The Sondheim Lyrics Chain

[scenicdesign71]

You could leave me the stocks, for sentiment's sake.
And ninety percent of the money you make.
And the rugs.  And the cooks.
Darling, you keep the drugs; angel, you keep the books.
Honey, I'll take the grand; sugar, you keep the spinet
And all of our friends, and -- just wait a goddamn minute!

[MartinG]

M: Gold!
Sitting there and glistening!
Gold just
Lying around!

W: Gold dust
Glittering and littering the goddamn ground!
...

M: Oh, go on, Addie,
The two of you together--!
What fun!

(Anticipating a quibble, this is the lyrical allocation from the recording, if not the version printed in Look...Hat. However the equivalent phrase from the book can also be found in the same place I'm thinking of  )

[scenicdesign71]

^ Is this a Woodsy issue of switching between verses, or perhaps versions, from "It Takes Two [of you]"  to  "...two of us" (or vice versa; I'm too lazy to look it up)?
Or was the anticipated quibble to do with Bounce/Road Show?
I'm confused, so I'ma just sidestep the whole issue and go with Kukla, Fran and Ollie, for whom SJS wrote a whole song entitled "The Two of You," the phrase appearing in practically every other line:

I want no one else in lieu of you:
I prefer the two of you.
And I'd like to take the two of you
To tea!

Come spend a day!
Oh, what lovely sights we'll see --
But nothing's sweeter than the view of you.
So stay, the two of you,
With me.

[KathyB]

aargh—this took me long enough to figure out.

[quote from memory]

Got my guy and my sky of blue,
Now, however, I own the view,
More is better than nothing, true,
But nothing's better than more

[scenicdesign71]

For an extra challenge, there should be a game where you have to try to find instances in which SJS has used not just the same word but the same rhymed pair of words in different contexts.

Maybe a bit more challenging in his case than it would be with that of the average lyricist, given SJS's aversion to repeating himself.  (For the sake of practicality -- meaning, in order to keep such a game going for any significant length, and without every second or third turn being a "bunny" -- it might have to become an all-lyricists game rather than Sondheim alone).

Still, even just within his oeuvre, there have been a few duplicated rhymes over the years -- though almost always simple, innocuous ones like "view/true":

We sit inside the screens
And contemplate the view
That's painted on the screens:
More beautiful than true.

(...)

And no one presses in
And no one glances out
And kings are burning somewhere...
Not here.

[Jenniferlillian]

"You yearn for the women,
Long for the money,
Envy the famous
Benjamin Stones.
You take your road,
The decades fly,"

[Jenniferlillian]

Ha! My phone didn't go to the last page! Let me try again 

[Jenniferlillian]

Not quite right but at least in the ballpark this time-

The girls of summer get burned
They start the summer unconcerned
They get undone by a touch of sun in June
Plus a touch of the moon

[Chris L]

Love that song!

Maybe he thinks that I'll come through for him
Maybe the moon is cheese!
And yet maybe
Maybe
Something real is happening here

[KathyB]

Game Police stepping in here...

Unfortunately, in this game you can't respond to burning with burned. If Scenic had left burning as the target word, then burned would be fine, but in this game you need to find the entire target word, not variations of it, and not parts of it.

So, we're back to burning, and no, I don't know where to find it, although it will probably come to me as I'm drifting off to sleep, as a couple others have...

burning

[scenicdesign71]

To be fair, this isn't an easy one: I had to Google to be sure there was another instance of burning, and finally found one -- five or six pages into the search results.  There may be more, or maybe not: it's conceivable the word makes only two appearances in the entire oeuvre.

I take "kings are burning" as poetic metaphor, not necessarily meaning that there are monarchs out there who are literally dying in flames -- though it's such an oddly distinctive and compelling image (well worth the several repetitions SJS gives it throughout "Advantages") that I've never been 100% sure.

The other instance (perhaps the only other instance, though again, I wouldn't swear to it) is unambiguously figure-of-speechy, describing a specific character but not referring to actual physical combustion.  The song in which it occurs is a ballad.

[KathyB]

Of course—

Sweeney was sharp, Sweeney was burning,
Sweeney began the engines turning.

[a lot of overlapping lines here, but this is what the script says:]

Sweeney's problems went up in smoke
All resolved and completely solved
With a single stroke
By Sweeney!

[scenicdesign71]

It's the greatest — !
It's the single — !
It's the only — !
It's the perfect — !
It's the —
Hi!
Dreadful!
Fabulous!

[KathyB]

Well, Beadle calls on her, all polite,
Poor thing, poor thing.
The Judge, he tells her, is all contrite,
He blames himself for her dreadful plight,
She must come straight to his house tonight!
Poor thing, poor thing.
Of course, when she goes there,
Poor thing, poor thing,
They're havin' this ball all in masks.

[scenicdesign71]

The king is giving a Festival!
	More than life,
		I wish...
I wish to go to the Festival...
	More than riches,
...and the Ball,
		I wish my
		Cow would give us some milk.
More than anything!	More than anything,
	I wish we had a child!
		Please, pal...
	I want a child...
		Squeeze, pal...