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[0:00] Michael Riedel: Welcome to Singular Sensation: The Podcast. Today, we have the legendary composer John Kander with us to discuss the making of Chicago.

[0:40] John Kander: I knew Bob Fosse from Cabaret, which Bob Fosse directed and had won a number of Oscars for, including for Joel Grey, who beat out the entire cast of The Godfather, believe it or not. So they worked together with him on the movie. Bob Fosse grew up in the burlesque vaudeville world. He was a kid dancer and so he was fascinated by the vaudeville world. Chicago, of course, is set in the 1920s, the roaring 20s, with all the cynicism of showbiz, but it's all the cheap and tawdry aspect of showbiz that he knew. But also, Fred Ebb knew very well too, and John and Fred wanted to write a score that was going to capture the jazz age. In fact, I remember Fred telling me this; I think I interviewed him on my TV show back in the day called Theater Talk.

I said, how did you come up with some of the phrases, you know, razzle dazzle, all that jazz, all that kind of stuff that they wrote? He said, I just bought an old book that was about the roaring 20s and I stole all the titles from the book for the song titles. It's a true story, I'm telling you, that's what he said. He looked at it; it was a book about the roaring 20s, and he just went through it and said, these are good song titles, razzle dazzle, I'll take it. So that's how they came to write much of the score to Chicago.

[9:51] John Kander: Of course, Chicago starred Bob Fosse's wife, Gwen Verdon, and that was a fraught relationship. They did love each other; there's no question in my mind, as I've interviewed people about them, that they loved each other. But Fosse was a cheater, you know, he was sleeping with every chorus girl that came his way. Gwen knew he was a cheater, but she put up with a lot of it because Fosse was a genius, and they've been together since kids, danced together when they were young, and she knew that nobody could choreograph her better than Bob Fosse. So she was the star with the great Chita Rivera in the original production of Chicago. But then Gwen got sick, and they had to come up with a replacement because Gwen Verdon was above the title.

Without her in it, people were not going to go, or they would want their money back. So Fosse came up with the idea of Liza Minnelli, who was the star of Cabaret and one of the biggest stars on the planet back then. There were moments when people would go to the theater and they'd say, unfortunately, Gwen Verdon is out tonight. The role of Roxy Hart will be played by—and the audience would go, oh no, Gwen Verdon's out. The role of Roxy Hart will be played by Liza Minnelli. Oh my god, there were roars and cheers from the audience. I often wondered, and I never got the answer to this question, if Gwen heard about that and how she would have felt that the audience roared and cheered when they heard that Liza Minnelli was in for Gwen Verdon.

[11:18] Michael Riedel: We'll be right back. It's no secret around Broadway and Hollywood that Bob Fosse could be a tyrant. He was a director who ran and controlled every aspect of his productions, and he often bullied—I have to say, that's the word—he bullied John Kander and Fred Ebb. But John and Fred got great advice from Liza Minnelli on how to handle Bob Fosse. How was Fosse in tech?

[11:44] John Kander: He could be terrible or he could be nice. Depends on the mood, how fast things are going or how slow things are going.

[11:52] John Kander: When she did the movie Cabaret, something happened on the set, and Fosse was screaming at her, and then at the end of it, he said, Liza, come in here. I'm going to talk to you right now. She said, no, we'll talk about this tomorrow. He became very insistent, and she said, Bobby, if I go in there now, you're going to say things to me that you're going to be sorry about tomorrow, and you're going to send me flowers, and we'll have to go through it. So we'll talk about it tomorrow, and she left, and she told me that story about three days before we opened. We were trying to get Bobby to change something, and he started defensively in on the song Roxy, as a matter of fact, a terrible song it was, and it got really abusive, and Fred was making the mistake that you make in a situation like that, which is actually try to have a conversation to answer back, and I suddenly, I swear to God, Liza appeared in my brain, and I said, good night, Bobby, and I took Fred's head, and he turned it around, and we went out the door, and as we were leaving to go out stage door, he was already compromising.

[13:11] Michael Riedel: Oh, Bobby was?

[13:12] John Kander: Yeah. He was already pulling back. Yeah, I've always remembered that. I mean, I'm not a good fighter or a good arguer, but you can always leave the room. You don't have to play to somebody else's script.

