John Kander Talks about The Scottsboro Boys

Monday January 19th marks Martin Luther King Day 2015.

There is a moment towards the end of The Scottsboro Boys musical when a black woman is told to move to the the back of a segregated bus and she refuses. That woman was Rosa Parks and her subsequent arrest led to a boycott of the buses in her city of Montgomery, Alabama. King's role in the bus boycott was to transform him into a national figure and become the best-known spokesman of America's growing civil rights movement.

John Kander, together with the late Fred Ebb, in creating the legendary partnership of Kander and Ebb had already composed some of the greatest shows of the 20th century, including Cabaret and Chicago before going on to write The Scottsboro Boys.

To coincide with Martin Luther King Day, I interviewed John Kander about the show, and in a conversation that ranged from the injustices of prejudice around the world, through to the development of a musical with Fred Ebb and Susan Stroman, the conversation was fascinating. Read on....

John Kander

JB: What made you want to write a musical about the story of The Scottsboro Boys? 

JK: The first thing that happened really was that Stro (Susan Stroman – the show’s director and choreographer) and Fred (Ebb) and Tommy (David Thompson, who wrote the show’s book) and I loved working together. That's really the first thing. 

We were looking for a subject and we had spent some time dealing with the '30s as a period which to explore and as I recall, we thought let's keep looking there and see what's interesting to us.

I can't be very accurate about how the subject came to us. Certainly we were looking at cases and trials among a lot of other things as a possible subject. 

Once we stumbled onto Scottsboro, we were immediately intrigued by it, in great part because nobody with the exception of me probably, remembered it at all and I remembered it because I'm so bloody old. (Kander is 87)

I remembered that when I was just learning to read I would see on the newspaper, pretty much daily in those early reading days, something about The Scottsboro Boys. I didn't know what that was or who they were, but they were always mentioned, they were always called that title. As I began to be able to read and understand more, it seemed to me that they were always spoken of as a group. Then they disappeared altogether.

When we stumbled on this topic we were immediately, in the first place just as humans, intrigued by this story and horrified by it.

I think the thing particularly, looking back on it, was to think that these guys actually disappeared. There were nine lives that were just erased, if you will.Then we began to try and figure out how we might tell the story. 

My feeling, and I think my co-workers will agree, is that when we stumbled on the idea of the minstrel show it suddenly solved any number of problems. First of all the minstrel show, which was the most popular form of entertainment in the country for I think well over 100 years and even had its reflection in England too, with The Black and White Minstrel Show

JB: Yes. That show was broadcast on the BBC until 1978 and achieved very high ratings.  

JK: And the minstrel genre was terribly, terribly popular in the USA too. Nobody thought anything about it. That's what's amazing. I don't think any of us really thought about the real implications of it. Not only was it made up of white people in black face (black make up), but if you had black performers, they also had to wear black face too.

Aside from the racist conversations that come with the minstrel show, its structural form was such that there is a semi-circle of entertainers and in the middle is sat a white man, the Interlocutor, who we looked on as a kind of benign “plantation owner” type.

The Interlocutor calls on people to tell stories or tell jokes or do a dance or carry out some long sort of narrative and as you may recall having seen the show, every once in a while the Interlocutor will say, "Mr. Bones, tell us a joke." Or "You boys sing that song about home that I love so much." So that flexibility meant that we could jump around in the story and weren’t too bound by narrative. In my opinion, once we stumbled on the minstrel show, that was the key to The Scottsboro Boys musical. 

One of the other things about the minstrel show, which none of us really considered as we were growing up, was that it was a show populated by white men pretending to be black and playing for a white audience. They also sang songs written by white men as if they were black men longing for the days of the old plantation.

Some of the most popular songs that ever happened in our country, the Stephen Foster songs like Old  Black Joe or Swanee River, they all are very lyrical, nostalgic songs about “how I wish I was back on the old plantation with good ole Massa”. 

It's interesting, and I think this is so true in a lot more areas, that you can get used to that prejudice and you no longer think about what these things really mean. They just become kind of entertaining cliches.

JB: The prejudice becomes normalized and conditioned…

JK: Right, they did this in vaudeville for years and if you leave the black situation by itself, the stingy Jew, the drunk Irishman, those stereotypes are very entertaining to a certain extent and people made their careers out of exploiting them and being funny with them, but then in some areas they become lethal.

When you look at the cartoons in the early days of Nazi Germany, the big-nosed, conniving Jew who is out to eat children and hoard all the money. Those things go from entertainment into real powerful propaganda.

