Free Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz by Greg Lawrence, John Kander, Fred Ebb

because she was working with this absolute authority who was not going to put up with anything false. Mr. Abbott would not play that game. He really was crazy about her. He was the daddy that she needed.
    EBB: But with Liza, when you let her loose, she’s very creative. She has a deadly instinct for what will work with an audience. If you give her that freedom, you get the benefit of that expertise. On the other hand, if you are as dictatorial as Abbott, you don’t get it. I think during Flora she wasn’t ready to make that kind of contribution, even though she won a Tony Award for it. But later on, certainly during her TV special Liza with a Z and when she came into Chicago, she was ready. In 1993 I did her act Stepping Out at Radio City Music Hall, and we gave her the song “Seeing Things” from The Happy Time . She said, “I would like to close the first act with that song and show film clips of me and my father. I think that ‘Seeing Things’ is like our relationship. I was the practical one. He was the dreamer.” She asked me, “Can I put that film together?”
    Now, out of total trust for her instinct, I said, “Of course.” She put the film together, and we could not have had a better closing for the first act. But Liza did that. Now, it could be that if George Abbott had been directing, he might not have let her. I didn’t have a moment’s doubt about Liza or about any of the other actors who were in Flora. Bob Dishy, Skipper Damon, and Mary Louise Wilson were perfect. I thought we were really lucky to have such a great cast.
    KANDER: Mr. Abbott later said that he thought he was the person responsible for Flora’s not working.
    EBB: I told Liza that I thought his love for her killed the show. He wouldn’t allow that spunky side of her to come out.
    KANDER: Mr. Abbott didn’t want to see Liza do anything ugly or unseemly at all. The one thing that became very clear to
us toward the end was that he couldn’t bear the idea that Flora would be seriously in love with a Communist, because of his own political feelings.
    EBB: He didn’t relate to the material in that show because it was a world he never knew.
    KANDER: He was rich when all these people were starving in the thirties.
    EBB: He was playing golf with Whitney and his wealthy friends.

    Harold Prince on Flora :
    I always wanted to direct Flora , the Red Menace . I understood the milieu. I understood the characters. My wife’s family had been victims of the blacklist, and I knew full well how idealistic and naive and innocent so many of the people who were pilloried really were, and I wanted the show to be about that and so did the original author of the novel. The problem was George Abbott didn’t know anything about that. The guys started to write the score and Abbott heard it, and Abbott said, “It’s brilliant. I want to direct that.” And because of my relationship with him—I mean, without him I would not have gotten a strong foothold on a life in the theater—so, obviously, if he wanted to do it, it was his call. At that point in time, I didn’t have the confidence, having not really done very much up until then, to know that I could have pulled it off, If I had had that confidence, I might have talked him out of it. Say I had done Cabaret first, and we were then working on this, I would have said, “Look, Mr. Abbott, you don’t know these people.” But I hadn’t done that. And so of course he directed it, and I stayed on as the producer. But I always wish I had done it.

    KANDER: Mr. Abbott was a terrific man, and I learned more about working in the theater from him than any other single source. At our first preview out of town, we were all standing in the back, and Mr. Abbott came in and looked at us rather strangely. We all recoiled at that moment, and he said, “All right, who’s gonna sit with me? Can’t learn about a show standing back there. Somebody’s got to sit with me.” I was closest and he grabbed my wrist.