Fred Ebb

American musical-theater lyricist

• Born: April 8, 1933
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 11, 2004
• Place of death: New York, New York

Ebb collaborated with composer John Kander to write some of the most controversial and memorable musical-theater pieces of the twentieth century, including Cabaret and Chicago. Ebb’s lyrics are some of the most sardonic, wittiest, sharpest, and creative phrases in the Broadway canon, instrumental in developing character as well as moving the plot forward.

The Life

Born of Jewish parents, Fred Ebb grew up in a house without music. He worked in his family’s dry-goods business until he graduated as valedictorian from high school. Although his mother hoped he would pursue a more stable path, Ebb had fallen in love with theater after seeing an Al Jolson show and decided to become a writer. He worked in a variety of odd jobs while in school but managed to earn his bachelor of arts from New York University and a master’s degree from Columbia University in English literature. He lived in New York City, decorating his apartment with Expressionist and other avant-garde artwork. Shortly before his death, Ebb was awarded two honorary doctorate of fine arts degrees, from Boston University and St. John’s University. Ebb never married. His work monopolized his life until he died of a heart attack in September, 2004. The lights on Broadway were dimmed in his honor.

The Music

Ebb began work as a songwriter with Paul Klein and Phil Springer (whom he credits as his mentor) in the 1950’s. Although he enjoyed modest success with a few hits recorded by Judy Garland and Eartha Kitt, it was not until his music producer and friend Tommy Valando introduced him to composer and pianist John Kander that his legacy as one of the great Broadway lyricists became a certainty. Once they met, Kander and Ebb began writing together almost immediately. Their early work impressed director-producer Harold Prince enough to hire them to write the songs for his Broadway musical Flora, the Red Menace. The show closed after only eighty-seven performances but netted the star, Liza Minnelli, a Tony Award and catapulted Kander, Ebb, and Prince to national theatrical prominence. Prince immediately hired them to begin work on his next major project, Cabaret.

Cabaret. Adapted from a 1951 play by John van Druten, I Am a Camera, which was based on short stories from the 1930’s by Christopher Isherwood, Cabaret tells the story of an English nightclub singer, Sally Bowles, living in pre-Nazi Germany, who falls in love with an American writer, becomes pregnant, and has an abortion. Book writer Joe Masteroff revised the play to focus on the anti-Semitic sentiments of the time and added the devilishly delicious emcee. Bowles’s love story is developed before the backdrop of the Kit Kat Club and political turmoil, which is explored through the characters of the German landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and her Jewish boyfriend, Herr Schultz. When Cabaret opened on Broadway in 1966, it became a huge success, enjoying a run of 1,166 performances and winning the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical and eight Tony Awards, including Best Composer and Lyricist and Best Musical. Cabaret helped establish the new form of “concept musical,” one that has a nonrealistic, episodic plotline with a mixture of scenes and songs. Jay Presson Allen’s book for the 1972 film adaptation made a few changes, and the film won eight Academy Awards. A Broadway revival ran for six years.

Chicago. Kander and Ebb’s next big hit, Chicago, enjoyed 923 performances. The plot revolves around a starstruck murderess, Roxie Hart, who kills her lover to get publicity, and a slimy attorney who manipulates the public’s heartstrings to get her acquitted. The musical is based on a play by Maurine Watkins, Chicago (1926), which was inspired by an event she covered as a reporter. Bob Fosse adapted the play, calling it Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville. True to its name, the musical features scenes and songs announced as in a vaudeville show, and it contains rhythm numbers, a ventriloquist, strippers, a female impersonator, musical soliloquies, soft-shoe dance numbers, and comic duets. Beneath the glitz, however, is a serious satire on the way media attention makes celebrities of criminals. Ebb cowrote the book with Fosse. When it was revived in 1996, Chicago received an even greater reception and became one of the longest-running revivals in Broadway history. The film version in 2002 was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, winning six, including Best Picture.