It happens without us even realizing it.

JB: I want to talk more about the Interlocutor and what Julian Glover does with that role in London.

JK: Yes, he's wonderful.

Colman Domingo (Mr Bones), Julian Glover, Forrest McClendon (Mr Tambo)

JB: It strikes me as such a complicated role. The Interlocutor’s racism is ingrained, it's what he's grown up with. His is such a complicated character and I think Julian gives it an amazing degree of depth.

JK: I quite agree. I think he's spot on with it and the thing is about the Interlocutor, is that he's a racist sort of by definition but he really, truly believes that black people are just not as smart as white people and it's up to the white folks to take care of them. He believes that that's what he does. He believes that they have a place in the world, but they are not equal to white folk, in a kind of paternalistic way.

It's the romanticized idea of “good ole Massa” on the plantation, but he is not a Klu Klux Klansman.  somebody who would go out and shoot people or lynch them.

Julian Glover is perfect and he found just the right tone, so that at the end when the people that he's working with wipe off their blackface makeup and don't want to do the cakewalk anymore, he's upset that he's shocked and uncomprehending. 

JB: My next question is about the role of The Woman in The Scottsboro Boys. When I first saw the show, the woman was an enigma to me throughout, until the Rosa Park connection is made at the end. Seeing the show again and watching her onstage throughout, one can really observe that she symbolizes what The Scottsboro Boys did to the civil rights cause in the United States. 

Whose idea was it, as you were creating the show, to have the woman onstage throughout?

JK: I can be very specific about that. Tommy and Stro and I were having lunch at Stro's house, which is something we like to do anyway and we were sitting around the table and in my memory it was Stro who brought up the idea of having an observer and originally that observer was a little girl.

Then we did variations on that and we talked about maybe having a little girl who then gets older and older as time goes on and is a woman at the end of it. And then we learned that Rosa Parks was in fact involved with the Scottsboro Boys. That little moment in the last third of the show, where somebody brings them a cake, that was her, that really happened.

So we immediately I think sort of grabbed onto the idea that yes she is Rosa Parks but she is also more than that, in other words she is a real person, but she is a symbolic person as well.

I can even remember the sandwiches we ate as we planned that part of the show. We got our choice of tuna fish sandwiches or peanut butter and jelly, which I love. It was a very nice afternoon.

JB: On a more general level about your career, what was it that drew you and Fred to such interesting, difficult chapters of history to write shows about?

JK: I think your first adjective was the answer. What drew us to such “interesting” stories. The pieces that we've written which seem to be dealing with unlikely musical subjects, which are actually what make you want to write. 

I can't be I think more specific than that, but you know what's really hard to write? Boy meets girl, then they have an argument and they separate and then they come back together again. That's really hard, but if you're writing material about the beginnings of Nazism or the lack of justice in fascist South American prisons or racial problems, or killing people, murder in Chicago, those stories, those are rich pieces of material.

It's much easier to write that. you become so engaged emotionally that your passion for writing the piece can maintain itself right straight up to opening night.

JB: John Kander, thank you very much for your time today.

JK: It has been my pleasure.

The Scottsboro Boys continues at the Garrick Theatre until 21st February 2015.

Other reading:

My interview with Catherine Schreiber, producer and James T Lane, cast member of the Garrick production.

My 2014 review of the Garrick production

My 2013 review of the Young Vic production

The Scottsboro Boys - Review

Garrick Theatre,  London

*****

Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

Book by David Thompson

Directed and choreography by Susan Stroman

MY FEATURE ARTICLE: BACKSTAGE WITH THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS

l-r  Colman Domingo, Julian Glover and Forrest McClendon

A year after it wowed the critics in its London debut at the Young Vic, (see my 2013 review below) The Scottsboro Boys returns to cross the Thames. With many of the 2013 cast reprising their roles at the Garrick, the show's West End opening offers a rare privilege to re-review this 5-star treat, last year's Critics' Circle choice as Best Musical.

The Scottsboro Boys is written around a true 1930's travesty of justice that defined the hateful ugliness of America's Deep South. Eight black men and a boy, all of African American heritage, were falsely accused of raping two white women as their train stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama. Their subsequent conviction and death sentences polarised the USA. As the South was still licking its wounds barely 70 years after the Civil War, the North mounted a defence campaign that was to see 8 of the nine boys paroled. Parole, by its very nature, demands an admission of guilt and amidst a bevy of standout performances, it is Brandon Victor Dixon's Haywood Patterson, a man whose conscience couldn't permit him to utter a lie and who, defiantly, was to spend his life wrongly incarcerated, upon whom the story's spotlight falls.

