Kander and Ebb

While working on A Family Affair, Harold Prince introduced Kander to music producer Tommy Valando. Valando paired Kander with Ebb for what would become a forty-two year partnership, the longest collaboration in musical theatre history. Some of their first notable songs include “My Coloring Book” and “I Don’t Care Much.” Their song, “If I Were in Your Shoes, I’d Dance,” attracted the attention of young Liza Minnelli. According to Minnelli, she heard a friend sing one their songs and wanted to sing it herself and meet them. Minnelli said, “I loved how their songs said exactly what I was feeling. I found my truth in their songs” (qtd. in Lawrence 2). Kander and Ebb’s mentored Liza and this relationship led all of them to their first of many collaborations, Flora, the Red Menace (1965), a musical written by George Abbott and produced by Harold Prince. Although the story takes place during the Great Depression in the 1930s, Kander and Ebb’s score gave the musical the sound of a 1950s musical comedy. The writers made little attempt to evoke a 1930s period style. According to James Leve, the musical comedy perfectly served Abbott’s script, but failed to elevate the musical above its inherent conventionality (174). The musical comedy included a variety of musical numbers that an audience would expect to hear such as waltzes, marches, specialty dance numbers, ballads, and novelty songs. The song “A Quiet Thing” is an unexpected moment of lyrical introspection for the protagonist, Flora. The pulsating verse, surprising harmonic changes, and tonally distant bridge section became regular features in Kander and Ebb’s ballad songs (Leve 175). Ebb’s wit and irony in his writing style reflected the time and place of the story while Kander’s use of the minor mode personified the atmosphere of depression. Unfortunately, the musical unfortunately was a commercial failure, running for only a little over eighty performances at the Alvin Theatre. However, Minneli walked out of the production with a Tony Award for her performance.

Kander and Ebb’s second Broadway musical arguably changed America musical theatre forever. When Harold Prince signed on as director for Cabaret, he wanted Kander and Ebb to write the musical’s score. Prince and librettist Joe Masteroff gave Kander and Ebb a framework for writing songs. Prince wanted the cabaret to serve as a metaphor for German society. Their vision for the musical score was a mix of realistic non-deigetic songs with cabaret songs (Leve 40). Cabaret would follow the story of people living in Berlin in the 1920s, and the songs presented in the musical’s cabaret would comment on what the characters were doing or what was happening in the world around them. In preparation for the production, Kander researched German music, particularly popular nightclub songs in the 1920s such as German jazz, which infiltrated revues, cabarets, and concert halls (Garebian 68).

When Kander and Ebb started writing, they created two parallel scores, one consisting of non-diegetic songs and another featuring diegetic songs. Non-diegetic songs maintain or extend a musical’s plot while diegetic songs occur as a performance event within the context of the production. They created a group of songs that collectively captured the essence of Berlin in the 1920s for the first version of the score. They intended various characters to sing these numbers, which they called the “Berlin Songs” throughout the production. These songs explored a variety of topics such as economic hardship, prostitution, and sexual adventurism (Leve 41). Some of these songs include “Willkommen,” “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” and “Two Ladies”. Kander and Ebb originally composed about forty-seven songs for Cabaret, but ultimately only fifteen appeared in the final score (Garebian 71). Masteroff’s script writing influenced their process for writing non-diegetic songs. Often Masteroff wrote a scene for a character and brought the scene to Kander and Ebb to see if they could create a song in order to advance the plot. Some of these songs include “So What?” and “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

“Willkommen” and the Vamp

Unlike a traditional book musical, Cabaret does not open with an overture. The opening number, “Willkommen,” begins with a drum roll, clashing cymbals, and out-of-tune piano, and trumpet (Garebian 72). These sounds create the ambiance of a band warming up. Then, the vamp begins which is “arguably the two most famous measures in musical theatre” (Leve 53). The vamp underscores as the Emcee menacing remarks as he welcomes the cabaret crowd (as well as the theatre audience) to the cabaret. The vamp reoccurs throughout the show and announces the entrances of many characters including the chorus line of the Kit Kat Klub Girls (Garebian 73). The vamp also serves to foreshadow Sally’s and Germany’s downward spiral. Kander sneaked the vamp into many songs, such as a version transposed into a minor key at the opening of the song “Cabaret” that foreshadows Sally’s decision to have an abortion (Leve 53).

“So What?” and Witty Lyrics

Ebb played with satirical and witty words when writing the songs to portray the declining state of Berlin. For example, Fraulein Schnieder sings a song called “So What?” that shows her philosophy on life in Berlin. She outlines all these bad events in funny, descriptive detail that happen to her and at the end of all of them essentially says who cares anymore. An example of a witty verse is:

"When I had a man

My figure was dumpy and fat

So what?