[13:25] Michael Riedel: Exactly.

[13:25] John Kander: And when you don't play to their script, very often they sort of lose their power. We wrote it, and Fred said, put two snaps in at the beginning. Bobby will love that, and I always said, how can you be so sure, and he said, believe me, it'll happen, and he did, so it was all very good-humored, and then it got unnecessarily dark.

[13:50] Michael Riedel: Why? Why do you think that happened?

[13:51] John Kander: I think partly because he was getting a divorce, and he had the heart attack, and I think he became kind of paranoid. You're too young to have seen it.

[14:01] Michael Riedel: Yeah, I did not see the original.

[14:03] John Kander: But it was much darker, and what Annie and Walter gave it was a kind of a lightness. Other than that, it's exactly the same show. Why didn't it work 20 years ago?

[14:17] Michael Riedel: Yeah. Do you remember when Fosse had the heart attack? Was it in rehearsals?

[14:22] John Kander: He wasn't there. You weren't with him.

[14:23] Michael Riedel: No, he had a heart attack, and he went to the hospital. I remember we had to stop and wait to hear how he was. When he came back, he had all kinds of fantasies of people who were trying to do things to him.

[14:37] John Kander: Really? Paranoia stuff?

[14:38] Michael Riedel: Yeah. What's his movie?

[14:44] John Kander: Yeah, All That Jazz. That's hung on the idea that I think either Hal Prince or somebody was going to come in and take over. Everybody was sort of… The philosophy of that movie is, I'm completely corrupt, but everybody else is much more corrupt. He kind of made Chicago that way, too.

[15:02] Michael Riedel: Yes. How was the show received from your perspective the first time around? I mean…

[15:09] John Kander: Chorus Line was the same year. The Tony Awards, they were both up, and none of us went to the Tony Awards.

[15:13] Michael Riedel: We didn't?

[15:16] John Kander: No. Because you knew?

[15:18] Michael Riedel: Why bother?

[15:21] John Kander: So Chicago originally lasted, what, about a year on Broadway?

[15:24] Michael Riedel: I think it did a little better than that. But there was always the feeling it was okay. A lot of people liked it.

[15:31] John Kander: Were there any revivals in that 20-year period between the…

[15:34] Michael Riedel: No, not really. It may have been done in some stock places, but I don't…

[15:39] John Kander: Yeah, Barry Weissler, I seem to recall that there was something, a Long Beach production or something?

[15:44] Michael Riedel: There was, yes. And Rob Marshall directed it.

[15:49] John Kander: Did you see it?

[15:51] Michael Riedel: No, I did not. But I heard about it a lot, and I heard it was very good. And Robby, I think, was doing pretty much the original piece, but he would be very good for it, as it turned out.

[16:02] John Kander: Yeah. One of my favorite movies about show business, about Broadway, is All That Jazz, directed by Bob Fosse. It is a great movie about all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into putting on a Broadway show. Now, Fosse had been working on Chicago, and then he had this massive heart attack. And when he came back, he was also working on the movie All That Jazz. So he put so much of his experiences of working on Chicago and having this heart attack into the movie All That Jazz. His great rival at the time, and I encourage you to go back and look at this movie, his great rival at the time was Hal Prince. And there's a wonderful scene where Fosse, Roy Scheider in the movie, is in the hospital with a heart attack.

And the producers of Chicago, which Fosse was working at the time, they go to Hal Prince to see if Hal Prince could replace Fosse. And if you look at that scene, Hal Prince is played by the great John Lithgow. And if you look carefully, you see the show he's directing, which is Pacific Overtures, the Stephen Sondheim musical Prince was directing at the time they tried to, in reality, get him to replace Fosse, who was in the hospital. So it's a great, great movie. And as everything Bob did, it is totally and completely autobiographical. While Gwen and Bob Fosse were separated, he was, of course, carrying on with many people, including very young and very beautiful Anne Reinking. And for reasons that you need Sigmund Freud to unravel, somehow Anne Reinking and Gwen Verdon were friends.

