Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by Greg Lawrence, John Kander, Fred Ebb Page B
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relationship. I assume Steve Sondheim has a similar kind of relationship with Jonathan Tunick.
EBB: In the new production, the audience was seated at tables and chairs in the Kit Kat Club instead of in the theater. But seeing it in London, we had never dreamed, Oh, my God , wait until New York sees this! When finally I did see the show in New York, I had just gotten out of the hospital and I went with Chita. You were there that night sitting next to us. It may have been the first preview.
KANDER: I went back many times.
EBB: I walked in and those girls were walking around dressed the way they do, and kind of sniffing at the audience. And I wept. I looked at that show and what I saw overwhelmed me, what Sam had done. I had no idea it would be like that. Who would have imagined pineapples coming down from the ceiling in “The Pineapple Song.” There were so many arresting moments like that. Chita grabbed my hand, which made it worse, may I tell you. You know I cry a lot.
KANDER: We cry at different things.
Two years after their success with Cabaret , Kander and Ebb had a less than happy experience with David Merrick’s production of The Happy Time , with a book from N. Richard Nash. Under the direction of Gower Champion, the musical was turned into a multimedia extravaganza that overshadowed its stars, Robert Goulet and David Wayne. The Happy Time opened at the Broadway Theater, January 18, 1968, and ran for 286 performances. Despite the charms of the score and two Tony Awards for Champion
and one for Goulet, the show became one of Broadway’s first million-dollar flops.
KANDER: Collaboration is the most difficult part of our business, where collaboration involves the director, producer, writers—everyone who is in a key position creatively on a show. During our collaboration on The Happy Time , the concept of the show changed in a way that disappointed us when we were in Los Angeles. That was the wrong place for us to be trying out that show because people were saying, “You can’t have Robert Goulet play a failure”—meaning, his character in the script. Our director, Gower Champion, lost confidence in what the story was about, and Dick Nash had written a beautiful script. But we changed the show out of town in certain ways that we didn’t like.
EBB: I remember that Gower accepted some hideous advice from his Los Angeles friends. The Happy Time was a tough little libretto, and rightly so, reminiscent of The Rainmaker in that the story essentially involved exposing fraud, but with much warmth and humor. Bob Goulet played a French Canadian man, Uncle Jacques, who for years has deceived his family into thinking he is something he is not. At the end, he has to confess to his fourteen-year-old nephew, Bibi, who idolizes him, that he wasn’t really a glamorous photographer, that he was just a failure.
KANDER: He was actually a photographer who took pictures of shoes. The experience was sad because of what the show became, especially for Dick Nash, who was the real victim in the way they changed his book and the whole character for Goulet as the uncle.
EBB: With the original story in mind, we wrote the song “Please Stay” to show the relationship between Uncle Jacques and his nephew. Uncle Jacques returns to French Canada to visit
his family, and it is the opinion of the family that he is a bad influence on the boy. But Bibi adores him and one night Uncle Jacques takes him out on the town. They have a really wonderful time, and then they come home. They are in the room they share, and the song is sung by the boy to reveal what he feels about his uncle, who is planning to leave. Bibi protests, not wanting his uncle to return to his glamorous life:
I read a book on London.
It’s beautiful, I know.
Such fun to be in London:
Don’t go.
And Lisbon must be pretty
Around this time of year.
Just marvelous in Lisbon:
Stay here.
And Venice takes your breath away,
They
EBB: In the new production, the audience was seated at tables and chairs in the Kit Kat Club instead of in the theater. But seeing it in London, we had never dreamed, Oh, my God , wait until New York sees this! When finally I did see the show in New York, I had just gotten out of the hospital and I went with Chita. You were there that night sitting next to us. It may have been the first preview.
KANDER: I went back many times.
EBB: I walked in and those girls were walking around dressed the way they do, and kind of sniffing at the audience. And I wept. I looked at that show and what I saw overwhelmed me, what Sam had done. I had no idea it would be like that. Who would have imagined pineapples coming down from the ceiling in “The Pineapple Song.” There were so many arresting moments like that. Chita grabbed my hand, which made it worse, may I tell you. You know I cry a lot.
KANDER: We cry at different things.
Two years after their success with Cabaret , Kander and Ebb had a less than happy experience with David Merrick’s production of The Happy Time , with a book from N. Richard Nash. Under the direction of Gower Champion, the musical was turned into a multimedia extravaganza that overshadowed its stars, Robert Goulet and David Wayne. The Happy Time opened at the Broadway Theater, January 18, 1968, and ran for 286 performances. Despite the charms of the score and two Tony Awards for Champion
and one for Goulet, the show became one of Broadway’s first million-dollar flops.
KANDER: Collaboration is the most difficult part of our business, where collaboration involves the director, producer, writers—everyone who is in a key position creatively on a show. During our collaboration on The Happy Time , the concept of the show changed in a way that disappointed us when we were in Los Angeles. That was the wrong place for us to be trying out that show because people were saying, “You can’t have Robert Goulet play a failure”—meaning, his character in the script. Our director, Gower Champion, lost confidence in what the story was about, and Dick Nash had written a beautiful script. But we changed the show out of town in certain ways that we didn’t like.
EBB: I remember that Gower accepted some hideous advice from his Los Angeles friends. The Happy Time was a tough little libretto, and rightly so, reminiscent of The Rainmaker in that the story essentially involved exposing fraud, but with much warmth and humor. Bob Goulet played a French Canadian man, Uncle Jacques, who for years has deceived his family into thinking he is something he is not. At the end, he has to confess to his fourteen-year-old nephew, Bibi, who idolizes him, that he wasn’t really a glamorous photographer, that he was just a failure.
KANDER: He was actually a photographer who took pictures of shoes. The experience was sad because of what the show became, especially for Dick Nash, who was the real victim in the way they changed his book and the whole character for Goulet as the uncle.
EBB: With the original story in mind, we wrote the song “Please Stay” to show the relationship between Uncle Jacques and his nephew. Uncle Jacques returns to French Canada to visit
his family, and it is the opinion of the family that he is a bad influence on the boy. But Bibi adores him and one night Uncle Jacques takes him out on the town. They have a really wonderful time, and then they come home. They are in the room they share, and the song is sung by the boy to reveal what he feels about his uncle, who is planning to leave. Bibi protests, not wanting his uncle to return to his glamorous life:
I read a book on London.
It’s beautiful, I know.
Such fun to be in London:
Don’t go.
And Lisbon must be pretty
Around this time of year.
Just marvelous in Lisbon:
Stay here.
And Venice takes your breath away,
They
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