Life’s Been a Cabaret : Lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander have turned out hits ranging from ‘New York, New York’ to the current musical ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman.’ Next stop: 1933.

Lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander were tossing around ideas for a musical to work on when Ebb suggested “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” He’d seen Hector Babenco’s 1985 film a few years earlier and thought it might have potential.

Kander agreed immediately and so did their frequent collaborator, director Harold Prince. No matter that the film, like Manuel Puig’s 1979 novel, was set in a Latin American prison and had some very unusual protagonists. Kander and Ebb, who had even toyed at one point with an opera about Eva Peron, like this sort of material.

Long before turning to “Kiss,” with its gay window dresser Molina and his unlikely cellmate, political prisoner Valentin, Kander and Ebb had set prewar Berlin to music for “Cabaret.” They have turned out scores about fashion designers and Communists (“Flora, the Red Menace”), skating rink operators (“The Rink”), colorful murderers (“Chicago”) and Greek peasants (“Zorba”).

Kander and Ebb “are very snappy and smart and sometimes smartass and sentimental in the best sense,” Prince says. “John is very melodic and musically sophisticated, and Fred is as good a lyricist as we have.”

Alternating prison scenes with glamorous movie fantasies--which actress Chita Rivera inhabits in the touring production of “Kiss” at the Ahmanson Theatre through April 21--”Kiss” also gave the composer and lyricist a wide range of musical options. As Kander puts it: “Any story where you’re spending half your time in somebody else’s imagination, going in and out of reality, is ripe for music.”

Apparently so. “Kiss” won seven 1993 Tonys, including one for best score, and joined a Kander and Ebb roster that sweeps in nearly a dozen musicals, not to mention TV and film scores, since they first got together more than 30 years ago.

Such classics as “New York, New York” have been immortalized not only by their frequent star, Liza Minnelli, but also by Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. Highlights from their more than 200 songs were featured in “The World Goes ‘Round: The Songs of Kander and Ebb,” a successful off-Broadway revue that later played Los Angeles (at the Henry Fonda Theatre in 1992) and elsewhere.

Kander, 69, and Ebb, who says he’s a little younger, turn out much of that music at Ebb’s spacious but cozy apartment fronting Central Park. Piano tops and wall shelves are loaded with photographs, Tonys, Emmys and other reminders of their lives in the theater.

Kander lives four blocks away. He comes over each morning around 10, and the two work together for maybe five hours a day. “I like to go out to go to work but Fred likes to stay home,” Kander says. “So that works out great. Except when it’s very cold.”

They work in the same room at the same time. Kander composes at the piano, and Ebb works at a nearby manual typewriter--a slate-gray Smith Corona with green keys--that he has used since he started out. Ebb says he never worked on a computer and has no desire to do so.

“I generally write it out and then I type it out. Then I scratch everything out and type it all over again. Part of songwriting, if not three-quarters of it, is rewriting until you are both completely happy with it. Even then it might not be any good, but at least we’re satisfied.”

Usually, Ebb says, he comes up with an idea for a song or a suggestion of an idea for a song. Then, if Kander likes the idea, he starts improvising at the piano as Ebb works on the lyrics. They build the song together, and then, Kander adds, “we have a sandwich.”

The two men finish each other’s sentences in conversation and say they do the same sort of thing with songs. “I don’t, for example, write a complete lyric, give it to John and say, ‘Please write a melody for this,’ ” Ebb explains, “because that confines him to a form which may not necessarily be the best and most original form the song can take.”

“And vice versa,” Kander interjects. “I never hand him a completed melody.”

They like to write the opening number first, Ebb says. “Willkommen” in “Cabaret,” for instance, told them a great deal about the rest of that score. “It’s like hearing the gun go off at the start of the race. You know you’re starting. The race is on, and you know what you have to do.”

It’s a race each has long run.

Kander, for instance, has played piano since he was 6, and has long had dual interests in classical and show music. Growing up in Kansas City, Mo., he remembers, “I had a picture of Gertrude Lawrence in [the 1941 musical] ‘Lady in the Dark’ on one edge of my bureau and a picture of Lotte Lehmann in [the Strauss opera] ‘Rosenkavalier’ on the other. I thought if I ever ran away from home, I’d run away to one of those two ladies.”

It was when he was studying music at Columbia University graduate school in the early ‘50s, Kander recalls, that he made his choice. Composer Douglas Moore headed the department then, he says, “and he told me that if he had to do it all over again, he’d write for Broadway. That sort of legitimized me and helped me make my decision. . . . I [became] a rehearsal pianist, vocal coach, assistant conductor, conductor and dance arranger. I didn’t skip any steps.”

Ebb, who’s from New York City, also loved the theater but says writing lyrics didn’t occur to him at first. “I didn’t write music, and I therefore would need someone else to pursue the road to poverty with me. And I didn’t have anyone.”