And Bob died, of course, in 1987. He was directing a revival of Sweet Charity in Washington, and he was walking to the hotel just down the street from the National Theater, and he had a massive heart attack on the sidewalk and was dead. So the people who had to look after his estate, everything that he did, turned out to be Gwen Verdon and Anne Reinking and Nicole Fosse, Bob's daughter. And somehow these three women all managed to lovingly, I would say, look after this estate. And they became very important, very important in pulling together this revival of Chicago. So my good friend Walter Bobby, who was in Guys and Dolls, realized that his career was going to be a character actor, and that's it.

So he thought, I really want to direct something. And he got involved with Encores, and they asked him to do Chicago. He was actually looking at the script of Chicago, and it was right around the time that the O.J. Simpson trial was going on. And he thought, oh, my gosh, what's going on in Chicago is going on right now on court TV every single day. And Walter then turned to Anne Reinking because he knew how close Anne was to Bob Fosse and said, Anne, will you come and choreograph the show with me? And she said, absolutely. And they became partners on what was going to be a four or five performance showcase workshop, not even a workshop, reading, they used to call it Encores, reading with people with scripts and, you know, tuxedos and black dresses.

That's what it was going to be. They thought it would last one weekend. Nothing is really predictable in show business. At the time that City Center Encores was doing this five performance only concert version of Chicago, John Kander and Fred Ebb were working on their brand new musical Steel Pier, and they were totally focused on that. Chicago for them was the past. It was not something they even gave a thought to. They were immersed in Steel Pier. But at one point they said, you know what, this Chicago thing is going on at City Center. We might as well go to see it. So they went, they had a drink at a bar across the street from City Center. And an old friend of theirs who was in this production of Chicago popped by to say hello before he went to the dressing room to go on stage.

And they were having some trouble with Steel Pier, which, sad to say, was a flop. And there was a lot of trouble and they were down in the dumps. And they were telling this friend of theirs the troubles they were having on Steel Pier. And then they said, by the way, how is this concert version of Chicago? And the guy looked at them before he left and he said, I think you're going to like it.

[20:03] Fred Ebb: We got to the theater. It was like walking into a eerie kind of rock concert. None of us were expecting it. When it started, they were applauding vamps. Every time something would be about to begin, it was as if they knew about it. It was the most, I guess the most incredible experience I've ever had in the theater.

[20:26] Michael Riedel: You were probably more interested or up to your ears more with Steel Pier, right? Because that was the news. Then Chicago, that was like the concert.

[20:36] Fred Ebb: Yeah, the shows over there and like, I'm in this business. Oh, great. Finally, somebody's going to do Chicago. But we didn't, I don't think either of us thought of it very much because we were doing what we were doing.

[20:50] John Kander: Yeah. Freddy, probably more than I did, but I never thought very much in terms of career or what's going to happen. I've always been very focused on what we're doing. Not that there's any virtue in that, but it's just when it's over and you're doing something else, you're doing something else, right? Freddy, particularly in the early days, would be devastated. Really, really devastated. The kind of devastation where you had to go really talk to him.

[21:24] Michael Riedel: Can you remember a particular show that hit him hard that didn't go where you had to go speak to him?

[21:30] John Kander: I know he felt that way about Steel Pier. When you feel that your best, most personal work gets slammed, that's hard. Conversely, when you get praised for something that you thought, well, we got away with that.

[21:45] Michael Riedel: Yeah. Is it fair to say that Steel Pier had a more personal connection to you and Fred than Chicago ever did?

[22:01] John Kander: To me, it did. But no, I think nothing ever got as good as Chicago for Freddy. He loved it. Yeah. It's brilliant. I mean, his work in that is just brilliant.

[22:14] Michael Riedel: Well, yours isn't too shabby either.

[22:20] John Kander: Well, mine was easier.

[22:20] Michael Riedel: Really? Why?

[22:20] John Kander: I just think that what I do is easier. Or maybe I don't suffer enough. I don't know.

[22:44] Michael Riedel: So that's it for this episode of Singular Sensation about the beginnings of the great revival of Chicago. Now, next time on the series, you're going to hear from Anne Reinking, who was originally hired just to choreograph the Encores! thing. And then when they couldn't get Liza Minnelli, Walter Bobby said, Anne, why don't you do it? We'll see how she did. That's next on Singular Sensation.