If you’re ever in the unenviable position of talking to musical theater nerds and the conversation stalls, mention the name John Kander, OC ’51, and watch their faces light up like the Shubert Theater marquee, raving about how Kander — one half of Kander and Ebb, the songwriting duo responsible for Cabaret and Chicago —permanently altered the landscape of American musical theater. With lyricist Fred Ebb (who passed away in 2004), Kander’s darkly comic musical sensibilities dealt with delicate subject matter in typical Broadway fashion, treading on weighty issues such as rape, abortion and racism with bedazzled tap shoes.

Yet Flora, the Red Menace, the Kander and Ebb musical premiering in Hall Auditorium this Thursday, deviates slightly from the formula established by smash hits Chicago and Cabaret. For one thing, the 1965 original production of Flora — featuring a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli in her first lead role — was a flop, running for a meager 85 performances before the duo revamped the book and score for a 1987 revival.

Directed by Matt Wright with musical direction by Ian Axness OC ’09, Oberlin’s production of Floratells the story of Flora Mezaros (played by College senior Holland Hamilton), an aspiring artist who falls in with a ragtag group of communists after meeting and falling in love with the fiercely radical Harry (College junior Andrew Gombas).

Set in the Great Depression, the bleak economic and political climate depicted in Flora is “unfortunately more relevant now” than it was during the original production, Kander stated in a Q&A during his three-day visit to Oberlin, during which he and librettist Tommy Thompson worked with the cast during rehearsals.

Although most Broadway productions offer something far short of a “serious time,” the combination of weighty thematic material and old-school razzle-dazzle is characteristic of Kander’s work, whose most recent work, The Scottsboro Boys (nominated for 12 Tony Awards), featured a minstrel show format and a 12 year old prison inmate tap dancing around an electric chair.

During his visit to Oberlin, The Oberlin Review put Mr. Kander in the unenviable position of talking to musical theater nerds, where they discussed Flora, the artistic process and showtune-loving neo-Nazis.

Can you talk a little bit about Flora and the process by which Oberlin got you to come here?

Flora itself has personal significance because it was the first show that Fred and I had produced. And also, when we [revised] it, it was the beginning of our relationship with [librettist] Tommy Thompson and [director] Susan Stroman and Scott Ellis — the nucleus of theater people that are our family. We all worked together as often as possible. It truly is a family and it gives us all a security that we wouldn’t have otherwise. And I suppose — I didn’t come up with this idea, but — Flora is about people who are just out of school and entering into the workforce during a time of financial depression.

Sounds familiar.

Which has a certain resonance that we didn’t intend, so … anyway, when [Oberlin] decided to do it, I felt that it was probably a pretty good decision. It’s a show that was flawed to begin with, but when we redid it with Tommy’s book and everything, we made it better. It’s still not perfect, but it’s fun to be able to work with it.

A lot of your musicals take place in times that are not now and places that are not now — for example, Cabaret in prewar Germany, or Flora in the Great Depression. How do you write so it sounds like it’s coming from those times, but also so that it retains your voice?

Actually, very consciously: I listened to lots and lots of German jazz before I wrote Cabaret, and then forgot about it. When I was writing Zorba, I listened to lots and lots of Greek folk music, and then forgot about it … you have a feeling that it’s not so much that you’re doing research but that you’re putting the sound in your head, and then you forget about it and assume or hope that somehow or other it’s going to seep into your consciousness.

I recently read a New York Times profile while you were rehearsing Scottsboro Boys in which you instructed an actor: “You can never go too far. Go.” In light of this, do you think that you can ever go too far? Are there any topics that are untouchable or taboo?

I don’t think there should be, if you do it right. When I say, “you can never go too far,” if you’re writing about a murderer, you shouldn’t kill someone onstage, unless you have a good understudy. You know what’s worse than going too far, is not going far enough, so it’s weak tea, it’s weak coffee, it means nothing. If you apologize for what you’re doing to make somebody else feel better then you’re better off not doing it at all. … What you do may be hated by some people, and that’s their right too. But I don’t think you should ever betray yourself as a creative person.

But there’s also the danger of when you cross those boundaries, your work being incorrectly perceived by others — for instance, I recently learned that “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” [from Cabaret] has been co-opted by real neo-Nazis as a modern-day skinhead anthem.

You know what else? I got a request from a Jewish boys’ camp to use “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” as their song, so you can’t help that. To the extent that I can control who sings our songs, I would, but I can’t.

How does one learn to write good melodies? Is that something that can be learned, or is that something you’re born with?

I really can’t answer that. Sometimes you just put your fingers on the piano, they will invent something that you have no idea what’s going on up here. […] I guess it’s how we hear and if I write something that somehow pleases me melodically, that doesn’t mean it’s going to please anybody else. I think all of us — composers, writers, artists — we’re all very selfish people, doing what pleases us and you sort of have to not apologize. I wish I could tell you. I could show you how to write bad melodies … are you a composer?

I am, yes.

How do you know, when you’re writing, what you want to hear?

Well, like you’re saying, sometimes I’ll write something that sounds good to me at the time and then I wake up and I realize it’s not a nice melody at all.

Isn’t that awful? You look at yourself — at something you felt pretty good about in the afternoon — you wake up the next morning after you’ve had your coffee and think, “I didn’t write that.”

And then there are those moments when you write songs — like that famous anecdote of when you wrote “I Don’t Care Much” [also from Cabaret], when you [and Ebb] bet you could write a song between the main dish and dessert.

We were showing off. But I think that a lot of writing – certainly something as abstract as music — has so much to do with your unconscious that you can’t pin it down. When we wrote “I Don’t Care Much,” Fred said, “What do we write about?” I said “I don’t care much,” and he said, “Play a waltz” — it just happened. The only thing I can say is that you really have to let yourself be open. If you write with a censor sitting on your shoulder, you really can’t write anything. You have to really be not afraid to be bad. Just let it all happen and edit yourself later.