John Kander

John Harold Kander, born on March 18, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri, is an American composer whose work in musical theater spans more than six decades. The second son of Harold and Bernice Kander, he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family where singing around the piano was a household tradition, and he has credited that environment with sparking his interest in music at the age of four. His first composition, a Christmas carol, was written during a second-grade mathematics class; his teacher sought permission from his parents before having the school choir perform it at a holiday assembly. At nine, Kander attended his first opera performances when the San Carlo Opera visited Kansas City with productions of Aida and Madama Butterfly, experiences he has described as foundational to his understanding of how music can serve storytelling.

Kander attended Westport High School before transferring to the Pembroke Country-Day School. During World War II, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, completing training in California and sailing between San Francisco and Asia before leaving the Corps on May 3, 1946. Rule changes governing national service then required him to enlist in the Army Reserves in September of that year, after he had completed one semester at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. During the Korean War he was ordered back into active duty, but a medical examination revealing scars on his lungs kept him in New York City for six months of observation. He received his official discharge on July 3, 1957. Kander earned a degree in music from Oberlin College in 1951 and went on to graduate studies at Columbia University, where he worked under Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson and Otto Luening, completing his master's degree in 1953.

Following his graduate work, Kander conducted at summer theaters and then served as a rehearsal pianist for Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story in New York. Robbins encouraged him to compose dance music, and Kander subsequently wrote dance arrangements for Gypsy in 1959 and Irma la Douce in 1960. His first produced musical, A Family Affair, opened in 1962 with lyrics by William Goldman. That same year, through their mutual publisher Tommy Valando, Kander met lyricist Fred Ebb. Their first collaboration, "My Coloring Book," gained popularity through a recording by Sandy Stewart, and their second, "I Don't Care Much," was made famous by Barbra Streisand, cementing their partnership.

In 1965, Kander and Ebb brought their first Broadway show to the stage: Flora the Red Menace, produced by Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, with a book by Abbott and Robert Russell, and notable as the production in which Liza Minnelli made her Broadway debut. The following year, Cabaret opened on Broadway, a musical adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories. Chicago followed in 1975, and both productions were later adapted into films; the film version of Chicago won multiple Academy Awards at the 2002 ceremony, including Best Picture, Film Editing, Costume Design, Art Direction, and Sound. Kander and Ebb also wrote the title song for director Martin Scorsese's 1977 film New York, New York, at the request of Scorsese and co-star Robert De Niro, and the song became a widely recognized standard.

Throughout their partnership, Kander and Ebb wrote extensively for Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, contributing to musicals including Zorba, The Rink, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, as well as producing special material for their live and television appearances, among them Liza with a Z. Kander's Broadway credits as composer also include The Happy Time, 70, Girls, 70, The Act, and Woman of the Year, the last of which brought him a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1981. Kiss of the Spider Woman earned him a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1993, and he received a Tony Award for Best Composer and Lyricist in 1967. The songwriting team accumulated eleven Tony Award nominations in total, along with two Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe nominations, and Kander later received a Tony Lifetime Achievement Award.

After Ebb's death in 2004, Kander continued composing with new collaborators. The Landing, with book and lyrics by Greg Pierce, premiered off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre on October 23, 2013, directed by Walter Bobbie and starring David Hyde Pierce and Julia Murney. Kid Victory, also with book and lyrics by Pierce, had its world premiere at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, on February 28, 2015, before opening off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre on February 22, 2017, directed by Liesl Tommy with choreography by Christopher Windom and a cast featuring Jeffry Denman and Karen Ziemba. The Beast in the Jungle, a dance play with lyrics by David Thompson, opened off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 2018, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman and featuring Tony Yazbeck and Irina Dvorovenko. Kander also collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on "Cheering for Me Now," a track about New York's ratification of the constitution, released as part of Miranda's Hamildrops series.

In his personal life, Kander married dancer and choreographer Albert Stephenson in Toronto in 2010; the two had been partners since 1977. His grand-nephew Jason Kander served as Missouri Secretary of State.