Showtime!
The World Goes ’Round by John Kander and Fred Ebb
West Yorkshire Playhouse, Courtyard Theatre, 1995
John Kander and Fred Ebb
John Kander and Fred Ebb have established themselves as authors of the most dazzling and stylish musicals ever to have appeared on stage. The World Goes ’Round is a tribute to their songwriting talent, an ability to write fabulous songs with satire and great poignancy. They have never been afraid to face life either in their lyrics or with their music. The titles alone tell a story: ‘The Happy Time’, ‘The Grass Is Always Greener’, ‘We Can Make It’, ‘How Lucky Can You Get’, ‘Maybe This Time’, ‘Coffee in a Cardboard Cup’, and ‘All That Jazz’.
They first came together in the early sixties. Kander a self-confessed “opera nut”, and Ebb, who was on his own admission working “for anybody who would work with me, if there was a dollar to be made”. Whilst Kander had already composed musicals on Broadway with A Family Affair written with James and William Goldman, Ebb had been writing for nightclub acts, revues and for the satirical show That Was The Week That Was. Their partnership epitomised the age, combining glamour and lavish excess with both intelligence and wit.
The Broadway musical had long been resistant to anything that wasn’t entertainment pure and simple. The exceptions had been rare. Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat had been the first to touch on such themes as racial prejudice, Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey used a sleazy nightclub setting with an anti-hero as its hero, and West Side Story, for all its contagious score, was a serious indictment of racial intolerance and disaffected youth. Broadway had always captivated its audiences through strength of song alone, and this was precisely where Kander and Ebb’s talent lay, as they have proved time and time again. For them it was simple: “it was a case of instant communication and instant songs”.
Drawing on the musical traditions of a bygone era their partnership created torch songs and ballads, with wit and panache, alongside extravagant outpourings which capture the spirit of the time. Anthems to the glory of living such as ‘Cabaret’ and ‘New York, New York’ have been adopted by the showbiz glitterati, Minnelli and Sinatra, as their calling cards which have been passed on from generation to generation. In Ebb’s own words, “Forget your failures… Get on with it.”
Through all their shows, Kander and Ebb’s great strength has been in their symbolic use of popular music, their ability to take a ballad or anthem and blow it up into a huge showstopper. In this they sometimes parody the over-the-top excesses of the brashest Broadway musicals, but at the same time, reading between the lines (or indeed listening carefully to Ebb’s lyrics), you find there is always one foot firmly lodged in reality. The theatrical and the real meet, and strike sparks off each other which illuminate not only the lives of the characters but those of the audience as well.
In openly embracing the tradition and joie de vivre of the musical, Kander and Ebb have been able to create contemporary collages – making something fresh and new by drawing on its history and theatricality to their own advantage. Often their works are set in times of great decadence and turmoil: the social, moral and political decline of Berlin in the late 1920s in Cabaret, the American Bohemianism of the 1930s apparent in Flora, the Red Menace, alongside the excess of the Roaring Twenties of Chicago. Audiences are given the opportunity to revel and indulge in the spectacle created on stage, the richness of Ebb’s lyrics and Kander’s music seducing them and intensifying their responses. By heightening our enjoyment, they are able to create sharp contrasts, never being afraid to build something up just to knock it down again with either wit or pathos. Think of the Emcee in Cabaret, for instance, singing a love song to a gorilla, and its killer last line: “If you could see her through my eyes/ She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”. They are masters at mixing and matching songs and emotions for comment or effect. Of course they also wrote great showstoppers, designed for maximum impact; but these didn’t unbalance the production, and never overshadowed the show itself.
Their first collaboration, Flora, the Red Menace, was based on Lester Atwell’s Love is Just Around the Corner. As a satire on 1930s radicals it received poor reviews, but was good enough to win Liza Minnelli a Tony Award on her Broadway debut, and strong enough for Harold Prince to commission a new musical from them, Cabaret.
Perhaps the most striking innovation of this show is that is rejects the principle of the fully integrated musical which had been the standard format over the last few decades.. Harking back to a pastiche on the Brecht-Weill street songs of the thirties and the musical theatre of the time, all the numbers are performed on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub by ‘professionals’ who comment on the plot without being a part of it. No character in the story bursts into song to express their feelings. The only exception to this is the drunken overtures of the Jewish shopkeeper in ‘Meeskite’ (omitted from the film score) and ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, sung by a group of waiters in the play, but introduced by a clean-cut Aryan boy in the film whose simple theme of confident nationalism is gradually taken up by the clientele at a seemingly peaceful outdoor café. Both songs are used as a chilling reminder of the rise of the right, the first to dramatic effect, the second showing how an idea can be captured and picked up by a nation as easily as an emotive tune.
The show captures the spirit of the age with its acceptance of ambiguity in sex (‘Two Ladies’), moral corruption (‘The Money Song’), and political decadence (‘Willkommen’). Sally Bowles as resident songstress takes centre stage, and her small fragile dreams sum up the ethos of the time. Drowning in decadence, she has nowhere to go but along with it.