Dixon is a long-established Broadway talent and having spent the last year listening to his voice on my iPhone in the NY cast recording, it is a privilege to witness him live. Patterson's journey carries the show and he bears his principled stand with passion, poignancy and perfect performance. The brilliant jazz-hands irony of his softly sung Nothing as he pleads his innocence, echoes the sardonic lyric of Kander and Ebb's Mr Cellophane from Chicago. The observations are as sharp, but this time there's no comedy.

The company are excellent throughout, with fellow Broadway imports Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon defining the harshest of satires as minstrel jesters Messrs Bones and Tambo, their gags making a pastiche of Vaudevilke. Deliberately corny, the clown-like versatility of these men and Domingo's comedy-horror rictus grin seal the brilliance of the genre.

The jarring perversity of Kander & Ebb telling this history story via a minstrel show, only serves to underline the perversion of justice to which Alabama subjugated itself as its rednecks bayed for the Boys' blood. The minstrel show's Interlocutor, 79yo veteran Brit Julian Glover, gives a performance that subtly combines majesty with a brilliantly understated bumbling ineptness. A man who believes passionately in what he perceives to be justice, yet who has also learned his racist views from childhood, carrying a sincerely held belief that black people are worth less than white. Glover's is an acting masterclass.

Elsewhere, excellence drips from this show. Broadway talent James T Lane, resplendent in frock and hat as Ruby Bates, one of the perjurious white women, dances across the stage with a movement that has to be believed. Susan Stroman, who has remained with the show since it's emergence off-Broadway back in 2010 has envisioned the ghastly tale magnificently, never bettered than in the slickly-sickly tap routine Electric Chair. A mention too for the brilliantly delivered tour of Fred Ebb's take on the South's music, played under Phil Cornwell's baton.

First time around, this review failed to pay sufficient respect to the character of The Woman, played by Dawn Hope, onstage almost throughout and saying nothing until the final scene. Consider (or google) Rosa Parks in history and it becomes abundantly clear how much of a cornerstone in the USA's Civil Rights movement The Scottsboro Boys became.

The Scottsboro Boys is unmatched on any London stage. As both a history lesson as well as a display of world-class stagecraft it stands apart. More than unmissable, if you care for humanity and appreciate some of the finest song and dance around, this show has to be seen.

Runs at until Saturday 21st February 2015


Later this month I shall be touring Scottsboro, Alabama and visiting The Scottsboro Boys Museum.

Follow me on Twitter @MrJonathanBaz for my upcoming writing about this visit.

MY REVIEW OF THE 2013 YOUNG VIC PRODUCTION

Backstage with The Scottsboro Boys - Feature

The Young Vic Company

As the West End welcomes The Scottsboro Boys, I ventured backstage at London’s Garrick Theatre during final rehearsals to catch up with its inspirationally committed producer Catherine Schreiber, along with one of the production’s talented US imports actor James T Lane. I wanted to learn a little more about this remarkable minstrel show, that took the Young Vic by storm last December and went on to win the (UK’s most respected) Critics’ Circle award for Best Musical 2013. 

The Scottsboro Boys was to be the final collaboration of one of the greatest songwriting partnerships, that of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Kander and Ebb were masters of that rare art of studying man’s inhumanity to man and then being able to set the wickedness to toe-tapping tunes. Who else could have written Cabaret, a show about the rise of Nazism and the impending Holocaust, that was to give Liza Minelli such a career-defining belter of a title song. 

The start of the Scottsboro Boys’ true story may pre-date Hitler’s accession to the German Chancellorship by two years and by half a world, but history has taught us that evil respects no borders. With the Great Depression gripping the nation after the stock-market crash of 1929, people hopped freight trains to travel from one city to the next in search of work when a fight between blacks and whites broke out on a train in Jackson County on March 25, 1931. The train was brought to a halt at Scottsboro and trying to avoid arrest, two women on the train falsely accused nine black youths of raping them. It was an inflammatory allegation in the Jim-Crow South, where many whites were attempting to preserve supremacy just 66 years after the end of the Civil War and it did not take too much legal process for the accusations to be “proved” and for all nine to be sentenced to Alabama’s electric chair.

