Broadway composer John Kander on Cabaret and why De Niro made him change New York, New York

Telegraph

20 hours ago

Over the past decade, a generation of Broadway maestros have taken their final bow. The deaths, in relatively short order, of Jerry Herman (La Cage aux Folles; Hello, Dolly!), Stephen Sondheim (Company; Into the Woods) and, in May, Annie's Charles Strouse, mark out what feels like the end of an era.
Mercifully, though, John Kander is still standing, at 98. 'Let's put it this way, I have reached an age where I don't have very many contemporaries,' observes the man who – with the lyricist Fred Ebb, his longtime collaborator – gave us two undisputed masterpieces, Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975).
The 1996 revival of the latter has become the longest-running American musical in Broadway history, while Rebecca Frecknall's louchely-immersive staging of Cabaret is currently playing both in New York and London (where it has reached a landmark 1,500 performances). In themselves, the two shows attest to the darkness and daring with which Kander and Ebb advanced the form. Cabaret dealt with the rise of the Nazis during the demi-monde of the Weimar Republic; Chicago, with brazen femmes fatales and the amoral showbizification of the justice system during the Jazz Age. Both married irresistible tunes with complex subject matter and full-on theatricality, while inviting audience complicity to sharpen their point.
Decades later, they both remain pertinent. 'I can't remember an interview where somebody didn't say, 'Doesn't Cabaret seem particularly relevant?'' Kander tells me, speaking over the phone from the rural residence in upstate New York he shares with his longtime partner (since 2010, his husband), Albert Stephenson, a choreographer. 'It's terrible, but it's as if it continues to issue the same warnings. Chicago, too – it always seems to be exposing something in our society. Things that are terrifying and corrupt about the world that we live in never seem to go away, no matter how much we expose them.'
Kander and Ebb hit it off from the moment they met in 1962. 'He was very much a New Yorker, I was very much a Kansas City person,' says Kander, 'but the difference created a third sort of personality that wrote all the songs'.
He continues: 'We were lucky. Projects that attracted us turned out to be groundbreaking without our intending it. Our first musical Flora the Red Menace' – which premiered in 1965 – 'was about the Depression and was political. If you look at our work as a whole, you see lots of instances of injustice and oppression but it wasn't as if we got together and said, 'Boy, what social statement can we make today?' It was about the stories we felt like telling.'
After Ebb's death from a heart attack in 2004, aged 76 – 'a shocking moment in my life and a life-changing one' – Kander resolved to complete their outstanding works-in-progress. Among these, were the murder-mystery musical comedy Curtains (2006) and The Scottsboro Boys (2011), which used the device of a minstrel show to retell the notorious case of nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. A couple of years ago, their partnership was honoured on Broadway again with New York, New York, based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film for which they had provided the anthemic title number, and incorporating new songs co-written by Kander with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the meantime, Kander had also worked with lyricist Greg Pierce on two further, well-received musicals: The Landing in 2013 and Kid Victory two years later.
And it's not over yet: Kander is still composing, he tells me, but he won't elaborate on the project afoot. This year will also see the release of the film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Kander and Ebb musical based on the 1976 Manuel Puig novel about two Argentinian cell-mates, a gay man and a socialist revolutionary, who bond through the former's cinematic reveries. Starring Jennifer Lopez, it's directed by Bill Condon, who wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film of Chicago (2002) and is, in Kander's view, 'a wonderful film-maker'.
Born in March 1927, the son of a Kansas City poultry trader, Kander was raised in the shadow of the Depression. 'I remember it very well,' he says, 'and I felt lucky that, even though we were not wealthy people, I got a feeling of security in my family.' Perhaps above all, it was music that got them through the worst of times. 'Nobody was a professional musician, but there was music in the house a lot. Very often after dinner, we would go into the living room and just play music. My mother was tone deaf but every once in a while my dad would say, 'Play a march for your mother!' So I would.'
In his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement prize at the 2023 Tony awards, Kander confessed himself 'grateful to music which has invaded me early on, from the time I was a baby.' After he caught TB as an infant, he was kept on a porch outside the house to ensure isolation. Looking back now, he suspects that he first made sense of the world through listening. 'It's a theory that I have but also a memory,' he says. 'I could hear the footsteps of my family coming to the door, to give me some attention. I think probably at a very early age, I began to interpret sound in a very strong way.'
