikely. Kander and Ebb, along with their frequent collaborator, Hal Prince, and
book writer Terrence McNally, managed to craft a complex and controversial musical that won
seven Tony awards. Kiss of a Spider Woman follows the experiences of Molina, a gay window
dresser and his cell mate, Valentin, a revolutionary in a Latin American prison. The only relief
from their misery is Molinas fantasies about an actress, Aurora, which he shares with Valentin.
Over the span of their illustrious partnership, Kander and Ebb wrote at least seventeen
musicals together. Thirteen of their musicals premiered on Broadway and of those, nine were
nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical and two would take the honor: Cabaret and Kiss
of the Spiderwoman. They were nominated for the Tony Award for Best Original Score ten times
and they received the honor three times for Cabaret, Woman of the Year, and Kiss of the
Spiderwoman. In 1998, they were recognized by the Kennedy Center Honors for their
achievements in musical theatre.
Kander and Ebb have a style that is distinctly their own. Their musicals are usually
political in nature and ooze with cynicism and irony. Many scholars compare their style to that

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of Brecht. They are not afraid to call attention to the artificial nature of theatre and exploit it to
tell the story they need to tell. Kander and Ebb did not have to set The Scottsboro Boys in a
minstrel show, but doing so revealed the evils of the system (Cohen). In the final number of
The Scottsboro Boys, like the end of any minstrel show, there is a cakewalk. However, when the
Interlocutor asks the boys to be seated once they finish their minstrel march, they rebel and walk
away. It is a simple, yet powerfully evocative statement, a moment that is distinctly Kander and
Ebb.

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WORKS CITED
Bloom, Ken, and Frank Vlastnik. Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time. New
York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2008. Print.
Green, Stanley, and Cary Ginell. Broadway Musicals: Show by Show. Milwaukee, WI: Applause
Theatre & Cinema, 2011. Print.
Guernsey, Otis L. Broadway Song & Story: Playwrights/Lyricists/Composers Discuss Their Hits.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985. Print.
Kander, John, Fred Ebb, and Greg Lawrence. Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music,
Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003. Print.
Leve, James. Kander and Ebb. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print.
Mordden, Ethan. Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s. New York:
Palgrave for St. Martin's, 2001. Print.
"Scottsboro Boys Is Focus of Protest." artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com. The New York Times, 7
Nov. 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.
Zoglin, Richard. "The Scottsboro Boys." Time. Time Inc., 09 Nov. 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.