John shared some pictures from the show’s original production in which his grandfather can be seen gracefully playing the lead role, wearing only boxing shorts.
The dance-drama musical was about a boxer grappling with the existential feelings of defeat. It turned out, unlike Ashrawi’s original assumption, Our Boy was not a one-off song, but a one-act musical, in which John had wanted Dave to play the lead role. And sure enough, a day or two later, he had an email from John Kander himself. He sent him a message about the record he’d found, hoping that he could get in touch with John. “And I was right! So I did a little more googling, and I found that he had a grand nephew named Jason Kander, who is the former Democratic Secretary of State of Missouri.” “Being like a kind of Broadway icon, I figured his email probably wasn’t just gonna be online,” Sama’an laughed. “To me it’s kind of like the musical version of when you look up at the moon, and imagine the person you’re very far away from is also looking at it too.
“My grandfather would kind of gingerly and delicately pluck the same notes that John wrote all those years ago,” Sama’an explained. At the time it didn’t look to be more than just beautiful music, however, he now realizes how romantic it was. Sama’an told Classic FM that as a child, whenever his grandpa would come to visit, he would sit down at the piano and play pieces from Cabaret. Once he passed away, Sama’an’s mom revealed that the mysterious boy was, in fact, John Kander. Dave recounted this to his grandson but never mentioned the boy’s name.
That was the moment he became confident in the fact that he was gay. When Dave was moving into his dorm in freshman year, he noticed a boy “with the prettiest eyes.” The pair had met during their time in Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio.