hey everybody thank you for joining this way we are going to dive into the worlds of cander and EB today so let me share the screen we'll get going right away this one is called life is a cabaret and the subtitle is real life Showbiz and the musicals of cander and EB there are going to be several musicals that show up in their prolific careers which really have two worlds on stage a world that paints a picture of real life and then another world layered onto it that PS paints a picture of Showbiz life and how those two worlds interplay again and again in different kardam musicals is sort of the focus of this lecture while also acknowledging they wrote a lot of other shows that don't use this particular unique structure we'll be touching on on all of them so here are kander and E and the first important thing to remember is that John kander who is the man with white hair in the pictures writes the music cander is our composer and E the man seated in the larger black and white picture and then standing not at the piano in the smaller black and white picture is our Lyricist maybe a trick to remember who does what is that lyrics in this case are in English and EB starting with an e is the same letter as e that begins the word English e writes the English lyrics Pander writes the music I also learned something like five minutes ago that I have to share with you about their names I wanted to know the etymology which means the origin of a word of the name cander and so it turns out it's a Celtic uh origin and there's a Celtic word that uh the name cander comes from which means clear flowing which seems to indicate like a river a clear flowing river which is sort of fascinating to me because the word EB in English obviously is the movement of water towards the ocean The Tide is um an EB and I sort of love the idea that just by sheer coincidence these two men whose names really have been come become intertwined into one long word cander and EB um they all they each have Nam that suggest the movement of clear flowing water out towards a larger destination there's something about that that just um makes me feel that there's a cosmic uh thing going on in the world that brings people together because the reality is that cander and EB uh constitute the most enduring and prolific musical writing team in our art forms history and today we will go through their body of work so they made their Broadway debut in a show called Flora the Red Menace John cander by the way had been born and raised in the midwest he grew up in Kansas City Fred e was born and raised in New York but they found each other in New York City because they both had a dream to write Broadway musicals and when they created floor of the Red Menace it was directed by George Abbott who we've talked about and George Abbott was the mentor to H prince who produced The Show for George Abbott who directed and I do think that if Hal Prince who was about a year away from directing his breakthrough show Cabaret more on that soon if Hal had directed Flor the administ I think that this poster would have looked a lot different and that the show would have been darker and more complex as it stands in the George Abbott production this was a musical comedy about communism and I think that the political um exploration that could have taken place and a hell Prince directed version of the show would have been quite different but as it stands Florida R Menace is a romantic comedy that is set in the 1930s in New York City during the Great Depression about a young dress designer named Flora who moves to New York City with a dream to become a successful dress designer and she falls in love with a guy who is a member of the Communist party and she sort of has to choose between the aspirations she has for her career or what she thinks is her um correct choice in ter terms of her love life and then also her own beliefs and ideals of what she feels is right for the world it is a musical about a young woman who has to decide what road to walk down and the young woman that played flora and the original production was 19-year-old Liza Manelli Liza Manelli was known for being the daughter of Judy Garland who was the star of The Wizard of Oz and one of the great Hollywood stars particularly movie musical Stars of the 1930s into the 40s into the 50s and here in the 1960s her daughter was making her professional debut and Liza Manelli really became a kind of muse for karb especially Fred e in a way his alter ego was the um identity of Liza Manelli and over the course of uh Liza's career she would become known for singing so many kerb songs and playing so many cander and E roles but Florida R Min was not a Broadway hit it was their first real musical they had written sort of an apprentice musical the year before which is what inspired how Prince to hire them to write Flor of the Red Menace just like Bach and harck how Prince is responsible for seeing the potential in artists and saying I'm going to trust you with my next show you didn't do it last time we going to bring you along for this one we'll do Florida Remus on Broadway and I'm going to make you into Broadway songwriters well although cander and I became Broadway songwriters with Flora the Red Menace and I have to say it is in many respects a stunning score including one of my favorite opening numbers all I need is one good break a finale for Flora where she decides what is most important to her which is achieving happiness even when the world looks like it's impossible to deliver happiness and she sings a song called Sing happy but I think my favorite song in the show is a ballad called a quiet thing in a way Fred e liked writing songs which he called screamers um these were big belty showstoppers but John kander loved writing songs which he called Whispers these are the gentle songs that sort of sneak up on you they tiptoe and they can penetrate your heart through truth and gentleness not through a punch in the face and a quiet thing is a whisper of a song the character of laora has received what she wanted and she's amazed to learn that it doesn't arrive with um a triumphant arrival that's loud and Earth shattering that the best things in life come in on tiptoe they um they arrive as quiet things and Flora's realization of this is a deeply intimate tender number that I feel probably most accurately expresses the songwriting potential of both kander and E even though uh John kander loved writing these whisper songs these ballads and fredb loved writing these belting rash big songs they were both equally Adept at at both and the delicateness of the lyric and the purity of John kander's music in that song I find to be astonishing so it was a great score but not a great show in fact I think that had the tone been a little bit more politically aggressive and astute it could have been a more interesting show but it did not get good reviews and how prince who produced this I feel understood two things he understood the potential of kander neb and he understood that Florida Red Menace might not be a giant hit so he said to them guys I know that we're opening floor of the Red Menace tonight on Broadway this is back in 1965 but I want to schedule a meeting in my office tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. and kander and EB saidwhat are you talking about no way we're going to be riding high on the opening night we don't want to come to the office at 10: a.m. why would we do such a thing and Hal said to start the next show because he knew that if Florida admin has turned out to be a giant hit they would be out all night partying they would be riding high they would not want to go home at the end of the night they would want toay stay together to keep celebrating to keep dreaming on what they would do next but if it did not get good reviews and it was not going to be a hit they need to find a way to move forward to not wallow in their disappointment to not go home and stare at the wall or regret their life decisions but to show up at the office and get to work on the next show and so they showed up at 10:00 a.m. the next morning and as it turns out the reviews were not good and Flora the red menes would not be a hit but that was the morning they started work on a musical called Cabaret and Cabaret not only changed the lives of cander and EB and Hal Prince but Cabaret changed the world and this began a tradition that how Prince continued for the rest of his life which was the morning after he opened one show he would start work on the next whether the show that opened was a hit or a flop a success or a failure work would begin on the next project because an artist has to always look forward an artist can't ever just take credit for what they did yesterday they have to be thinking about what they're going to do tomorrow and Cabaret was the Breakthrough show not just for cander and EB but for how prince who unlike Flora the Red Menace didn't just produce it he produced it and he directed it and he directed it in a way that was different from how he directed She Loves Me by Balan harck a few years before she loves me as beautiful as it is is a pretty conventional musical there's nothing conventional about Cabaret and the impact that Hal Prince was able to make as a Storyteller as a director on this show cemented his reputation as an Innovative daring Brave and experimental director because Cabaret May in fact be the most or at least among the most experimental musicals the world had yet seen when it opened in 1966 it's B based on a series of short stories by a journalist and novelist named Christopher isherwood and those stories are called the Berlin stories and they constitute isherwood's time in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s after World War I before World War II when Berlin was in a state of transformation and the musical Cabaret is set around a nightclub called the Kit Kat Club and the Kit Kat Club was a place where no matter if things were bad outside you could come into the Kit Kat Club and life was beautiful there were dancing girls there was music there was food there was drink and you could kind of shut out the world outside you could forget about it and you could celebrate and the main plot of Cabaret is about a performer at the Kit Kat Club whose name is Sally balls and in the original show she's a British performer in the movie when Liza Manelli would later play her role Liza said I don't want to do a British accent and so they made her American but in the musical she's British and she meets an American writer named cliff Bradshaw and they find themselves sharing an apartment they meet as strangers and at first they're sharing it platonically but then they begin a romance at a time when Sally is a performer in a place that wants to shut out the world and Cliff is a writer and wants to acknowledge and attempt to understand what's going on in the world and there is a conflict between someone who wants to bury their head in the sand and someone who wants to look out the window and say something's going on out there that we have to acknowledge because of course what was going on out there that had to be acknowledged was Rising anti-Semitism in Berlin and the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party and this comes into relevance in the subplot of Cabaret which is about a late life romance between a Jewish fruit seller and a non-jewish land lady and the romance that develops between them which is genuine heartfelt and seemingly true is affected by the fact that roine Schneider the landl is a gentile and her Schultz the fruit seller is a Jew at a time when such a romance was not looked on as socially acceptable and eventually socially possible but then there is another character who adds a third dimension to this story or at least if you consider the plot as a single Dimension the plot and the subplot one dimension the other dimension of Cabaret the second world as it were of Cabaret is led by an MC who performs at the Kit Kat Club he sort of introduces Sally balls every night and the songs that the MC sings throughout the musical Cabaret are not related to the plot of Sally and CLI and they're not related to the plot of her Schultz and foran Schneider at least not directly what they offer is commentary on that plot and so every song that the MC sings has the effect of issuing thoughts and feelings on the world of the show but not necessarily advancing The Narrative of it and the best way to express it is to say that there are two worlds in Cabaret the real world which is Berlin in the 1930s and the characters sing their songs thoughts and em or sing their words thoughts and emotions non- diagetic that means they don't know they are singing so there's a song in act one when cliff and Sally decide to become roommates called perfectly marvelous and they sort of make the agreement that we're going to figure out how to share this apartment the last line is really uh sort of nice and sly because Cliff says um but there's only one single bed and Sally says we'll think of something implying that their romance will soon begin so those are all non- diagetic songs the characters don't know they're singing and in a way it's a musical like Oklahoma where the songs Advance the plot but simultaneously there are all sorts of songs across Cabaret which are diagetic songs where the characters are performing where they know they're singing and these are the songs performed at the Kit Kat Club largely by the MC and The Ensemble around him and all of those songs offer commentary on the Real World scenes example after cliff and Sally sing perfectly marvelous and agree to become roommates then the MC and his crony of backup singers at the Kit Kat Club sing a song called two ladies which is about the convenience of having roommates especially having two roommates because if you're tired of sleeping with one of them you can just go across the hall and sleep with another it's cheeky it has a sense of playful but legitimate sexuality and it's meant to issue commentary on the scene we just saw in which two characters decide to share a single apartment together now that's a pretty innocent form of commentary later in the show when the romance between roine Schneider the Gentile landl and her Schultz the Jewish fruit seller begins to grow the MC shows up on stage and the number that he sings is seeming telling the audience about a new girlfriend that he's Acquired and he says I know what you're thinking you wonder why I chose her out of all the women in the world and then a gorilla enters the stage really a person in a gorilla outfit and the MC sings if you could see her through my eyes she would look beautiful to you and then the last line as the MC is playfully dancing with a gorilla on stage is that he turns to the audience and he says if you could see her through my eyes she wouldn't look Jewish at all and the audience would gasp because the connection between the romance between frine Schneider and her Schultz is now being commented on that in 1930s Germany a relationship between a non-jewish person and a Jewish person was akin to a romantic relationship between a man and a gorilla and that's the way that commentary is able to exist within a non diagetic musical this is really a show in which half of it is like Rogers and Hammerstein and half of it is doing something entirely new issuing thoughts and feelings about the narrative about the themes and about the growing danger that the rise of the Nazi party and anti-Semitism in Germany is causing and this was the original Scenic Design of the production in 1966 directed by how Prince the designer was a man named Boris arenson a r o n s o n and if you look at that large rectangular shiny object in the middle of the Scenic Design that's a mirror it's a mirror that is tilted and hanging over the stage for the entire show and that mirror serves a couple different purposes the audience is actually able to see themselves in the mirror which sort of makes the scenes that are set on the stage of the Kit Kat Club where the actors are performing for an audience a bit real suddenly an audience member at Cabaret in 1966 has found themselves more or less cast in the show and is represented on stage in the form of a reflection of an audience member in 1930 Berlin you see an audience watching the events and it helps to drive home the fact that much of the show is set in a theater but the mirror also serves another purpose the mirror reflects people and it reflects 1966 America watching a story about 1930s Germany and what Hal Prince is saying is it can happen anywhere the anti-Semitism you see occurring on stage happens in America and not just through anti-Semitism but through any kind of prejudice based on hate the idea that we see ourselves on stage as the characters behave terribly as humans do the worst things that humans are capable of doing which is hating another person and allowing that hate to inform all of their behavior we see ourselves in that mirror it's meant to say yes this is a show about another country in another decade but this is also a show about right here right now Cabaret did a thing that Broadway musicals hadn't done very often at all which is to say a story of social importance a story of urgency can be told as a musical these shows don't have to just deliver entertainment they can make you uncomfortable they can make you afraid they can make you think and they can also deliver great songs and you find yourself tapping your foot to the songs and then you listen on another level to what the song is about and you realize that we can get swept up in things that look beautiful that in fact are not beautiful at all this is a poster for the film of Cabaret and that's Liza Manelli in the center of it she did not play the role of Sally balls in the original production um how Prince did not want to follow up uh her star turn in Florida R Menace with another star turn and another cander and at Musical and he also had this Instinct that Liza was too talented the role of Sally BS is a complex one because Sally is not going to be a major star and the Kit Kat Club is not a major venue it's sort of Ratty it's falling apart it describes itself as beautiful but it's in Berlin in a time of great economic turmoil and the The Cabaret of the Kit Kat Club is not the ideal venue to play in certainly a major star wouldn't play there and yet Liza Manelli had all of the bearing in her Talent of a major star so she was not in the original production but when Bob fossy directed the film uh kander and EB said we'd love Liza to play the role and Bob FY had no problem with that and so Liza was the star of the film and the actor who played the MC in the film is the same actor who played the MC in the original production Joel gray and Joel gray is pictured here in color in the top photograph and then his successor in a Revival of the show in the 1990s and then again in the 2010s is Allan pictured below and the Cabaret the uh role of the MC really is an astonishing part in musical theater and if you think about Pippen for example which was written a decade later after Cabaret uh the role of the leading player is highly influenced by the role of the MC in Cabaret the way the role came about is that when they began writing this musical in 1965 in the wake of Florida Red Menace it was actually pretty conventional how described it as about a lot of girls dancing on tables whatever that means and then he remembered when he was stationed in Germany during the Korean war in the 1950s he briefly served in the Army and his job was like the princess track of the army his job was to create a Weekly Newsletter in which he told his fellow soldiers what the best restaurants and clubs in Germany were so it was a pretty safe gig um especially because the Korean war was not being fought in Germany uh that said he would go around uh Germany and he would find the best restaurants and clubs and one day in the 1950s How Prince wandered into a bombed out club a restaurant that had previously been a nightclub but in World War II it had the site had been bombed and it really had not been repaired and while he was in this nightclub which was decrepit and falling apart he saw an MC on the stage and how was fascinated by him he just imagined that this person had a very strange and evocative life he was charismatic but he um was strange and how was captivated by his strangeness and he forgot about him for decades or a decade and then when they were making Cabaret and it was a lot of girls dancing on tables how had the idea that there was going to be a way to make this show a lot more Brave a lot more daring a lot more dangerous and be able to issue a lot more commentary and he created the role of the MC to interrupt The Narrative of Cabaret to issue commentary and he called jel gray on the phone and said Joel I have a great part for you it's in the new John and Fred show called Cabaret and I'd love you to play the MC and that's how one of the most ionic roles in American Musical Theater was created uh Cabaret was a giant hit how Prince uh won his first Tony as director of a musical he would go on to win a total of 21 Tony and cander and E became permanent fixtures in American musical theater so they began an incredibly prolific time and for slides like this where I just have three posters of shows these are the shows that don't use our Two Worlds um uh metaphor uh directly or at all uh but there are plenty that are going to have a lot of text on the screen but for shows like this I just want you to have sort of a oneliner idea of what each show was about I'm going to ask you about them on the quiz but I'm not going to ask you about them in a um in a in-depth way so Zorba was a followup to Cabaret because how Prince directed it and cander and EB wrote The Score it is set in cre in Greece and is about a really charismatic Storyteller named Zorba I think the thing to know about Zorba is the connection with the country of Greece indeed it's based on a novel a famous novel called Zorba the Greek it's about a guy who is a Storyteller who loves life who exudes a kind of irresistible Charisma but it's kind of a pessimistic and sad show about um how the things that we want don't always come true and the opening line of the show or rather the opening lines of the show are a lot of people in Greece sort of sitting around a cafe musing on what life is and finally a character who is called the leader who's pretty reminiscent of the MC in Cabaret except the leader is played by a female identifying performer the leader says all of your suggestions of what life is is wrong and then she defines what life is and she says life is what you do while you're waiting to die this is how the time goes by and in a way it's an awfully pessimistic lyric but I'm not sure that makes it untrue life is what you do while you're waiting to die this sad or at least cynical notion is set on a really lilting in a way beautiful and enchanting Melody and this is kind of of the cander and EB Duality sometimes cander is providing really upbeat optimistic driving music and what e is doing is saying don't tap your toe too much because what I'm saying is a little bit dark and a little bit true and a little bit sad and it's that dichotomy between happy music and knowing cynical but honest lyrics that is I think the and E cocktail uh the happy time is uh one of the very few musicals set in uh French Canadian communities I don't see a lot of musical set in like cubec and here's the one uh it stars Robert goule and uh it's about a photographer who has been a great success he's traveled all over the world but he goes back to his little village in cubec to remember the happy time of his life and he ends up having a big influence on his young nephew who is growing up there who very much looks up to him and the fact that this photographer who's probably in his 30s has seen the world um it was a light musical comedy um that I don't think brought out the best of kander and neb you can see on the album cover pictured here that David Merck was its producer so cander and I have sort of pivoted between how Prince a giant Broadway producer in the 60s and David Merck the other giant Broadway BR Broadway producer in the 60s and you can see the name of the director is G champion who was the director and choreographer of Hello Dolly so in a way it's sort of just mixing up the producer and director of Hello Dolly with the song writers of Cabaret but it didn't turn into much of a hit and is not often produced today 70 girl 70 is a very memorable concept which is about a New York City apartment building sort of a semi-luxury building not super fancy but it's a nice um it's a nice big building with a lot of retirees a lot of old people people living there but the building is going to be sold to developers and all the retirees are going to be evicted unless they do something about it and what they've determined to do is to buy the building and in order to get the money to buy the building all of these old people decide to start SE stealing fur from New York department store they steal fur coats you can see on the um illustration on the poster an old lady wearing a fur coat yes this is the musical about the Band of Thieves um who are all uh retired New York senior citizens who start stealing fur coats in order to buy back their New York apartment building do it that what you will it um has a very pleasing score including a song I like a great deal uh called say yes but um it was not a hit so after Cabaret there are three shows that don't come up to the expectations of Cabaret but that would change in certain ways in 1976 with the Musical Chicago now unlike Cabaret which was so much the invention of Hal Prince Chicago was so much the invention of the director choreographer Bob FY he was the director the choreographer and he co-wrote the book with fredb and it really was fy's stylistic vocabulary his particular understanding of um sex on stage and economy of movement on stage that really defined the energy and the identity of Chicago it starred Gwyn verden and cheetah Rivera who would become like Liza Manelli a great interpreter of the work of kander and ab and of course cheetah Rivera died only a few months ago after a prolific and stunning career on Broadway so Chicago is set in the 1920s and it's set here in America in the city of Chicago Illinois it's a satire on the criminal justice system and it basically is saying being a criminal is just like being another kind of celebrity in Show Business that the criminal justice system is a Lot Like Show Business now the 1920s were the a was the age of Vaudeville and we talked about Vaudeville towards the beginning of the semester and every character in the Musical Chicago sort of represents a different kind of vaud villian and over the course of the show every number in a way is like a different Vaudeville turn in a different style so this is suggesting that the show has the similar Two Worlds uh equation that Cabaret has um there's the real world and the real world is a plot about a woman named Roxy who kills her husb um kills her hus lover kills her lover um and goes on trial and uh the Showbiz world of Chicago is that every character in the course of that narrative gets their own vaudville ter to sort of reveal what's going on with them the original production opened in 1976 and it got pretty mixed reviews on account of the fact that it was ahead of its time what was exactly in sync with its time in 1976 was the musical Chorus Line which opened on Broadway right around the same time became a giant hit and went on to become at that time the longest running show in Broadway history meanwhile audiences were sort of baffled by Chicago and the idea that criminals were celebrities that we were fascinated by criminals and the way that we are fascinated by celebrities that idea didn't really show up as a cultural truth until a couple decades later and then in the 1990s there was a Revival of Chicago uh that Revival's poster looked like this and of course that this production is still running on Broadway it's the longest running uh Broadway production longest running Revival certainly and um it's as if the show finally caught up with the times I actually think one reason for this is that the OJ Simpson trial in the 1990s