Word: kander
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CABARET Remember when Joel Grey was considered seedy? Alan Cumming gave Grey's Wilkommen a sinister new twist as the androgynous emcee; Natasha Richardson embodied a defiantly deglamorized Sally Bowles; and British director Sam Mendes made the terrific Kander and Ebb musical even more terrific...
Sally herself, played by Natasha Richardson, is older, more wasted, less the perky-quirky charmer played by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie. Richardson (The Handmaid's Tale onscreen; Anna Christie onstage; Vanessa Redgrave's daughter in real life) doesn't belt out the Kander and Ebb numbers a la Liza; she acts them. The climactic title song, most startlingly, is no longer a triumphant anthem. Richardson clutches the microphone and grits through the lyrics ("Start by admitting/ From cradle to tomb/ Isn't that long a stay"), shouting her defiance even as she struggles to keep from flying apart...
...Tony Award nominations. And far from showcasing a new generation of downtown talents, like Rent's Jonathan Larson or Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk's Savion Glover, this season could pass for a Friars Club reunion of old Broadway tunesmiths, with Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity), John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret), Maury Yeston (Nine) and Leslie Bricusse (Stop the World--I Want to Get Off) all back on the boards...
Steel Pier, by contrast, has been carried to Broadway by far more favorable winds. It has a score by Kander and Ebb--once again toasts of the town, thanks to the hit revival of their 1975 show, Chicago--and a premise that seems made to order for the team and for talented choreographer Susan Stroman: a 1930s dance marathon in Atlantic City. The show is cannily mounted, bouncy and often tuneful, professional all the way. Yet it's still a disappointment...
...original director and choreographer Bob Fosse (her live-in companion for several years), and one look at that distinctive Fosse style--bodies that slither and strut, every hunched shoulder or cocked head a seductive come-on--is a reminder of a whole lost vocabulary of Broadway dance. John Kander and Fred Ebb's score is a model of its craft. No detachable love ballads here, just a stream of tuneful, witty numbers that make their point, engage the ear and evoke an era without sounding like mere pastiche...