BWW EXCLUSIVE: 5 SONGS BY... John Kander On THE VISIT

By: Pat Cerasaro May. 26, 2015

BroadwayWorld recently kicked off a brand new feature series spotlighting the best and brightest songwriters on Broadway and beyond with their own personally chosen quintet of songs that hold special meaning to them, titled 5 SONGS BY... .

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Today, we continue the 5 SONGS BY... series by talking to legendary Broadway and Hollywood composer John Kander all about his complex and dazzling score for the new Broadway musical THE VISIT starring the one and only Chita Rivera. Kander opens up about his process in crafting the score with longtime lyricist and collaborator Fred Ebb, who passed away in 2004 after the original version of the show had been completed, as well as comments on some new elements - both musical and lyrical - that Kander himself composed for the piece in Ebb's absence. Most importantly of all, Kander highlights what he feels are the most essential elements of the score by choosing the songs that mean to the most to him personally.
More information on THE VISIT is available at the official site here.
"You, You, You"
"The first thing that I wrote for THE VISIT is a song that appears early on and goes through the entire show - it's a waltz and it's called 'You, You, You'. It's a very simple waltz. The story behind it is kind of the story about why we wanted to do this and musicalize this source material. The play, THE VISIT, by Friedrich Durrenmatt, I first saw many, many years ago with the Lunts, and I realized since that the story of an impoverished country or place about to meet the richest woman in the world and hoping to nab her to marry one of its citizens so they would have the money is the story of THE MERRY WIDOW. I am convinced that Durrenmatt knew that, too - if you think about it, that's exactly what it is. What he did was take the story of THE MERRY WIDOW and stand it on its head and turn it into something really quite vicious. Armed with that belief, the very first song that Fred and I wrote for the show is 'You, You, You' - it is a very seductive waltz and it was a kind of style-setter for the piece musically as a kind of operetta in its style; filled with waltzes and sort of beguiling love songs, if you will. Once I hit on that idea, then that song almost wrote itself. It was the idea of us doing our own MERRY WIDOW waltz. So, the 'You, You, You' theme was the first thing that we wrote and then we went back to the beginning and wrote 'Out Of The Darkness'."

"Love And Love Alone"
"The whole thing that attracted us to the piece was to take Durrenmatt's story - which is quite political and quite nasty in its comments on Swiss society - and to open up the relationship between the two main people, which, when you think of it, is about as intense a love/hate experience as you can possibly find. That was what drew us to the material itself and is also what led us to write the song Claire sings toward the end called 'Love And Love Alone' - all these disastrous things that happen and this rage and need for vengeance is about love. It's one of Fred's best lyrics, I think. In the song, it's about the fact that almost everything that you can think of - all the things you are so sure of - are really caused by love in one form or another. Only towards the end of Claire's life does she realize that. Love and revenge - I guess the point is that they are really very connected."

"I Must Have Been Something"
"There was a song for Anton when he is going back in the past and trying to figure out what is happening to him - this is shortly after they have met and had the conversation in the woods - and he is not quite sure what has hit him. At that point, we had a very short song, and, then, I developed it into something that was an idea that Fred and I had talked about but he hadn't really lived to finish in which Anton starts to imagine himself years ago - and, he really holds the belief that he was quite dashing. It's called 'I Must Have Been Something' - the song that he now does with his young self onstage. He's remembering - or sort of remembering - who he was and how irresistible he must have been."

"Yellow Shoes"
"I'm trying to remember how yellow became our synonym for money - I guess it's just gold. Yellow shoes itself is kind of a stand-in or symbol for money and greed, and, pretty soon, everybody in the company has got them on. That was a lot of fun to write - that was really fun. And, also, that's a lyric of Fred's that just totally takes my breath away. There's a couplet in there that still makes me smile every time I hear it, which is: 'People who call themselves the elite / Are people who take good care of their feet'. That's really Fred - through and through."
"You Know Me"
"Things that get cut are usually cut by the authors - and usually for good reason. There was a song for the original version of THE VISIT called 'You Know Me' - it was a duet between the Mayor's wife and Anton's wife in which they are gossiping about this strange, rich, glamorous woman who has come to the city and they are really bitching her; it actually gets quite vulgar at certain points. And, both of them are claiming that they are not gossips - sort of 'You know me, I'm not a gossip; I don't spread things like that around,' and, then, they proceed to really tear Claire apart. It's a very, very funny lyric and Fred and I both loved it, but, even very early on, it seemed like a piece from a different show - and that happens a lot; you have to always have your ears open and be kind of ruthless with yourself. So, 'You Know Me' was a duet that would have been fine for a musical that was in a different style, but we found that every time we got to that point we bumped our noses because the two characters singing it stopped being the two characters that we had written and became sort of vaudevillians. Still, it was a funny, funny song. I have said this often - Fred and I wrote very fast and we tore up just as fast because I think our primary mode of working was to make a piece of theatre that was true. So, it wasn't so hard to cut when we considered that."

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