captivated America and really combined the worlds of Criminal Justice with a kind of celebrity I mean OJ Simpson was a celebrity and people tuned in to find out about the trial and were obsessed with every detail of it in a way that very much made um Justice another form of entertainment and that's what Chicago's message is fundamentally in 2003 a film adaptation directed by Rob Marshall won the Oscar for Best Picture This was um one of the few instances of a musical winning best picture at the Oscars it's not the only time but one of the few times and in many ways the reason why there are a somewhat frequent number of movie musicals made today um is because the 2003 production of Chicago was a rarity there had not been uh musical movies um with great regularity at that point but then this one won the Oscar for best picture and it started kind of a Renaissance in movie musicals and between the 1997 Revival which is still running today and the 2003 film which won best picture the message of 1976 that uh criminals or celebrities had finally caught up with the times uh here is our next slide of three shows that you only have to know a little bit about um the Act was a showcase for Li Manelli basically it was kerb writing a nightclub act for Liza but Liza didn't play herself Liza played an Entertainer sort of like Liza Manelli not necessarily straddled with the biography of Liza man ell where she was the daughter of a world famous entertainer Judy Garland it was an Entertainer who was a celebrity in her own right putting together a Vegas club act and cander and EB wrote the score to really showcase the brilliant Charisma and showstopping ability not just in terms of numbers that are kind of belted to the sky screamers but also in terms of Whispers uh ballads that cander loved to write that were tentative and gentle and revealed some fundamental truth about the character the Act was a Liza Manelli showcase if you look at the bottom of this poster it says directed by Martin scorsi um a rare example of a major movie director uh working on a Broadway musical um it would be his only Broadway musical um but it would not be his only kered musical later on we'll talk about a movie Musical that Martin scors as he directed uh that has probably the most cander song at the very center of it more on that soon uh but the Act was a great showcase uh for Liza it cemented her connection with cander and EB which of course began with FL Florida Red Menace and continued with the film of Cabaret but it was not a giant hit neither was woman of the year which starred a major movie star Lauren ball and uh woman of the year is about journalism Lauren ball plays a editorial writer at a paper who runs into a romantic comedy with a cartoonist at the newspaper um it was very conventional and I would say that cander and EB were at their best when they weren't conventional when their shows were Brave and dark and daring when they tried to write musical comedies it just sort of squared um their eccentricity and when you're an artist and you feel that you do something that is unusual that is angular that is different from the people next to you keep doing that don't do the thing to resemble last year's hit or something that looks like more commercially acceptable be the unique artist that you are and that's the only way to be your authentic self the rink I think is the most successful of these three shows in part because it was a double star showcase for the two great kander and E interpreters cheetah Rivera and Liza Manelli played mother and daughter and it was really about a reunion between a grown woman and her mother trying to repair the past trying to come to an understanding but they oftentimes get sidetracked into reiterating the arguments and the conflicts that split them apart in the first place the reason it's called the rink is because the mother owns a roller skating rink and that's where the daughter returns to really kind of of returning to the scene of the crime where the split between mother and daughter first occurred and you know a rink is often circular um and the characters sort of go in circles with one another never quite coming to an understanding until the end when they break through and emotionally are able to be honest with one another and respect one another perhaps for the first time this was a great occasion for two stars um who are great at interpreting kander nebs work to work together it was not like hugely well received but as a show I think it often it shows more to me um storytelling uniqueness than a woman of the year or even the act and um I'd love to see a Revival of it I think there could be a lot of dream casting that could occur um to bad Liza never was able to take the opportunity to um take the mother role and have some uh younger woman play the former Liza Manelli role but I think that there would be some dream casting that could happen with a really interesting pair uh to perform in a Revival of the rink someday next up is another two worlds Musical that we'll spend a bit more time on in 1992 uh cerb reunited with Hal Prince to create Kiss of the Spider Woman which was about um a South which was based on a South American novel and had a book by the brilliant liberti and playright Terence mcnali the the show is set in an unidentified South American country but we can kind of understand it to be Argentina um and it's set in a South American prison where the character of Molina who is a gay window dresser and is imprisoned really just for being gay in a place where um that uh was uh extremely prejudiced against and he's sharing a cell with a political revolutionary imprisoned for being an advocate for justice and that revolutionary's name is Valentine and Molina and Valentine don't have very much in common and they are unlikely friends and they're both unjustly imprisoned and over the course of the show they have to come to an understanding with one another because they are in fact sharing their lives with each other in a single cell and that's the real world of Kiss of the Spiderwoman but there is a second world a chiz World a fantasy world and that is inside Molina's mind because Molina Loves movies and movies and thinking about movies and remembering movies that he's seen is how he escapes metaphorically from his prison cell he thinks of his favorite movie star Aurora and all of her movies and he's able to in his own imagination be free be unim prisoned and it's how Molina gets through the day and Aurora in the original Production shows up on stage in all of Molina fantasies it's a great star part and in the original production it was played by cheetah Rivera and the only part in the body of work of this movie star Aurora that Molina doesn't like to think about is when she played a character called the Spiderwoman who was an embodiment of death and the Spiderwoman had the power to K kill with a kiss and Molina doesn't like to think about that because Molina knows that he is in prison for life and that one day he will die in this prison and he attempts never to think about the Spider Woman but he