The Sondheim Lyrics Chain

[scenicdesign71]

...seven different women — and they are all women, ranging from very-young to approaching-middle-age — singing seven different songs in which they mention their own hair. 

So, to recap:

• The three remaining instances (that I'm aware of) all come from different shows:  different from each other, and from the ones that have already been played.
• None is a cut song like "Bang!" or a later addition like "Our Little World" — these three songs have all been in their respective shows since their original productions (and cast albums), and remain in them to this day, so they're not too obscure.
• And, while one is from a less widely-known show, to those who have seen or heard it (it's had at least three cast albums), the song in which it appears tends to pop out as an instant highlight.
• None are hidden in chorus or counterpoint; the remaining three instances are all technically duets, but all three "my hair"s occur in clear, easy-to-hear solo lines.
• The three remaining instances are sung by women ranging in age from "very young" (probably even younger than Rapunzel, and, one could say, following a similar path) to "eyeing middle age from a cautious distance" (like a less-jaded Charlotte, perhaps).

MY BAD!  Turns out, that last-mentioned instance is actually sung by a man!

In my defense: he's actually singing from the first-person perspective of the woman with whom this duet is shared (or, more accurately, split).  It passes from her to him midway through — in fact, the topic of her hair becomes the more-or-less arbitrary "handoff point" at which the song segues from her vocal line to his, after a brief unison passage — but, dramaturgically speaking, the words remain manifestly hers all the way through, even when he's singing them alone.  By the time the specific phrase "my hair" occurs, he has taken over the vocals entirely, while she has likely exited the stage a stanza or two ago; but he's continuing to sing her thoughts (about her own hair, among other things) verbatim, as it were.

In light of all that, misidentifying the singer of that particular phrase in that particular context was an honest, if careless, mistake.  Still: if my erroneous claim that all seven instances were sung by women caused anyone to overlook this one — my apologies!

[KathyB]

This is the last "my hair" that I have found, and I too thought it was sung by Clara.

Perhaps when next we meet,
I'll be a sorry sight.
You won't know who I am.
My hair completely white,
My face
A mass of wrinkles.
What will you feel then,
My Giorgio?
Time is now our enemy...


Five down, two to go, and there's probably some convoluted way that "enemy" connects back to "my hair"

[scenicdesign71]

Circling back around, coincidentally...

Bang! The war commences.
The enemy awaits in quivering expectancy...
The poor defenses, the penetrable gates—
How terrible to be a woman!

The time is here.
The game is there.
The smell of fear
Like musk pervades the air...


It's not coincidental that this target happens to rhyme with "my hair"... Just sayin'.
Re-recapping, and then some:

• One of the remaining two "my hair"s is sung by a female character who, while younger than ITW's Rapunzel*, shares with her a somewhat similar dramatic arc (minus the tragic spiral to an early death); their hair bears a certain resemblance, too.
• The other is sung by a woman in a duet that many consider one of the highlights of a relatively seldom-produced show.  Out of all seven, this singer is the only one who's mentioning her hair as a point of seemingly uncomplicated sexual pride, with no apparent worries about age, upkeep, etc.  (Of course, this being Sondheim, things turn out not to be so simple).
• Each is from a different show, and neither is from Night Music, Into The Woods, Passion, SITPWG, or Sweeney.
• One of them rhymes "the air" with "my hair".
• And the other one, just as a heads-up, occurs at almost the very top of the song in which it appears, sharply limiting the available target words that could lead to it.

*Granted, Rapunzel's own age has been a matter of some confusion.  She seems like a sheltered late-teen or young adult.  But her brother the Baker has for many years been unaware of her existence, presumably having been too young to remember their mother's pregnancy — which would put the siblings' age gap in the lower single digits.  He and his Wife, meanwhile, are written (and usually cast) to seem no younger than, say, 30 — in which case, given the above, the Witch must be keeping Rapunzel in captivity well into adulthood.  But for present purposes, even if we assume the Baker is only in his mid-20s, his little sister would still be older than the young lady we're looking for.

[KathyB]

I still haven't found them.
I'm still looking.
I'm hoping @Leighton is too.

*I thought one of the singers might be Philia, but she doesn't seem to care much about her hair when I look at her lyrics.

[scenicdesign71]

• One of the remaining two "my hair"s is sung by a female character who, while younger than ITW's Rapunzel*, shares with her a somewhat similar dramatic arc (minus the tragic spiral to an early death); their hair bears a certain resemblance, too.

--namely its color.  While perhaps technically a tiny bit less written-in-stone in this character's case (I don't think she's ever actually referred to, point-blank, as having "yellow hair" (or tawny, flaxen, golden saffron, etc.), or "hair as yellow as corn," it's awfully hard to imagine this girl as a brunette, and making her one would not be entirely inconsequential.

Philia was a smart thought, @KathyB , re: captivity and rescue, but she and Rapunzel and Johanna do have yet another spiritual sister of sorts, whose "imprisonment" is entirely legal and psychological: unlike the others, she travels constantly — just not freely.  All are active collaborators in their own "abductions," which all might plausibly regard just as much in terms of self-emancipation as of elopement.  (In some cases, one wonders whether the chivalrous rescuer mightn't more realistically be thought of as a hot getaway driver than as husband material).

