Y’ASSOU, ZORBA! By Peter Filichia
In 2010, Antonio Banderas announced that he’d appear in a revival but never did.
Some years before, Mandy Patinkin was offered the show but wasn’t enthusiastic enough to spur a new production.
And for a while in the late 1980s, two Israeli film producersannounced that they’d do a film of this musical.
They’d change its name from ZORBA to I, ZORBA.
Anthony Quinn would repeat his most famous leading screen and stage role: Zorba the Greek. And as Nikos, his boss – ostensible boss, really, for the plot had Zorba almost always bossing him – would be John Travolta.
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman and director Robert Wise, each of whom had profited nicely from their work on a previous musical movie – THE SOUND OF MUSIC – would be involved.
That is, until Quinn said no.
And that was that.
One doesn’t get many opportunities to see ZORBA, the 1968 musical that composer John Kander, lyricist Fred Ebb and book writer Joseph Stein adapted from ZORBA THE GREEK, Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1946 novel and Michael Cacoyannis’ 1964 film.
Yes, Encores! tackled it, but that was suddenly 10 years ago. Take the opportunity now to see it at J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company on West 45th Street.
Can’t make it? Then check out the cast album for the 1983 Broadway revival, which, unlike the original 1968 production, starred the two performers who had done splendidly in the 1964 film.
Anthony Quinn once again portrayed the title role that has got him an Oscar nomination. Not only that, Michael Cacoyannis, the film’s director, would stage it.
Once again, Broadway would hear John Kander’s evocative music. When the show debuted, it was often compared to Manos Hadjidakis’ music in the recently closed ILLYA DARLING (the musical version of the 1960 Greek film NEVER ON SUNDAY). Although Hadjidakis had been born in Greece, many felt that what he wrote seemed less authentically Greek than Kansas City Kander’s music for ZORBA.
Did Quinn suggest that Kander and Ebb write him another solo, given that he only had two? Not that the ones from 1968 weren’t of great quality. “The First Time” had Zorba express how experiences he has in life never grow old, no matter how many encounters he has with them.
Zorba also told of once meeting a foreigner: “I could tell he was a Turk, but I liked him, anyway.” It’s the same message that was an important component of THE BAND’S VISIT: citizens from two warring countries hate each other until they meet one-on-one; then they find they have so much in common, it’s a phenomenon.
“I Am Free,” Zorba’s closing number, was a rejection of possessions and creature comforts, which he saw as ties that bind. In other words, all he needed was the sun in the morning and the moon at night.
Both were zesty numbers, which left room for the tender new one: “Woman,” in which Zorba tried to educate the shy Nikos in how to appreciate members of the female sex. Zorba’s sincere, sentimental and eloquent feelings were diametrically opposed to those that His Majesty holds in THE KING AND I – that women are mere vessels for men to fill.
Quinn’s co-star in the stage revival was the same performer in the 1964 film: Lila Kedrova, who was touching as the aging Madame Hortense. She regarded Zorba as her one last chance at love. He’d give her an affectionate nickname – Bouboulina – but for the longest time didn’t want to give her much more.
Although such stage-to-screen stars as Yul Brynner, Joel Grey, and Rex Harrison each a won a Tony and then an Oscar, Kedrova did it in reverse. She won her Academy Award in 1965 and her Tony 19 years later.
But why Kedrova wasn’t chosen for the original 1968 production remains a mystery. Harold Prince, who would produce and direct, opted for Maria Karnilova, who’d originated Golde in his FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. And yet, in February 1968, Prince had directed Kedrova as Fraulein Schneider in the London production of CABARET. That she proved herself worthy through four songs in that Kander-and-Ebb musical makes us wonder why Prince didn’t bring her to New York that autumn to do the new Kander and Ebb musical?
So, theatergoers would wait 15 years to hear Kedrova delight in “No Boom Boom,” in which she – as a young and beautiful courtesan – recalled influencing her lovers, all admirals, to stop shedding more blood. How poignant she was in “Goodbye, Canavaro” – a term of respect for a heroic man – when she hoped that Zorba’s leaving town wouldn’t mean that he’d leave her forever. In “Only Love,” she reiterated what she craved during her old age: marriage. Happily, Zorba eventually rose to the occasion and everyone sang “Y’assou!” (a celebratory greeting) to mark the occasion.
Ebb did well by all these songs, but his greatest came in Madame Hortense’s “Happy Birthday,” which was neither in the novel nor film. We’ve often heard the theory or belief that when we’re about to die, we see our lives flash before us. So, Ebb wrote a lyric in which Madame Hortense, just before death, recalled her sweet 16th birthday when she was at the height of her beauty and saw as many possibilities as Georges Seurat did.
ZORBA also had a subplot involving Nikos and The Widow. Author Nikos Kazantzakis didn’t give her a name, but he chose his own for his character because he was at least in part telling his own story. There actually was a man named George Zorba, who had greatly influenced the writer’s life.
Was he as timid as Nikos, who was as afraid to become involved with The Widow as she was with him? Ebb made the most of it in “Butterfly,” in which he used as a metaphor that insect’s evolution from its cocoon state.
What Ebb wisely did between 1968 and 1983 was rethink and revise the first line of his opening number. What had been “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die” became “Life is what you do till the moment you die.”
(And future Tony winner Debbie Shapiro sang it dynamically.)
Granted, the second Ebb lyric doesn’t say anything amazingly profound. Nevertheless, it’s a distinct improvement over his first one, for ZORBA is not a musical about a man who sees living as simply marking time or playing out the string. Zorba is a man who relishes life and seizes every day no matter what comes his way. He is certainly not “waiting to die”; he’s living to live. Think of him as a Greek male version of Auntie Mame, who famously proclaimed that “Life is a banquet and most poor [expletive deleted] are starving to death!”
And how well Anthony Quinn portrayed the man who would vividly live life until the moment he died.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