Kander and Ebb’s subsequent musicals have continued to exploit both sides of their medium. In their next works, both from 1968, The Happy Time revived French-Canadian folk ballads and Zorba captured the sound of Greek music, vividly recreating the rural culture. In it, Nikos attempts to rebuild a mine that he has inherited, and finds an ally in the earthy character Zorba, who wantonly squanders the money given to him to buy supplies. Zorba’s hedonism, encapsulated in the songs ‘I am Free’ and ‘The First Time’, is challenged by financial failures and tragedies involving those around him, causing him to question his own priorities.
Chicago, described as “brassy, sassy, raunchy”, was a full-blooded satire on the corruption rife in the legal system of America in the 1920s. Chorus girl Roxie Hart dispatches her unfaithful lover, yet retains her freedom due to her talent for self-publicity and the skills of a disreputable lawyer. She meets another murderous dancer, and together they decide to open a nightclub. Tongue-in-cheek, Chicago in vaudevillian style takes a poke at the American way of life with ‘I Can’t Do It Alone’, ‘Me and My Baby’, ‘Mr Cellophane’ and ‘All That Jazz’.
Based on another American city, New York, New York – Scorsese’s film starring Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro – advises that a man should pay more attention to the woman in his life. It is a story of boy meets girl, boy resent girl’s career, and boy then loses girl through his own arrogance. Wrapped up in a plethora of big-band blockbusters from the forties and fifties, the message can’t hide itself. If people (men in particular) can’t accept that things move on, then they will be the losers in the long run.
For each of Kander and Ebb’s musicals the style is allied closely to the content, a parallel running commentary that is ironical, worldly-wise, witty and revealing. Yet ultimately their work will always entertain. From the 1971 production 70, Girls, 70 about a band of old women who decide to bring excitement back into their lives by shoplifting, to the award-winning 1993 adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel about political imprisonment, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Kander and Ebb have continually displayed their versatility. Their work spans three decades and The World Goes ’Round presents a fitting tribute to them both, showcasing the variety of satire and showstoppers that they have made their own.
William Goldman
PS
Reading this again after all these years, the writing strikes me as rather sloppy, which I hope mostly suggests I had to get it done in a hurry, relying too much on the tone of the sources, which were probably nothing more than heavily partisan programmes and puff pieces. “Audiences are given the opportunity to revel and indulge in the spectacle created on stage, the richness of Ebb’s lyrics and Kander’s music seducing them and intensifying their responses.” Well, duh. Every audience, not just a musical one, is being invited to enjoy the spectacle before them (‘if it don’t look good it won’t sound good’), and what are music and lyrics in a show meant to do other than seduce and create a response? “The theatrical and the real meet, and strike sparks off each other which illuminate not only the lives of the characters but those of the audience as well.” How true. How very true… whatever that means. Just tell me again how that makes these two any different from any other musical songwriters? The only line that sounds anything like me is the pat summation of Sally Bowles: “Drowning in decadence, she has nowhere to go but along with it.”
But the Oscar-winning film of Chicago notwithstanding, it’s still Cabaret which is always going to be the quintessential Kander and Ebb musical for me, not least because I saw an excellent student production of it in Oxford in the mid-seventies complete with all the bits the film left out. It was still brilliantly affecting. In other words, Cabaret is a show so good that even when you cut bits out, it still not only stands up, it does somersaults.
The other reason I remember this Oxford Cabaret was because it was directed by one Alex Cox (Worcester) who in the following decade would go on to direct the cult movies Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986). What prodigies of effort, skill, hard work, good timing and luck must have come together to bring him finally to that exalted position? Maybe his period of post-Oxford study at the film and TV department of my own home town’s university might have helped?
But it’s interesting how great talent, or at least the potential for it, can be there from an early age, and certainly one’s time at university can help develop such talents if you’ve got them. You have the time, the contacts and the energy to start laying down those foundations, and the super-skilled are always going to make their mark early. Another show I have fond memories of from that time was a big-budget production of Peter Barnes’s sprawling historical tragi-comedy The Bewitched directed by Greg Hersov. He too went on to a highly successful career in the theatre, particularly with the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
Although I never met either of those two gentlemen myself at uni – coming, as I did, late to the theatrical party – I was at least in time to contribute to a couple of revues where the likes of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson were starting to show the rest of us how it was done. You could tell they were already headed for the top, route one. First it was Not the Nine O’Clock News on BBC2, then the West End shows, and then beyond. I remember I was standing on Temple Meads Station in Bristol in 1989 when I suddenly found myself face to face with a cinema poster. It was for The Tall Guy, and it is my habit to read all the credits at the bottom. I recognised Jeff Goldblum and was already a big fan of Emma Thompson. Oh, and Rowan was in it. Good. Maybe he had a hand in the writi–? Nope. ‘Written by Richard Curtis’. So they’d made it, I thought. Full house. Good for them.
And was this a film in which “The theatrical and the real meet, and strike sparks off each other which illuminate not only the lives of the characters but those of the audience as well”? Happily not. It was rather better than that.