Ebb wrote special song material for performers such as Carol Channing, then moved on to collaborate with Philip Springer and, later, Paul Klein. Music publisher Tommy Valando introduced him to John Kander in 1962. Valando felt, Ebb says, “that together we would create a certain chemistry.”

Kander called Ebb, then came by to visit. The two men hit it off, and just three weeks later wrote a song called “My Coloring Book,” which went on to become a hit for Kitty Kallen and Sandy Stewart; Barbra Streisand, among others, also recorded it.

They took their first completed show, “Golden Gate,” to legendary director George Abbott. Abbott wasn’t interested in the show, which remains their only unproduced work. (“We raid the score once in a while,” Ebb says, “[but] most of it’s still there.”) Abbott was impressed enough, however, to hire them to write the score for “Flora, the Red Menace.”

“Flora,” produced on Broadway in 1965, also brought them together with Prince, who was its producer. Prince had directed Kander’s earlier musical score for “A Family Affair” in 1962, but it was the first time the three had worked together.

“Flora” didn’t work, Prince says today, but the score did. So even before they took the show into New York, the director told Kander and Ebb that no matter what its fate, he wanted them to work with him on a musical version of Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.” Says Prince: “I thought we had a disaster coming into New York, and what could buoy people more than to know that there is life after a flop?”

“Cabaret” opened in 1966, and among its eight Tony awards were Prince’s first for directing, as well as one for Kander and Ebb’s score. The assignment was “a terrific vote of confidence,” Kander says, “and I know I’ll never forget that.”

On “Kiss,” they returned the favor, taking it to Prince. With its book by Terrence McNally, “Kiss” launched the New Musicals program at State University of New York’s Purchase campus in May 1990. Although the SUNY program died in less a year, “Kiss” survived. Its creative team started over, salvaging just a few songs, and the re-conceived show opened in Toronto in June 1992 before heading to London, Broadway and beyond.

“ ‘Kiss’ was a perfect cross-fertilization of their styles,” says Susan Stroman, who choreographed the first production of the show at SUNY. “Fred loves MGM musical music--big brassy show-biz music--whereas John would love the more Latin, more political, more dramatic themes. John loves the ballads and Fred loves the up tempos and that’s why they’re so good together.”

To research the show musically, Kander says, “I just listened to lots and lots of Latin American music from all the Latin American countries, not confining myself to one. I sort of let it seep through, and hopefully what came out was a kind of generic Latin feeling.”

From his point of view, Ebb says, “Kiss” required little research. For one thing, he explains, it’s contemporary. “To research it, all we had to do is read the papers to see what was going on, and to steep ourselves in Manuel Puig’s writings. There are six novels. I’ve read every one of them, and learned from him language and emotion and a Latin American sort of sensibility.”

Other ideas have worked less well. Some time before Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice did their take on Eva Peron, Kander and Ebb also tried telling her tale--in opera. They wrote a few songs, then abandoned the project. Each of the two men tries to take the blame, with Ebb faulting his lyrics, Kander his music. When they later saw the Lloyd Webber-Rice “Evita,” Ebb says, “I thought I couldn’t have taken on the same subject and done this good a job. That, in a funny kind of way, was a cold comfort.”

Another project now in development is a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for “Fiddler on the Roof,” is writing the book, Ebb says, and Jerry Zaks will be directing a workshop this fall, before a Broadway production.

Also in the works is “Steel Pier,” a musical about marathon dancing, which reunites Kander and Ebb with “World Goes ‘Round” director Scott Ellis, choreographer Stroman and book writer David Thompson (a trio that also collaborated in 1987 on a revival of “Flora, the Red Menace” at New York’s Vineyard Theatre).

When Kander and Ebb were unable to get the rights to the 1969 film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” Stroman says, she, Ellis and Thompson decided to write a new story about marathon dancers. Kander and Ebb liked their story, then just an outline, so they continued developing it.

“We wanted to work on another show together and had been trying to find material,” says Stroman, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Crazy for You” and “Show Boat.” “We didn’t particularly think the film would work as a musical--it’s just too tragic--and when they couldn’t get the rights, we decided we could make another musical in the same period with the same atmosphere.”

Set in Atlantic City in the summer of 1933, “Steel Pier” had a reading in New York in October and will be developed in a workshop in New York this June and July. Its stars include Karen Ziemba of “Crazy for You” and Jarrod Emick of “Damn Yankees” and, Stroman says, “the work we’ve done so far has been thrilling.”

Meanwhile, Kander and Ebb are enjoying their current success. “ ‘Kiss’ is one of the most satisfying theatrical experiences I’ve ever had,” Ebb says. “It fought its way into being in Purchase, out of Purchase and then on to Toronto, London and New York. It went through so much. It seemed like a piece that was just destined to survive.”

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“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Through April 21. $15-$65. (213) 365-3500.