'Scottsboro Boys' creative team lovingly tells a tale of hatred

The man who wrote the music for Cabaret and Chicago, Curtains and Kiss of the Spider Woman, and more than a dozen other shows - to say nothing of "New York, New York" - leaned against the side of an upright piano in a Center City rehearsal room and broke into a smile.

"Yes, yes," said John Kander, to the dozen men on folding chairs who had just finished another run-through of the song called "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey!," which opens The Scottsboro Boys, a musical about a true travesty of American justice, about racism and anti-Semitism, hatred and hypocrisy, told in the form of a minstrel show put on by blacks with a white "interlocutor," or onstage ringmaster. It did not sell well enough on Broadway last season to stay there, but received 12 Tony Award nominations after it closed.

Kander's approval came after he had told the cast that the happy-sounding song is sung by men who, at its end, are clearly very angry. That's the effect the cast achieved vocally in the run-through - the transition in tone that made Kander grin. It came earlier this month, on the first day of rehearsal for the show, now in previews at the Philadelphia Theatre Company's Suzanne Roberts Theatre and opening Wednesday.

Musical director Eric Ebbenga was at the piano, accompanying the cast and fine-tuning their delivery. But for this first day, Kander himself - he finished the score after his lifelong collaborator, Fred Ebb, died in 2004 - was on hand to start things off. He liked what he saw.

"Good rehearsal!" he would later tell director-choreographer Susan Stroman (The Producers and many others), a five-time Tony winner who hails from Wilmington, and David Thompson, who wrote the book for The Scottsboro Boys and other shows with Kander and Stroman.

The three had come to sit with the cast that day and talk about the show, its evolution, and its subject - the court case in the '30s in which the lives of nine black boys were ruined by a lie that continued to destroy them in prison even long after it had been recanted.

Kander, Ebb, Stroman, and Thompson first had the idea for the The Scottsboro Boys 10 years ago this month. They worked on it - Thompson doing major research, the others digesting it all - and then it sat untouched for four years after Ebb's death.