thinks about all of Aurora's other movies and eventually he is left with only being able to dwell on the one thing left to think about which is the Spiderwoman who brings death and Molina's inevitable death that he will one day experience in this prison um I find this to be a stunning Musical and really in the the tradition of Cabaret and Chicago achieves the Two Worlds real world and fantasy Showbiz world with such accuracy where they um push and pull on one another in such a profound way these are three great Parts Molina Valentine and Aurora and this show has never had a Broadway Revival I really hope that someday it does I feel like um Ariana debose would be an excellent Aurora um and there are many brilliant choices for uh Valentine and Molina but I think before that happens there is at least a rumor that Jennifer Lopez is going to star in a film adaptation of this musical and play Aurora if that comes to pass I think it would be a great way to introduce a Really Brave and daring musical into the mainstream and I hope that movie comes to pass kiss the Spiderman was a hit and um in a way was uh a recap capturing of the magic that occurred when kander and E and Prince collaborated uh three decades earlier on cabaray here are three other musicals um Steel Pier was uh the last musical uh produced on Broadway by cander and EB that fredb was around to see fredb died in 2004 of a heart attack very suddenly and it ended the 40 Years of collaboration between kander and E and the death of Fred e um was a stunning death for the musical theater because at that point Kender and I had been writing shows together for 40 years Steel Pier was their last musical it is set um sort of in the world of marathon dancing you familiar with what Marathon dancing is it's like the fundraiser where you show up at like 7 o'clock um to a party and the music starts and whoever dances and does not stop and dances all night long and is still dancing the next morning after everyone else has grown too tired to keep dancing that person gets a cash prize and Steel Pier occurs um at a dance marathon on the pier where there's also um the story of a pilot who may or may not be a ghost it's a interesting ambitious book Musical that doesn't have two worlds like the other shows that we've talked about is more akin to the traditional cander musicals but it does have kind of a supernatural bravery um that I don't think was ever fully successful but I wonder if one day there might be a Revival and perhaps a revision of The Narrative of Steel Pier that could make this show into um a better version of itself um I happen to like the score a lot it constituted the Broadway debut of Kristen Chinowth and um I think offers a lot of interesting material if you're interested in cander and M show songs that are um not sung as much look at the score of still Pier there's some there's some lovely things in there and that was the last live show that uh Fred e saw before his death in 2004 but they had written shows that had not yet been produced at the time of Fred's death in 2004 and the next several decades would show other cander EB musicals opening on Broadway poly for fredb but taken care of by John Candy who when needed would write an occasional additional lyric to fill out places that Fred e had not been able to write during his lifetime but by and large all of these shows have full lyrics by Fred e and um it just speaks to the prolificness of their career uh that they could have U new mus that fredb could have new musicals opening even after his death curtain was a show that was a Broadway murder mystery and if you recognized the actor David Hyde Pierce he was the star of the show he played a detective who happened to be obsessed with Broadway musicals who was called in to investigate a murder that was taking place dur that took place during the out of town Tri out of a musical while it was in performances in Boston the leading lady has died eventually the producer dies and a detective has to seal the theater to investigate who's doing all of these killings and it just so happens the det itive who is brought in is totally Stage Struck loves Broadway musicals um and that kind of uh kind of plot Quirk is what gives curtains its life force it's a play within a play or musical within a musical I should say and it is a murder mystery all at the same time uh really a cut kind of a cerab musical comedy and of the cander musical comedies I think it's kind of the best one um for me this show has um a lot of stylistic Verve and it is able to give both a traditional musical comedy World on stage in the musical within the musical but then there is a detective story that has a lot of commentary on um the state of uh making musicals and all of the sacrifices that have to occur in order for a miracle to be made on stage um there's a lot to love in curtains and I saw it from the front row on Broadway uh in my early days in New York and I'll always take that memory with me um the visit is a really interesting Swan Song in a way for cheetah Rivera to play a great cander and eil it's based on a German play and the play in the musical share the same plot it's about the richest woman in the world she's become extraordinarily Wealthy by marrying a lot of um wealthy husbands who she has outlived and she has a ton of money and she returns to her hometown where she grew up very poor and that Hometown has um been experiencing a huge economic depression they're desperately in need of money and here is their um Native daughter someone who grew up there who has never returned but who has become the richest woman in the world and so the town feels that uh the visit of this wealthy Aris to her hometown could be the miracle they've been waiting for if she can give just a little bit of her money to the town it would be a boon to the town it would save the town and the character that cheetah Rivera plays says yes I will give you money I'll give you all the money you need I'll give you my entire Fortune but you have to do something for me there is a person in this town now an adult who I grew up with with but when we were young he assaulted me and I want revenge if you give me that person who now is a leader in the town very well-respected but if you give me that person I'll give you all the money you need but you must know that when you give him to me I will kill him and the town has a moral question to answer do we sacrifice one of our citizens who apparently has done something very bad but without a trial without any kind of justice system we would be handing him over to a woman who promises that she will take revenge on him and murder him but if we do that we'll get all the money we could ever need for our town and all of us will be rich or do we say no Humanity must win we can't just give you this person knowing that you will kill him even if he did something wrong the absence of just jce feels like a moral failing and they have to ask what will they do and maybe I can give you a spoiler they give the guy to cheetah Rivera and she kills him and they take the money so it sort of