The Sondheim Lyrics Chain

[KathyB]

Cheer them
In their glory,
Diamonds and pearls,
Dazzling jewels
By the score.
This is what beauty can be,
Beauty celestial, the best, you'll agree:
All for you,
These beautiful girls!

[scenicdesign71]

Best thing that ever could have happened...

Right, we'll do a new show--
No, we'll do a whole batch!
When it's over with, I'll cut the connection!
You gotta have endings,
Or there wouldn't be beginnings... right?

When you're flattened this low
And you're starting from scratch,
You can only go in one direction--
The side is retired,
But there still are lots of innings... right!

[KathyB]

Now's your inning,
Stand the world on its ear!
Set it spinning,
That'll be just the beginning!

Curtain up!
Light the lights!
You got nothing to hit but the heights!

[scenicdesign71]

A spark
To pierce the dark
From Battery Park
To Washington Heights!

Someday maybe
All my dreams will be repaid.
Heck, I'd even play the maid
To be in a show.

[KathyB]

I needed you to tell my troubles to,
The heck, babe,
Let's neck, babe,
Hey, Margie, you wanna go dancing,
Or driving, or something


I'm playing this lyric even though both the Follies libretto and Finishing the Hat have the "Broadway Baby" lyric as "Hell, I'd even play the maid" (these being the two sources I would count as "official")--but then Elaine Stritch sings "Heck" in Follies in Concert, it's "Heck" in both the London and Broadway versions of Side By Side by Sondheim, and it's "Heck" in the 2011 revival of Follies. (It's also "Heck" in the one random online lyrics site I checked--ST Lyrics--although Sondheim sings "Hell" on Sondheim Sings, Vol. 1)  So, my guess it that it got changed from "Hell" to "Heck" during Side by Side by Sondheim and never got changed back. I did a lot of listening to different versions yesterday, and I admit that I like "Heck" better than "Hell."

[scenicdesign71]

Thanks, Kathy!  Now that you mention it, I know I've encountered "Hell" before, but apparently rarely enough for it to have slipped my mind completely until reading your post just now.  (Follies in Concert was my original exposure to the show, and probably remains my unconscious touchstone).  But since you've got me thinking about it, I like "Heck" better too; it sounds more period somehow, and more innocent.

Then again, that may be a misapprehension on my part, unconsciously pasting postwar, Hayes Code notions of both propriety and purity onto a song that ostensibly dates from the Depression years.  Surely "Hell" wouldn't have been off-limits in a theatrical genre built largely around the frank glorification of female nudity.  And while the singer's starry-eyed persona may strike modern (post-1960s?) audiences as comically quaint, to 1930s eyes Hattie's charm might have stemmed as much from her moxie -- look, she swears! -- as from her supposed naïveté, if not more so: she could easily be played as more Anytime Annie than Peggy Sawyer.  (That analogy is imprecise, but Stritch, for one -- simply by being Stritch -- took the song's tone right past "spunky" and into "hard-bitten" even without using the stronger expletive).

[scenicdesign71]

Friday nights, with him all in tails,
We'll have dancing.
Meanwhile...
It's a rip in the bustle
And a rustle in the hay
And I'll pitch the quick fantastic...

[KathyB]

The collar is damp,
Beginning to pinch,
The bustle's slipping--
I won't budge one inch!
Who was at the zoo, George?
Who was at the zoo?
The monkeys and who, George?
The monkeys and who?

Artists are bizarre, fixed, cold.
That's you, George, you're bizarre, fixed, cold.

[scenicdesign71]

In Cairo you find bizarre bazaars.
In London—pip pip!—you sip tea.
But when it comes to love,
None of the above
Compares, compris?

[KathyB]

Well, ladies and gentlemen,
That aroma enriching the breeze
Is like nothing compared to its succulent source,
As the gourmets among you will tell you, of course.

Ladies and gentlemen,
You can't imagine the rapture in store—
Just inside of this door!

[scenicdesign71]

The child is so sweet,
And the girls are so rapturous.
Isn't it lovely
How artists can capture us?

[KathyB]

I'm lovely,
All I am is lovely,
Lovely is the one thing I can do.
Winsome,
What I am is winsome,
Radiant as in some
Dream come true.

[scenicdesign71]

Everybody ought to have a maid:
Someone who, in fetching you your slipper, will
Be winsome as a whippoorwill,
And graceful as a grouse!

Of the few SJS productions I've managed to work on, Forum is the only one I've designed twice (a decade apart, in 1997 and 2007).  But I've wondered, as time went on, whether some of the show's humor has permanently passed its sell-by date.  My first time, as part of a summer-stock residency, I remember the intern company performing "...Maid" at our season-opening "meet the company" Straw Hat Revue a month before the actual Forum production -- and, even back then, with the altogether traditional 1996 revival still running on Broadway, the show's early-1960s gender politics seemed due for tweaking.  Our revue's director brought on the female company members midway through the song, dressed as maids or at least carrying suitable props, to observe the libidinal antics of the male singers with eye-rolling disdain, before thrusting their feather-dusters, mops, etc. into the men's hands near the end of the number -- how 'bout you flitter down your own damn hallway, buster? -- turning the tables while, in effect, adding their own triumphant final flourish to the men's tableau of gleefully asinine self-emasculation.  If I recall correctly, the ladies may even have "buttoned" the number by giving the guys an aggressive swat on the ass.

[KathyB]

Disgraceful! What's become of them?
Some of them
Hardly pay their shoddy way.

What once was a rare champagne
Is now just an amiable hock,
What once was a villa at least
Is "digs."

[scenicdesign71]

Black sable one day, next day it goes into hock.
But I'm here.
Top billing Monday, Tuesday you're touring in stock.
But I'm here.
First you're another sloe-eyed vamp.
Then someone's mother; then you're camp.
Then you career from career to career.
I'm almost through my memoirs, and I'm here.


I first heard "I'm Still Here" some 35 years ago, but I think I may have somehow missed the rhyme of another with mother until just this very minute (though one day and Monday had not similarly escaped me).  It's one of those instances, freakishly common with SJS, where the language is so coruscatingly brilliant -- this would be astonishing writing even if it didn't rhyme at all -- that to find an extra, perfect but un-showy internalish one tucked in there, modestly overshadowed by the more specific and pointed hock/stock and vamp/camp, not to mention the sheer delirium of career from career to career... it's just unearthly.