The Scottsboro Boys' plight gripped the nation, galvanising liberals in the North as their champions and proving a significant keystone in the foundations of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Their case lurched precariously through the Alabama justice system and whilst this article will not reveal how the story ends, the whole musical focusses acutely upon the key tenet on which justice and decent society depend. That of individuals telling the truth. 

l-r David Thompson, Susan Stroman, Catherine Schreiber, John Kander
photo credit Paul Kolnick

Together with London's Young Vic and fellow New Yorker Paula Marie Black, Schreiber is Lead Producing the Garrick show, but the passion for both telling this tale and championing its cause is clearly in Schreiber's DNA. Following The Scottsboro Boys' off-Broadway premier at New York’s Vineyard Theatre (a production that gave rise to the only currently available Cast Recording, though Schreiber hints, intriguingly, at a London recording possibly being released) she worked hard to bring the show to Broadway, where it only was to last a disappointingly short run. Away from the stage and at home, her lawyer husband shares her passion for racial equality. He served his training clerkship with Thurgood Marshall, the man who was to become the first USA Supreme Court justice of African American heritage

Today, Scottsboro's The Scottsboro Boys Museum is curated by Shelia Washington and Schreiber’s eyes welled up (and to be honest, so did mine) as she spoke of having worked alongside this formidable woman, as the Broadway show (and beyond) evolved. Washington has laboured tirelessly for the Boys’ guilty verdicts to be revoked by the State of Alabama and her efforts remind us not only of the power of human endeavour (hers) in fighting for a cause, but also of quite how frighteningly recent and contemporary this whole episode has remained. It was not until April 2013 (that’s last year!) that the Scottsboro Boys were all finally exonerated by Alabama at a ceremony where Schreiber, already honoured with the key to Scottsboro, gave the keynote address.

Sat next to Schreiber, and with the assuring air of a performer who knows his material inside out, James T Lane exudes a gorgeously relaxed yet finely balanced poise as we talk. No stranger to the trans-Atlantic showbiz commute, this gifted hoofer not only wowed the crowds at the Young Vic with The Scottsboro Boys’ London debut, he had already spent most of that year at the London Palladium playing Richie in the acclaimed revival of A Chorus Line. His extensive experience, both on Broadway and across the USA belies his youthful 36 years and I for one would have loved to have seen his Tyrone in Fame, as the man’s voice and movement are simply astonishing.

James T Lane

As an African-American, Lane brings his own experiences to the show. Our discussions range across the racial prejudices experienced on both sides of the Atlantic, though whilst Britain is a multi-cultural nation that is still in pursuit of a more harmonious society, this country has only welcomed significant numbers of non-white immigrants since the latter half of the 20th century. America’s Statue of Liberty may well represent the open arms of a melting pot too all, but the African-American legacy that pre-dates the Civil War and stretches back to periods of horrendous slavery, provides a far more complex, painful history. 

My opening paragraph referred to The Scottsboro Boys as a minstrel show, but remember that it was this black-slapped buffoonery that dominated America’s theatres during the 19th century, promoting its insidiously acceptable culture of acceptable racism. Shamefully, it was only as late as 1978 that the BBC were still broadcasting The Black And White Minstrel Show across Britain in a primetime Saturday night slot. That The Scottsboro Boys spectacularly lampoons the minstrel genre, with a beautifully weighted gravitas from British white veteran actor Julian Glover as the show’s Interlocutor (think of a Variety Hall’s Chairman) only adds to the show’s painful poignancy.

Lane also remarks on the joy, of instead of going “up against” his African- American competitors in auditions, often pursuing the same opportunity, how The Scottsboro Boys has provided an opportunity for him to work (brilliantly, I might add) with some of his closest friends in the business. 

But Lane is only one of a number of Americans who have travelled back to the UK with the production. As well as having performed his roles in the Broadway show (and he plays, with remarkable conviction, one of the falsely accusing white women, Ruby Bates) he is joined by other Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo, all three of whom created their roles way back in 2010 at the Vineyard. Dixon’s Hayward Patterson is the show’s lead character whose struggles with the abuse of truth prove to be the show’s emotional fulcrum, whilst McClendon and Domingo play the minstrel-show regulars of Mr Bones and Mr Tambo, adopting all manner of acutely observed satirical characterisations.

The Young Vic Production

Whilst a five-star show has to deliver perfect performances from its actors, it is the creative talent behind the show that inspires the excellence and the pedigree of The Scottsboro Boys' team is faultless. As well as Kander and Ebb’s compositions that are structured around David Thompson’s book, it is Susan Stroman, the wunder-talent of recent years in musical theatre who has remained the director and choreographer of the show from the Vineyard to the Garrick. Hers is a remarkable commitment, for on the simplest of stages (this show has no techno-gimmicks whatsoever) the movement that she extracts from her company has to be seen to be believed.