But when this one sings about her hair... maybe think Nellie Forbush?  Not for character or circumstance, but more for the 20th-century idiom Nellie uses to describe her own (sort-of) "escape".

"The air" is still the current target, and there are multiple other instances in which it appears.  But I'm pulling hard for the one where it is rhymed with "my hair", the latter hopefully to be used as the next target so we can finish out the seven and all drink champagne or something.

[AmyG]

If Momma was married I'd jump in
the air
And give all my toe shoes to you.
I'd get all these hair ribbons out of my hair

[scenicdesign71]

(I bet she'd wash that Momma right out of it, too...)

Last call for the sexy lady from the less-often-produced show (though I think I recall you once saying you'd seen a production of it, @KathyB )...?  Final hint: as frisky as she might seem, she's not quite herself when she sings about "my hair".  (Still, it's a pretty ballsy opening gambit, given that — probably alone among the seven — hers likely isn't even her true color).

[KathyB]

Oooohhh... of course.

You like my hair, yes?
My lips, yes?
Ze sway of my--
'Ow you say--
Of my hips, yes?

Yes, I did see a production a couple of years ago. It was a student production, which may honestly be the only way this show will ever get produced, because the book is pretty ridiculous, and one almost needs an über- sense of humor about the whole thing in order to pull off the show.

[scenicdesign71]

Hip hip... hooray!   

And thanks for the link to your wonderful review, @KathyB !  I hadn't remembered it being that (relatively) recent, but then again, time's been slippery for at least the past five years.  And I'm still hoping for a miracle production that finally turns ACW into, if not a hit, then at least a true succès d'estime rather than an interesting score with a hopeless book.  My only real experience of it — the Donna Murphy-Raúl Esparza-Sutton Foster Encores concert in 2010 — was so delightful.

[KathyB]

This isn't meant to be a stumper. The song I was thinking of uses the word three times in three lines. But the word (hip) is also a part of many other words, which leads to zillions of possibilities.

hip

[scenicdesign71]

I'm guessing you're thinking of the hip-bath, but I feel like "In Praise of Women" has gotten such a workout on this thread that I wanted to give it a rest.  So, a different trio of hips...

It's time to stop to frolic and plop
And learn how to hop — it's hip to hop!
Hip hop! Hip hop!

Brek-kek-kek-kek kek-kek kek-kek
Ko-ax!
Brek-kek-kek-kek kek-kek kek-kek
Rib-et rib-et!

Stay with the frogs! With the frogs!
With the wits of the bogs!
Not your hippy-dippy insurrectionists.
Not your hasty, pasty-faced perfectionists.
Stay with the easygoing, simple,
Rollicking, Frolicking
Frogs

[KathyB]

There are also a lot of "ships" in Pacific Overtures, and a bunch of "-ships" in too many other places to count.

And those who thought him a simple clod
Were soon reconsidering under the sod.
Consigned there with a friendly prod
From Sweeney Todd,
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

[scenicdesign71]

No more sneaking in at intermission
To the plays you wish you could afford.
Or producers having you audition
Whenever they're bored —
And who say, right away
As you play the first chord:

[KathyB]

So I think "Okay"
And I start a play,
And he somehow knows,
Cause right away,
It's Drrrring!

"Hiya, buddy,
Wanna write a show?
Got a great idea,
We'll own all the rights
With a two-week out
And a turnaround
On the guarantee
Plus a gross percent
Of the billing clause—"

[scenicdesign71]

I actually had to google that one — "gross" immediately struck me as challenging because by far the most common modern conversational sense of the word (repulsive, disgusting) seemed to me just a skosh ahead of SJS's time.  Jenny's use of it in Company, below, may represent relatively early adoption by someone her age: originating in the 1960s as teen slang usage, she would have had a decade at most (not in her own teens, but rather her mid-twenties to mid-thirties) to pick it up by 1970, perhaps from her kids.  Or she could be using it here with a slightly more old-fashioned shading, less "icky, nauseating" and more "coarse, lacking refinement".  (Obviously, legal, medical or financial terminology is its own thing, but apart from "gross percent of the billing clause" I couldn't think of any other such usages in SJS's oeuvre; ditto phrases like "grossly mistaken" or "gross injustice").  In any case, I suspect Sondheim himself would have been solidly into middle age (and much further into, if not entirely past, the 1970s) by the time "gross-disgusting" had spread across demographics to become anywhere near as ubiquitous, covering all kinds and degrees of distaste, as it is today — which is why it's hard to imagine almost any of his characters using the word casually.   Little Red, in Into The Woods, perhaps.  Or, I suppose, most of the characters in Here We Are, his first contemporary-set show since Merrily in 1981, although I couldn't find any instances of it on the ITW or HWA OCRs.  Let me know if you had a different one in mind than this:


—She's tall enough to be your mother!
—She seems so dead.
—And cheap and gross and...
—She's very weird.
—Depressing and...
—And immature?
—Goliath!

Poor baby, all alone!
Throw a lonely dog a bone, it's still a bone.
We're the only tenderness he's ever known,
Poor baby.