Through all of our years

He was so disappointed in that

So what?"

In order to focus on the lyrics in the song, there is an accordion accompaniment and faint underlying piano and brass selections to support the words being spoken by Fraulein Schnieder. The song is characteristic of the spoken-songs performed in European cabarets (Garebian 80)

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”

This song serves as the Act One finale. The song begins with one tenor voice before the chorus unites with it. The song is ominous suggesting that something terrible and powerful is coming. The first line the soloist sings paints the picture of a sunny meadow and running stag, and urges other Germans to “gather to greet the storm.” When the chorus enters chanting lyrics such as “somewhere a glory awaits unseen.” The song receives another layer of drama when the Emcee joins the chorus on the line “Oh Fatherland, show us the sign” giving him the impression of being evil (Garebian 82). The song effected audiences at the original Broadway production so much when the cast performed the number that some spectators accused the song of being a Nazi anthem, which infuriated Fred Ebb. Ebb received a letter from a rabbi claiming he had proof that the song was a Nazi anthem, and another person told him he knew the song as a child (Garebian 83).

“If You Could See Her Through My Eyes”

This song in Act Two is a solo for the Emcee, which he performs with a gorilla dressed as a lady. Through this song, the Emcee confesses his forbidden love for the gorilla describing all of her attributes that no one else can appreciate because she is a gorilla. This song was meant to represent the love that was illegal in Nazi Germany due to anti-semitism (Garebian 85).

In the original production’s libretto, the last lyric of the Emcee’s song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” read, “She isn’t a meeskite at all” (qtd. in Garebian 85). Meeskite is a yiddish word for “ugly duckling,” which suggests that the Gorilla is merely ugly. During the original production’s Boston tryout, the last line read : “But if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all” (qtd. in Garebian 85). The feedback Kander and Ebb received from a rabbi was a plea to substitute the word Jewish for another word because “ghosts of six million Jews were begging them not to use the last line (qtd in Garebian 85). In the movie version of Cabaret as well as the 1987 revival and on, the word “Jewish” replaced “Meeskite.” This lyric draws a crystal clear connection between the Gorilla and the Jewish people, making the Nazis’ impending persecution of the Jews even more poignant.

After the success of the original Broadway production, Bob Fosse directed and choreographed a film version of Cabaret. This version required Kander and Ebb to revise their score and add a few new songs. One of the most radical changes made for the movie was to eliminate all of the non-diegetic songs except for “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which a Nazi Youth sang (Leve 69). Fosse made this choice because he wanted to play into realism with the movie. Non-diegetic songs make a film less realistic because people do not sing when they talk to each other. Kander and Ebb also added a song for Sally Bowles that they wrote in 1964 for an unsuccessful project called “Maybe This Time.” (Sawyers 188). This song celebrates Sally’s relationship with Brian (the new name for Cliff), as she hopes their relationship will last.

One of their projects after Cabaret was the Broadway musical Chicago starring Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera. The show opened June 3, 1975 at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for a total of 936 performances. A balance of diegetic and non-diegetic music remained their songwriting formula, which they used for Chicago. In 1992, Kander and Ebb served as the composing team for Kiss of the Spider Woman directed by Harold Prince. This story is about two very different men who come to understand and respect each other after spending time together in a prison cell (Leve 160). This musical also explored the line between reality and the illusion of theatre through diegetic and non-diegetic songs. Kander and Ebb won a Tony Award for Best Original Score for this production.

Cabaret remains Kander and Ebb’s most produced musical receiving multiple revivals, tours, and productions overseas. Kander and Ebb’s collaboration ended when Fred Ebb died on September 11, 2004. According to Harold Prince, “They have a special gift to crystalize in words and music the driving metaphor for each of their shows” (qtd. in Lawrence 12). Cabaret is arguably one of the most influential musicals and placed Kander and Ebb at the forefront of musical theatre in the post Rodgers-Hammerstein era (Leve 76). Cabaret showed a new generation of writers a new brand of musical theater, one that can respond to the concerns of a nation in transition.

Kander, John, Ebb, Fred, & Lawrence, Greg. Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Showbiz, Collaboration, and All that Jazz. New York: Faber & Faber, 2004.

Leve, James. Kander and Ebb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

McKinley, Jesse. “Fred Ebb, Lyricist Behind 'Cabaret' and Other Hits, Dies.” New York Times 13, September 2004, p. A21.

Robinson, Mark. “Uncompromising and Entertaining – 50 Years of Kander and Ebb On Broadway.” Playbill, Playbill Inc., 12 May 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/uncompromising-and-entertaining-50-years-of-kander-and-ebb-on-broadway-com-348513.

Sawyers, June Skinner. Cabaret FAQ: All Thats Left to Know about the Broadway and Cinema Classic. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2017.