Creators Revive Their Broadway Baby : Can a 25-year-old failed Broadway musical about a love-struck member of the Communist Party find an audience in Pasadena?

Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb still write as if Broadway were Broadway and not Wall Street.

Years after their big hit shows (“Cabaret,” “Zorba” and “Chicago,” among others) they remain partners, recalling the tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe. They keep stretching stage traditions. In fact, they have two new musicals in the making now, an adaptation of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” to be directed by Harold Prince and “Auditions” for director Tommy Tune.

Plainly, perhaps foolishly or heroically, they work as if it is just like the old days, when a couple of newcomers could suddenly find themselves in the big time--indeed, as Kander and Ebb found themselves 25 years ago, doing their first Broadway musical, “Flora, the Red Menace.”

The show, which introduced the 19-year-old Liza Minnelli and concerned a young woman’s disenchantment with life during the Great Depression of the ‘30s, had a short, 87-performance life span on Broadway in the spring and early summer of 1965. Critics didn’t have too much praise for it, and the story about how the love-struck, unemployed Flora joins the Communist Party to be with her boyfriend didn’t really ignite audiences, although Minnelli did win a Tony for best actress in a musical.

But now Kander and Ebb have a second chance with their first-born. A rare revival of “Flora”--much revised--opens at Pasadena Playhouse on Feb. 11, with previews beginning Friday.

“We loved (“Flora”) the way a father loves his weakest,” Ebb said. “The one who needs more help.”

A libretto is the backbone of any musical, its most crucial component, and when New York’s tiny (65-seat) Vineyard Theatre showed interest in reviving the show last year, the two songwriters found a young playwright, David Thompson, to drastically revise the original Robert Russell-George Abbott script. Thompson reduced the show from a 1965 size (which included singing and dancing choruses) to a compact cast of nine actors, some of whom play multiple roles. He cut and reshaped the story, adding new narrative lines. It’s the script being used in Pasadena.

“Anyone who saw the original wouldn’t recognize it,” Ebb said.

Originally the collaborators had been brought together by music publisher Tommy Valando. Ebb, the lyricist of the two, had but one off-Broadway credit, and Kander was only slightly more experienced, having composed the score for a Broadway show (“A Family Affair”) that had nearly been rescued along the rocky road to New York by a novice substitute director named Harold Prince.

Prince was really a producer. He usually left the directing to George Abbott, the “Mr. Abbott” who, in 1964, still reigned supreme over the musical theater even at age 77--the same “Mr. Abbott” who trained Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse and was supervising Prince’s own directing apprenticeship. At the moment, however, it was Abbott who was directing the latest Prince musical comedy venture, “Flora, the Red Menace,” based on the novel “Love Is Just Around the Corner” by Lester Atwell.

Prince was riding an extraordinary high ever since producing 1954’s “The Pajama Game.” In the 10 subsequent years he (merely) produced “Damn Yankees,” “West Side Story,” “Fiorello,” “She Loves Me,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Prince had developed an admiration and friendship for Kander while working on “A Family Affair,” and Kander now felt that way about his new partner. He and Ebb tested this rapport by writing a couple of popular songs, and, just like that, one of them, “My Coloring Book,” became a hit.

Prince asked Kander and Ebb to work up some songs “on spec” for “Flora.” As Ebb described it, “ ‘Spec’ was sort of an audition. We wrote the songs on the basis of the novel, for the characters that appeared there, without knowing whether they would finally appear in the libretto.”

Abbott was (and still is today at 102) a 6-foot-6 drink of water, frozen. His intimidating force was such that with the solitary exception of Prince, everyone in the world (even, according to legend, his own mother) referred to him as “Mr. Abbott,” and he sat in Prince’s living room glaring. So eager were Kander and Ebb to impress that they threw in the songs from another show they had just written, “Golden Gate,” based on San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake (should anyone be in the market for a musical with contemporary relevance).

