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... .
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'."
Videos