is a phenomenal story I find it to be an incredibly evocative musical uh story that offers both um pain and Justice and anguish but also Joy um and as cheetah Rivera and the brilliant late actor Roger ree who played the man that she grew up with um reencounter one another as adults there is a sophisticated kind of Storytelling that shows up in this show that is the very best of kander andb but the show I want to zoom in on and this is the last show in our sequence is one of the shows that was posum asly produced after Fred E's death in 2010 and it's called the scotsboro boys and like uh Cabaret and Chicago and kiss of the Spiderwoman it also has two worlds so it's based on the real life story of the group of African-American teenagers who were falsely accused of rape and imprisoned in 1930s Alabama this is a real life story it was the byproduct of racism and it was an act of supreme Injustice in American history that a group of black teenagers were fly accused convicted and imprisoned for decades and decades and decades so the story delivers the narrative in the form of a minstral show which as we talked about is a form of racist entertainment an entertainment of course is in quotation marks because there was nothing entertaining about seeing um individuals on stage stereotyped caricatured mocked but White America in the early 1920s and 1930s even a few decades before that in earlier versions of the minstral show um called this a form of entertainment but what the Scottsboro boys does is it turns the tables on what the minstral show means because instead of making the characters devoid of humanity and one-dimensional it makes the characters full of humanity full of dimensionality and truth and so it's a minstral show that delivers none of the attributes that a minstral show is known for instead it shows the black characters with all of their Humanity pushed forward and there are two worlds on stage there are the worlds of um the real individuals who are unjustly imprisoned who are fighting for their right to live free who have love in their life they have hope in their life and dreams they want to realize but then there is another world a schiz world a world where burlesque and song are used to saiz racism are used to saiz anti-Semitism because the scotsboro boys had Jewish lawyers who were representing them which had the effect of doubling the discrimination at work because um White America was all too eager to um falsely convict the um black defendants and then also in a way punish their Jewish lawyers and it also issues a lot of commentary on capital punishment in our society because although the scotsboro boys um were not executed there was a huge movement that wanted them to experience the death penalty and this is a show that bravely traffics in what Justice and injustice mean in our society and and with a great deal of um delicacy tries to take individuals who were painted with one color in society and say no the Scottsboro boys were individual people with individual personalities and shared only really one thing which was their innocence and the fact that this was an act of Injustice now something to acknowledge about this production is that it had in 2010 an all white creative team uh cander and EB are white songwriters the bookwriter David Thompson is a white playwright and liist and the director choreographer Susan strowman is a white choreographer and director this would never happen today only 13 14 years later um the next time the Scottsboro boys appears on Broadway it will be led inevitably by a bipoc creative team and I really await that moment to see the lived experience of individuals growing up um Living in America as black artists bringing this story to the stage um that said I do believe that the humanity of kander and E of David Thompson and of Susan strowman um really shined through in this production it um was nominated for like 14 tonies the year of its Premiere but it won none of them an act of Injustice in itself not uh nearly as profound as the Injustice that incarcerated the Scottsboro boys but an act of artistic Injustice because I believe that this show was Brave in the way that Cabaret and Chicago and kiss of the Spiderwoman are brave one byproduct however is that the existence of this show brought the Injustice of the historical scotsboro boys back into the cultural conversation and the governor of Alabama ended up issuing statements which pardoned the Scottsboro boys who had not yet at that point been pardoned and this musical brought about the historic event of the Innocence of all the Scots World boys finally being solidified in the American legal system so every now and then a Broadway show comes along that nudges the world a little bit forward that makes the world as a whole better not just the art form better and the scotsboro boys is one of those shows here is a picture of John kander with me and my collaborator will Reynolds in 2018 we were the winners of the Fred e award for musical theater writing and obviously um I was so honored to be able to uh share part of the legacy of one of my favorite lyricists Fred EB when he died he had no um heirs and there was a fortune that had been amassed from the show Cabaret from the movie cabet from the movie Chicago and from the long running Revival Chicago as well as from songs like New York New York which I'll talk about in just a moment and um are played around the world constantly and you know blasted on New Year's Eve in Time Square every year um Fred EB was a very rich man when he died and he made a determination of where he wanted his money to go after his death and just spoiler alert it didn't all go to me I mean look around it didn't go to me um a little bit went to me in 2018 and I'm very grateful for that because fredb determined that he wanted his money every year to go to a team of songwriters or rather a songwriter or a team of songwriters who showed potential to be the next cander and E in the future and I was so lucky that will and I were selected for this award it not only sustained me economically for a long time but it also also gave me the time and space to be able to write uh which of course is really the only way that you can um become the next cander and EB but there's another source where Fred E's Fortune went to um it was sort of divided between going to the fredb award which is um given out every year and then also to a yearly donation to Broadway car's Equity fights AIDS and it constitutes the largest donation given to Broadway car's Equity fights AIDS every year of course this is a charitable organization that is dedicated to making sure that HIV and AIDS diagnoses are no longer a death sentence in the 1980s into the 1990s into the early 2000s and scarily even today an individual who um contracts AIDS um or HIV and um isn't treated will die and will die a terrible painful death but the scientific and medic medical innovations that are paid for in part by Broadway cares Equity fights AIDS make that reality exceedingly rare and Fred e has given millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to