The Musicals of Kander and Ebb

Discover John Kander and Fred Ebb, the most artistically and commercially successful musical theatre writing team since Rodgers and Hammerstein, in a brand new way.

Identifying the theatrical approach that renders their musical dramaturgy unique, this book explores their importance within, and contribution to, musical theatre history. Through their biggest hits, Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), Kander and Ebb have been performed on the stage more times both within and outside of the USA than any other American musical theatre writers. Unlike Sondheim, whose work from 1964 increasingly aspired towards the avant-garde, Kander and Ebb located their projects in a nexus between art and commercial entertainment, seeking to deconstruct popular forms in order to expose their ideological function.

This book investigates the full range of Kander and Ebb’s collaboration from the pure comic entertainment of 70, Girls, 70 (1971) and Curtains (2006) to more overtly serious musicals such as Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1992), The Scottsboro Boys (2010) and The Visit (2014), which were less commercially successful precisely because they addressed disturbing subjects. It explores how the difficult material inspired beautiful, though challenging, scores. It also probes how the ironic counterpointing of luscious music with witty and demotic lyrics challenges the desire of a Broadway audience for escapist entertainment, devoid of critical self-reflection, in order to create complex, yet popular, masterpieces of the genre.

This is the first volume to explicitly analyse the recurrent theatrical tropes and dramaturgical forms in Kander and Ebb’s musicals, offering an in-depth introduction to their oeuvre.

Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and Director of the Pinter Research Centre in Performance and Creative Writing. His research has focused on modern British theatre, the theory and practice of performance and on musical theatre He has published books on Stoppard and Harold Pinter, on modern acting theories and edited The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.