He flew to the piano. 'When I was four, I remember my aunt putting her hand on top of my hand, and we made a chord. It is still one of the great moments of my life, the fact that my hand could do that.' Composing began early too. 'I was in second grade. We were doing arithmetic. I remember sitting in the back of the class. Our teacher asked me a question, which, of course, I could not answer, and she asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was writing a Christmas carol. And she made me stay after school, and she played it.' Because his family was Jewish, the teacher called his parents to check his writing a carol was kosher. They supported him all the way.
There was no epiphany about becoming a composer, he says, it was just somehow always in him. 'Music is going on in me all the time. As time went on, I just assumed that that's what I would do. There was no awakening, and my parents were very encouraging without setting goals.'
There's a mildness about Kander that perhaps explains why his profile remains relatively low-key despite his enormous success. But it's a gentleness to which he may owe his career. He retells the incredible domino effect which began in Philadelphia in 1957 where West Side Story had just begun its pre-Broadway try-out run. 'There was a party afterwards in a big hotel. And there was a six-deep queue at the bar trying to get drinks. I'm not a very aggressive fellow, and I kept raising my arm. The guy in front of me saw my distress and said: 'What do you want?' He turned out to be the pianist with West Side Story in the orchestra, and we struck up a conversation and stayed in touch.
Some time after the show transferred to New York, the pianist asked Kander if he would cover for him while he was on holiday. 'And I said yes. And so there I was playing in the pit on West Side Story for three weeks, and during that period, they were rehearsing the company, and putting in a lot of replacements. Again, the stage manager asked me to be there to play for those rehearsals and those auditions. And then they needed a pianist to play all the auditions for this big new show called Gypsy. I said yes. And that led to me having my first Broadway show, called A Family Affair. It all goes back to that one night.'
It might sound like a charmed life, yet to grow up gay before the 1960s, as Kander did, was to experience a less accepting world. 'In the first half of my life all that had to be sublimated and couldn't be discussed,' he says. 'Now it's a natural part of the world that I live in. And I think how lucky I actually am that I lived my life that way. I think that in spite of my terrific family, I grew up understanding what secret suffering feels like.
'I never thought I would reach this point, but I am grateful for that suffering, because I think it helped me to understand other people, perhaps in a way that I would not have otherwise. I think the importance of compassion becomes clear when you experience suffering on your own. Looking back on the things that have interested me in terms of writing, I think they are influenced by the fact that, years ago, I learned what those feelings are like.'
When I ask if he has any regrets, he pauses. 'I know that regrets about the past are useless. But I wish I had been braver when I was younger.' To be himself? 'Yes… but there's nothing I can do about that.'
Although society has progressed in many ways since, in other respects he shudders at how removed things are from the post-war spirit he remembers. 'Back then, though life was very complicated, as it always is, and there were lots of problems, there was optimism about the future. I'm horrified by what's happening in our country. I don't know how long it will take to get our country back'. He expresses real upset at the fact that Trump and his team employed New York, New York at a pre-election rally in Madison Square Garden last year. 'I felt terrible about that. I don't think there's any way to stop that. I know other people whose music was used as well, and they went to greater lengths than I tried to, to stop the use of it, but I don't think you really can.'
Robert De Niro was the accidental catalyst for a song now inseparable from New York's sense of itself, and a seemingly eternal hymn to the can-do spirit. As the story goes, the original version that Kander and Ebb had written initially met with the approval of Martin Scorsese and Liza Minnelli, but De Niro dissented and, after a hushed confab with him, Scorsese requested the pair have another go at it.
Kander believes that it was their irritation at being told to go back to the drawing-board that spurred them to new heights. 'We went back to [Fred's] place and then sat down and wrote it in 45 minutes. I think, without our quite realising it, there was an energy of annoyance in it. And of course, it's a much better song.' Laughing, he admits that the original version 'was terrible. If I still had a copy, I would burn it.'
What's his view on the current state of Broadway, where shows can cost millions to stage, and the earth to watch? 'It's much harder to get things on today, because they're so ungodly expensive,' says Kander. 'When we did Flora or Cabaret, those shows which were considered expensive were nothing compared to what it costs to put on a Broadway musical today. But I think the theatre is probably the last place to give up the fight. The theatre has always, in some way, represented the resistance.'
Is its Golden Age over? His voice sounds a note of amusement. 'I think that the 'Golden Age' is every age just before the one that we're living in.'
The London production of Cabaret celebrates its 1,500th performance on July 7 and is currently booking until March: kitkat.club. The Broadway run celebrates 500 performances the following day