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Gay Pantheon: Kander and Ebb

Young gay reader! Know that there was a non-Sondheim gay titan of the late-twentieth-century musical theater, and he was Fred Ebb. He seemed to be part of a "thrupple" ... He was buried with two male "friends" in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.

His writing partner--John Kander--was also gay. Kander married his boyfriend late in life.

Who are the gay male writing forces in Broadway musical history? Sondheim, Howard Ashman, Kander and Ebb, Cole Porter, Michael John LaChiusa, Benj Pasek, Jerry Herman, William Finn, Lorenz Hart, Michael Bennett, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Tony Kushner, Jerome Robbins. I'm sure I'm forgetting many.

One thing I love about Kander and Ebb, and a thing that strikes me as "gay," is an obsession with death, and particularly grisly death. You see this over and over in the (gay) work of, e.g. Truman Capote, David Sedaris, Ryan Murphy, Peter Cameron, Howard Ashman, Sondheim, and of course Bryan Fuller ("Hannibal").

People are often getting murdered--in dramatic, centerstage fashion--in Kander and Ebb shows. "Talk, you fucking faggot!" shouts the military official, right before blowing out Molina's brains. "Chicago" gives us Roxie slaughtering her lover (in the first song!), then murmuring, "I gotta pee." And "Cabaret" has all the Holocaust victims, starving, attached to Stars of David. Institutional evil looms large, whether it's represented by the Nazis, by the repressive Latin American government in "Spider-Woman," or by the cynical media in "Chicago."

A good writer makes use of tension and irony, and this stuff drips from the pens of Kander and Ebb. In "Cabaret," the most beautiful number belongs to a quartet of Nazis--"Tomorrow Belongs to Me." If you weren't aware of context, and you weren't listening to the words, you might imagine you were hearing something stirring and pure, something that might get a spot at the Olympics. "Chicago" has a rousing, spirited number--"Razzle Dazzle"--but it's really about the death of truth and the wondrous potential you can find in evil acts (and it became extraordinarily popular, in a major, still-running revival, right after O.J. Simpson was declared "not guilty" in an American court).

K and E are especially interested in coping strategies--the ways in which people learn to tolerate injustice. "You've gotta learn how not to be where you are!" says Aurora, in "Spider-Woman." "Why should I wake up?" asks Cliff, in his drunken stupor, in "Cabaret." "Why waste a drop of the wine?" Most famously, empty-headed Sally Bowles, unwilling to leave behind her comfy life in Nazi Germany, asks:

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret!

Additionally, a K and E show is generally marked by a central rivalry. Velma loathes Roxie, and Velma becomes a kind of hate-filled chronicler of Roxie's rise. "Cabaret"'s Emcee, in the "Velma" role, mocks and sneers at Sally's complacency, even as Sally continues to insist on being blind to the truth around her. Aurora helps to tell Molina's tale--but, also, she wants Molina dead. She is, after all, the Spider-Woman.

At their darkest, K and E seem to suggest that all of us are complicit in life's sordidness. I see this in the show-stopping "Don't Tell Mama," from "Cabaret." That's where Sally Bowles does her striptease. The apparent plot is that she would never, never want her family to know about her secret life. But the running joke is that, in fact, everyone is in on the filthiness. ("You can tell my grandpa, that's all right! Cuz he comes in here every night." "You can tell my uncle here and now! Cuz he's my agent anyhow." "You can tell my brother; that ain't grim! Cuz if he squeals on me, I'll squeal on him." "You can tell my grandma, suits me fine! Just yesterday, she joined the line.") An interest in hypocrisy, the gap between speech and thought, between perception and "what's real"--This is a hallmark of a Kander-and-Ebb production.

I write all this just as part of your continuing gay catechism, reader. Kander and Ebb helped to explain the world to me. One of them is dead now, and the other is 91--but, anyway, long may they reign!

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