queerplaces - John Kander

Husband Albert Stephenson

Queer Places:
4335 McGee St, Kansas City, MO 64111
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
28 W 70th St, New York, NY 10023
22 W Crooked Hill Rd, Pearl River, NY 10965

John Harold Kander (born March 18, 1927) is an American composer, known largely for his work in the musical theater. As part of the songwriting team Kander and Ebb (with lyricist Fred Ebb), Kander wrote the scores for 15 musicals, including Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), both of which were later adapted into acclaimed films. He and Ebb also wrote the standard "New York, New York" (also known as "Theme from New York, New York"). In 2010, Kander married dancer and choreographer Albert Stephenson, his partner since 1977, in Toronto. They met while Stephenson was a dancer in the Kander and Ebb's show The Act. Since the late 1970s the couple has lived in a modest brownstone on the Upper West Side. They also share a house in upstate New York.

Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb are the musical poets of the polymorphous perverse. The stage (and, in two cases, subsequent film) versions of their commercially successful and critically lauded Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman glorify the creativity inherent in sexual ambivalence and celebrate the social renewal fostered by unorthodox forms of political action. Surprisingly for many gay fans, however, neither man is willing publicly to discuss his own homosexuality. "I thought they made a spectacle of themselves, frankly," Ebb complained to interviewer Randy Shulman following the nationally broadcast kiss shared by song writing team and lifelong partners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman while accepting a 2003 Tony Award for Hairspray. "Your bedroom is not the screen. And it is also not the stage." Instead, Ebb asserts, any statement that he and Kander wish to make about homosexuality has been made through their songs.

Kander was born March 18, 1927, into a music-loving family in Kansas City, Missouri. After studying music composition at Oberlin College and Columbia University, he settled in New York City, where he worked as an arranger, accompanist, and conductor. Ebb, a native New Yorker, wrote for nightclub acts, revues, and television (That Was the Week That Was), before being introduced to Kander. In 1965 Kander and Ebb joined forces with emerging theater powerhouse Harold Prince and legendary director George Abbott on Flora, The Red Menace, which both established their professional reputation as a song writing team and made a star out of their close friend, nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli. A string of huge successes, some near misses, and the occasional flop followed: Cabaret (1966), The Happy Time (1968), Zorba (1968), 70, Girls, 70 (1971), Chicago (1975), The Act (1977), Woman of the Year (1981), The Rink (1984), And the World Goes 'Round (1991), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), Steel Pier (1997), and The Visit (2001). They contributed as well to the film scores of Herb Ross's Funny Lady (1975) and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977). In 2003, Kander (who has lived for 26 years with one man, Albert Stephenson, a choreographer and teacher) implicitly addressed rumors concerning the nature of his non-professional relations with Ebb by describing the latter to interviewer Jeffrey Tallmer as "his 40-year partner in creativity but never in domesticity, much less romance." Ebb succumbed to a heart attack at his home in New York on September 11, 2004.

My published books:

BACK TO HOME PAGE

John Kander - Wikipedia