Broadway Care's Equity fights AIDS every year the donation is in the range of $2 to three million and the um donations have happened every year since 2004 when he died um it has saved people's lives it has moved the world forward and it has made the world better so I'm very grateful to be part of that Legacy where both um musical theater writers and um individuals who need medical care are able to be given medical care because of Broadway Care's Equity fights AIDS both funded uh in significant part by fredb and of course another byproduct of winning this award was that it allowed me to develop a relationship with John kander who I have found to be the most generous spirited individual um uh obviously I have adored his talent for my entire life but I've uh come to know his kindness since 2018 uh he endorsed The Violet hour um and uh issued some statements about uh his feelings which were very nice about the score uh and about our writing and he's been a great figure and leader in American musical theater in the past few years because he really is one of the only few individuals from his generation still around still working today you know I mentioned that Sheldon harck died last year John kander is about the same age and he's still here and unlike Sheldon harck who in many ways had retired and stopped writing John kander is still going there was a show on Broadway last year that he wrote the music for um and it was New York New York I'll come back to that previous slide shortly New York New York was a new musical which uh opened on Broadway last year which was sort of a jukebox show including a lot of cander and EB songs a new book written by David Thompson who wrote the Scottsboro boys uh and um uh the uh show was directed by Susan strowman and there were additional lyrics for new songs with music by John kander and those additional lyrics were written by Lyn Manuel Miranda a nice bridging between the past of music musical theater in the form of John kander and the future or at least the present of musical theater in the form of L Manuel Miranda who is born 60 years after the birth of John kander New York New York is inspired by uh this song and the film that resulted from it New York New York sung by Frank Sinatra one of the most famous songs in the American song book this is the one that begins with Start Spreading the News I'm leaving today I want to be a part of it New York New York um it was made into a film starring Liza Manelli and Robert dairo directed by Martin scorsi who I mentioned directed The Act um and New York New York the movie was in certain ways the inspiration for New York New York the Broadway show but I want to look just at this picture of the collaborators of Flora the Red Menace standing around the piano cander is at the piano before he became a Broadway songwriter when he was sort of uh in press photographs for his Broadway debut Florida Red Menace fredb is right behind him uh Liza Manelli in the center George Abbott is the older man there he was the director of Flora and how Prince is on the my far left in the picture looking at cander looking at e and I sort of believe looking at their potential not just thinking about Florida adminis but saying these these collaborators are going to be around for a long time and I'm going to work with them in ways that transcend what we're doing right here around the piano on their first show I think he was sort of seeing the future in that moment I can sort of I can sort of see it in his eyes here is kander and E A Portrait of them and that loving relationship uh between them was real uh cander would walk to Fred E's apartment every day and they would work in person in his kitchen uh creating the scores for their shows they would um uh have coffee and gossip for about an hour or so and then would move into the living room at the piano and they would improvise their way through writing the kander and EB song book they wrote in the same room at the same time music and lyrics being created together and in New York New York even though it was a fairly conventional show and did not get especially strong reviews um and closed uh far sooner than I think its creative team wanted it to it in a way also is a two World Musical in fact there are two worlds in its title there's New York York and then there's New York and those two kinds of New Yorks are put on stage the first New York is gritty the first New York is the New York when it's rainy or slushy or expensive outside and you don't know if you're going to make it till tomorrow it's the New York that is crowded on the subway it's the New York that says I'm going to beat you and I'm not going to allow you to do the things that you came here to do because I'm stronger and bigger and more expensive and more crowded and more overwhelming than you and I'm going to um and I'm going to bring you down we all know that New York feeling this is the hardest city in America I think to to live in but then there's this other New York and it's the New York of Dreams it's the New York that is fueled by the fact that people come here because their dreams are too big for the places where they originate their dreams have to go somewhere else somewhere where those dreams can spread their wings and come true and that's the second New York of this musical it's the New York of beauty of Manhattan hinge where you can look right down the Avenue and see the sun setting it's the New York of the Violet hour in a way where the sky turns that magical color and seems to indicate that the things you thought might be impossible during the day have become possible now that the world is giving you so much beauty that everything seems full of hope that's the New York that is the second world of New York New York that's the New York where I think we all sort of set our sights on when we came here the last lines of that title song are if I can make it here I'll make it anywhere actually it's given in the second person if you you can make it here you'll make it anywhere it's up to you New York New York I like that last line it's up to you New York New York because it can kind of be interpreted two ways it can be interpreted like it's up to you New York New York meaning that it's out of my hands it's the city it's either going to be the bad version of the city or the beautiful version of the city that I encounter and whichever version I encounter that's going to Define my future but I like the other interpretation even more which is that it's up to you every day you wake up in New York New York and you have to decide which New York it's going to be is it the one that's going to be overwhelming or is it the one that's going to fuel your dreams and make them possible it's up to you New York New York and I think that's a very cander and ab idea so I'm going to end the lecture there thank you so much for listening uh there'll be a quiz on this soon so bring those notes along and um try to live the rest of today in the New York of your dreams try to live the rest of your life in the New York of your dreams thanks so much everyone bye