ABSTRACT
John Kander and Fred Ebb's first joint Broadway effort debuted in 1965, featuring a young Liza Minnelli. Kander and Ebb allowed themselves to be caught up in Prince's enthusiasm. Kander and Ebb's working method is different from most other songwriters; as Kander told an interviewer, "We work in the same room at the same time". Kander added that they had written one of Cabaret's songs over the telephone, "but it was like being in the same room". Part of the frequent rewriting in the story stemmed from Prince's uncertainty about how explicit the parallels should be between the past and the present. Post-Cabaret expectations were high for Kander and Ebb, so their next show came as a disappointment. It was not that The Happy Time was a bad show. Chicago, in 1920, was famed for other things as well. It was a major hub on the vaudeville circuit, the itinerant entertainment that still thrived in the United States.
