John Kander interview: ‘We seduce people into being happy then let reality step on their necks’

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1927, John Kander is one of the last of the great American songwriters. In partnership with Fred Ebb, he composed some of the bravest and best musicals of the twentieth century, including ‘Cabaret’, ‘Chicago’ and ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’.

Ebb passed away in 2004, leaving Kander to finish their last project solo: ‘The Scottsboro Boys’; a musical as bold, exhilarating and uncomfortable as anything the pair ever wrote.

It appropriates the form of the minstrel show – a contentious type of nineteenth-century American entertainment – to tell the true story of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in 1931. Despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence, public outcry and two retrials, a succession of white juries found them guilty.

‘The Scottsboro Boys’ had its UK premiere at the Young Vic last year, just as Alabama’s parole board finally granted their real-life counterparts a posthumous pardon. It transfers to the West End this month.

Growing up, were you aware of the Scottsboro Boys case?
‘I was born in 1927, so in ’31 I wasn’t aware. But by the time I was reading I would see the Scottsboro Boys in the newspapers all the time. 
I became aware of the outlines of the case. But it seemed as time went on that gradually you saw their names less and less.’

Why did you and Fred Ebb decide to write a musical about the case?
‘We’d spent a lot of time writing about the ’30s, and it was an era that attracted us still and we felt we hadn’t totally finished with it yet. We started thinking of court cases and The Scottsboro Boys came into our consciousness very quickly. But it was spread over such a period of years that it was hard to make a dramatic whole out of until we hit on the idea of a minstrel show. That was our saviour.’

So why base your musical on these old minstrel shows?
‘The format of a minstrel show is that white men in blackface sit in a circle and a white interlocutor says something like, “Mr Tambo, get up and sing a song,” or, “Mr Bones, have you got any stories today?” They were incredibly popular and also extraordinarily racist, written by white men to be performed by white men in black makeup for an audience of white people. But all of the storytelling elements we needed were provided. So it became intriguing in terms of letting us tell a complicated, episodic story, but also in taking the minstrel show and turning its intentions on their head.’

Your cast is black but did you wonder about your right as a pair of white guys to tell this story?
‘We had thoughts like that. I don’t know how to justify that except: “We work in the theatre.”’

Is it a political work?
‘To a certain extent I was able to bring these guys’ names back into the world. But if that seems a little too ennobling, we were only writing what we thought was good theatre.’

Like ‘Cabaret’, ‘The Scottsboro Boys’ is both horrifying and enjoyable – is that your aim?
‘Yes, absolutely. In “Cabaret” we had a couple of moments where we very consciously seduced people into being happy and laughing at something, and then we’d have reality step on their necks. You hope to entertain people and make them uncomfortable at the same time.’

Did the two of you ever think: Maybe our musicals are too dark to find an audience?
‘We don’t. I’m not smart enough to know what is commercial and what isn’t.’

But you never wrote any boy-meets-girl-happily-ever-after shows.
[Laughs] ‘As far as I’m concerned writing boy-meets-girl-happily-ever-after is really hard to do!’

‘The Scottsboro Boys’ is at the Garrick Theatre until Feb 15 2015