Only on for 20 weeks The Scottsboro Boys will make you laugh and cry and the West End reviews will be out soon. Until then, these are my thoughts on the Young Vic production. The show truly is unmissable. See it and be humbled and amazed.

Runs at the Garrick Theatre until Saturday 21st February 2015

The Scottsboro Boys

Young Vic Theatre,  London

*****

Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

Book by David Thompson

Directed and choreography by Susan Stroman

Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon look down on Kyle Scatliffe

The legendary Broadway partnership of John Kander and Fred Ebb achieved their final collaboration with The Scottsboro Boys, a glorious treatment of an infamous chapter in the history of the American South. Kander and Ebb don’t do easy. Their view of the world is always through a sharply skewed prism, they strip away facades and revel in exposing the frailties that lie beneath. So it was that around the end of the 20th century, when these two wily writers scanned the history books for inspiration, their gaze settled upon the travesty of an injustice that befell nine innocent black men.

Riding the rails from Georgia in 1931, the train these nine had hopped stopped suddenly in Scottsboro, Alabama following a fight on board (that had not involved them). Two white women then falsely accused the nine of rape and they were summarily arrested, convicted and were to spend many years and endure countless appeals and retrials as death sentences were repeatedly pronounced and adjourned. For a time, the Scottsboro Boys were a cause celebre, polarising the USA across very old divisions. The South wanted them executed whilst the liberal North sought their liberty. That those Boys who were eventually paroled, were only freed after having had to falsely “admit” their guilt, only added to the cruel irony of the shameful saga. One man Haywood Patterson (a tour de force performance from American actor Kyle Scatliffe) could not bring himself to confess to a crime he hadn't committed and some twenty years later, was to die in jail.

Its grim material for a show, but that’s where Kander and Ebb are at their finest. Where their Chicago was scenes from Death Row staged as a series of Vaudeville numbers and Cabaret played out in a sleazy Berlin bar, so The Scottsboro Boys is told through the vehicle of a traditional minstrel show. Nine men play the Boys, whilst two other actors play the traditional minstrel roles of Mr Tambo and Mr Bones. Overseeing the whole on stage performance is the white-man authority figure of the minstrel show’s Interlocutor. 

Ebb died in 2004, some 6 years before Susan Stroman was to bring the show firstly to Broadway and now to London. Stroman extracts theatrical gold from her UK company, who include (amongst other Broadway performers, over on an Equity swap) Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo reprising the extreme satirists Tambo and Bones that they created in New York. In white suit and top hat, veteran brit Julian Glover is the evening’s Interlocutor, presenting a chillingly benign face of the all too acceptable racism that built the South. Drawing on ragtime, blues and spirituals for inspiration, the songs are all pointed. Go Back Home in particular, being a mournfully despairing blues number sung by Patterson and the youngest boy, Eugene. (And made all the more special on the Broadway cast recording by being sung by John Kander himself, solo, as an album extra. Buy it!)

The tale makes much of the importance of truth. The Alabama women lie whilst the Scottsboro Boys who are freed, only obtain liberty through a false confession. The song Make Friends With The Truth is possibly one of Kander and Ebb's best, telling the tale of a fictional black boy Billy, who after being lynched confesses his crimes to St Peter. Whilst Billy's honest confession gains him entry to Heaven, the last laugh is on him as he finds the pearly gates barred and discovers that even the afterlife is segregated, where a black man has to enter via the back door. 

Other memorable numbers are the false accusations made by the Alabama Ladies in the song of that title. Forrest McClendon’s That’s Not The Way We Do Things, sees him play a New York defence lawyer in a goggle eyed performance that suggests the mania of Cabaret’s Emcee, whilst Haywood’s beautifully defiant final number You Can’t Do Me, echoes the soft yet sinister, harsh staccato sound that Kander and Ebb deployed so masterfully in Cabaret’s Finale.

Stroman’s vision eschews fancy sets, relying instead on simple chairs, planks and the outstanding singing, dancing and acting of her troupe. In a year that has seen this show together with The Amen Corner and The Color Purple all staged within the creative powerhouse that is London's SE1 postal district, the capital has witnessed some truly astonishing theatre based around stories of the 20th century African American heritage. The Scottsboro Boys is an ugly story, beautifully told. As with Chicago and Cabaret, it could also, one day, make for a wonderful movie.

The Broadway original cast recording of The Scottsboro Boys is available to download from iTunes.