Later Work. In 1993 Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on Manuel Puig’s novel about two criminals in a Latin American prison, had 907 performances and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Of the Kander and Ebb shows that followed, many received high critical praise, especially Steel Pier (1997), which was nominated for eleven Tony Awards, winning for Best Original Score, even though it closed after only two months. Curtains (2006), nominated for eight Tonys, was in development when Ebb died. Kander worked with others to finish it and made plans to complete three other unfinished Ebb works: The Visit, All About Us, and The Minstrel Show.

Unlike many musical collaborators, Kander and Ebb worked together in the same room. They always wrote the opening number first to give them a sense of style for the show. Besides collaborating on Broadway musicals, they wrote songs for television and film. “New York, New York,” from New York, New York (1977), became New York’s official anthem. Although Ebb and Kander sometimes worked independently, nothing equaled the success they had together in their musical-theater efforts.

Musical Legacy

Ebb was the recipient of four Tony Awards (twelve nominations), one Grammy Award, and four Emmy Awards as well as the prestigious Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award, Dramatists Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Laurence Olivier Award. With Kander, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the New York Theater Hall of Fame and won numerous other special awards.

Ebb gave Broadway some of the greatest lyrics ever written, and through his forty-two-year collaboration with Kander, he helped develop a new style of musical theater that raised the standards for excellence in the genre. Their impact on musical-theater writers and performers of today and tomorrow is immeasurable.

Principal Works

musical theater (lyrics; music by John Kander): Flora, the Red Menace, 1965 (libretto by George Abbott and Robert Russell; based on Lester Atwell’s novel Love Is Just Around the Corner); Cabaret, 1966 (libretto by Joe Masteroff; based on John van Druten’s play I Am a Camera); The Happy Time, 1968 (libretto by N. Richard Nash); Zorba, 1968 (libretto by Joseph Stein; based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek); Seventy, Girls, Seventy, 1971 (libretto by David Thompson and Norman L. Martin; based on Peter Coke’s play Breath of Spring); Chicago, 1975 (libretto by Ebb and Bob Fosse; based on Maurine Dallas Watkins’s play); The Act, 1978 (libretto by George Furth); Woman of the Year, 1981 (libretto by Peter Stone); The Rink, 1984 (libretto by Terrence McNally); And the World Goes ’Round, 1991 (libretto by Thompson); Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993 (libretto by McNally); Steel Pier, 1997 (libretto by Thompson); All About Us, 1999 (libretto by Stein; based on Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth); The Visit, 2001 (libretto by McNally; based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play); Curtains, 2006 (libretto by Rupert Holmes).

songs (lyrics): “Heartbroken,” 1953 (music by Phil Springer); “I Never Loved Him Anyhow,” 1956 (music by Springer); “My Coloring Book,” 1962 (music by John Kander); “Say Liza (Liza with a ’Z’),” 1972 (music by Kander); “New York, New York,” 1977 (music by Kander).

Bibliography

Kander, John, Greg Lawrence, and Fred Ebb. Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz. New York: Faber & Faber, 2004. Firsthand accounts by Kander and Ebb about their lives, collaboration, and musical-theater experiences.

Kasha, Al, and Joel Hirschhorn. Notes on Broadway: Conversations with the Great Songwriters. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1985. Contains a chapter for each major Broadway songwriter, including Ebb.

Lewis, David H. Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Overview of the important musicals that shaped the development of the genre, including a solid section on the work of Kander and Ebb.

Mordden, Ethan. The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-five Years of the Broadway Musical. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Evolution of the Broadway musical from 1979 to 2004.

Suskin, Steven. More Opening Nights on Broadway: A Critical Quotebook of the Musical Theatre 1965 Through 1981. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. A valuable collection of opening-night reviews for Broadway musicals from 1965 to 1981 that encompasses Kander and Ebb’s Broadway offerings from Flora, the Red Menace to Woman of the Year.