Recalling that audition, Ebb could only shake his head and chuckle over such youthful impetuousness. “It was ridiculous. ‘Golden Gate’ had nothing to do with ‘Love Is Just Around the Corner,’ it was set in an entirely different period, but it was all we had. We had to show we could write songs for character, for narrative. And, praise the Lord, he liked us and he hired us.”

One afternoon by chance, Liza Minnelli made an appointment to hear some Kander and Ebb songs. Her visit had nothing to do with the show and, as an inexperienced youngster, “she didn’t particularly interest us,” Ebb recalled, “except to get a record, maybe.”

But after they played everything, Minnelli so enjoyed the material from “Flora” that she begged to audition. The songwriters frankly wanted Barbra Streisand. Unfortunately, Streisand had just found “Funny Girl.”

Despite Kander and Ebb’s lack of enthusiasm, Minnelli insisted on auditioning. “Mr. Abbott didn’t like her at all,” Ebb remembers, and worse, he was given the unenviable task of delivering the news to the 19-year-old, not that she was the only reject. They had also turned down Eydie Gorme “who once stood Mr. Abbott up on a dinner date,” Ebb now recalls with a laugh. But Ebb had begun to grow “entranced with Liza. I still don’t understand exactly for what reason. Of course I do now. She had that youth and naivete and eagerness to please. I just loved her. Always.”

As Abbott lost hope of casting the show’s lead quickly, he went home to Miami Beach, turning his mind to his golf game. It was then that Kander and Ebb convinced Prince to telephone the director on Minnelli’s behalf. “George,” Prince said into the phone, “We’ve been thinking about the Minnelli girl,” and with not a further word, the imperious director simply replied, “Well, OK, if you believe in her, hire her.”

Curiously enough, Ebb and Kander don’t recognize each other’s interpretation of the updated Pasadena script.

To Ebb, the more entertainment-minded of the two, there is more humor in the current version of “Flora” than there had been in the original.

To the more socially conscious Kander, it has become a more serious and political show.

“Mr. Abbott,” he said in an interview, “was rich during the Depression. He had no idea why anyone would do such a thing as join the Communist Party, and so he made the characters into cartoons. Here in Pasadena we’re trying to make it clear how attractive the ideals of the Party would be to anyone who was at all vulnerable.”

Kander and Ebb did see things the same way when it came to musically modernizing their show. They made sure all the songs were relevant and supportive to the story, eliminating numbers that had existed merely as entertainments. The team has reconstructed the opening number, “The Kid Herself,” so that it is integrated with dialogue as it had been during the original Broadway tryout.

They said they have restored transitional material to give dramatic structure to another song, “All I Need Is One Good Break.” They have added a new song, “The Joker,” and, finally, they have blended in bits and pieces from the abundant musical material left over from the original production. (There was plenty of music to choose from since, in the enthusiasm of working on a first Broadway show, they had written 60 songs before winnowing the score to 15, including the notable ballad, “A Quiet Thing.”)

Kander especially appreciates the musical challenges presented by the small production. While the New York revival used just a piano, the Pasadena production will have a five-piece band. “We’re trying to recreate a folk band sound of the period,” Kander says. “Besides a piano we have reeds, a violin and a banjo.” He said the Pasadena orchestrations remind him of such WPA-produced Depression-era musicals such as Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock.”

Like the New York revival, the local “Flora” is being directed by Scott Ellis, an actor/dancer who appeared in Kander and Ebb’s 1984 little-remembered musical, “The Rink.” Ellis had suggested the New York revival and “being that ‘Flora’ was our first break,” Ebb said, “we felt that we should give Scott a break, too.”

When his tiny Off-Broadway production got raves from critics, Ellis brought the show to Susan Dietz, the artistic director at Pasadena, and when she agreed to do it she put him in touch with the production’s current young lead.

This Flora, Jodi Benson, already has gained wide attention, sight unseen, singing the title role of the animated Walt Disney feature film, “The Little Mermaid.” Kander and Ebb believe it would be grand if, like the 19-year-old Minnelli, Benson could stroll on stage and get a second ovation herself.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But Kander and Ebb are among the few Broadway teams still around who believe in such magic.