Worst Ever Musical Theater Lyric

SPOT (GEORGE)

Ruff! Ruff!

Thanks, the week has been rough!

When you're stuck for life on a garbage scow

Only forty feet long from stern to prow

And a crackpot in the bow-wow, rough!

The planks ere rough

And the wind is rough

And the master's drunk and mean and- Grrrruff! Gruff!

With the fish and scum

And planks end ballast-

The nose gets numb

And the pews Bet callused.

And with splinters in your ass,

You look forward to the grass

On Sunday, the day off. Off! Off! Off! Off!

Chins.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Yes, that would an absolutely terrible lyric.

"So raise your right finger/ And solemnly swear/ Whatever they say about me/ I don't care"

The 'right finger' is referring to the middle finger, according to the gesture made during the song. It makes no sense.

Tim Rice owns this thread for the recitative in his shows - "He could have walked, cable cars scare him" in Chess

To throw in one not from a musical "Love, soft as an easy chair" from Streisand's Evergreen. Great song otherwise

Sunset Boulevard, ruthless boulevard

Destination for the stony-hearted

Sunset Boulevard, lethal boulevard

Everyone's forgotten how they started

Here on Sunset Boulevard...!

[italic]Aida[/italic]'s "Better the contempt of the familiar cannot start" by Tim Rice

[quote]"An old lady is waltzing in her flat / Waltzing with her cat" -- Sondheim, DO I HEAR A WALTZ?

Sounds like something I would have written in sixth grade for creative writing.

[quote]"To hand-crafted beers made in local breweries / To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese / To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo / To Huevos Rancheros and Maya Angelou" -- Jonathan Larson, RENT

What is exactly bohemian about those things?

You know when you have the word Sunset & Boulevard available and you continually emphasize the syllable "Boul" in your title song, you're pretty much fucked.

It never made it to the final product but if you've ever listened to the workshop version of Rent:

Mr. Negative cause he's HIV positive.

I know it doesn't really count since Larson had sense enough to cut it, but it always made me wince.

“Take me to a zoo that’s got chimpanzees / Tell me on a Sunday please.” What, did “cheese,” “breeze” and “squeeze” not make the cut?

"And what is twice as sad I was never at a party where they honored Noel Ca'ad" from The Lady is a Tramp (Babes in Arms)

The strained attempt to reference Noel Coward's name irks me.

R7 is correct. I love RENT but "La Vie Boheme" is the weakest set of lyrics in the show. Just not good, not smart, not well thought out.

Larson really should have worked with a lyricist AND a proper bookwriter.

Sunset Boulevard, frenzied boulevard

Swamped with every kind of false emotion

Sunset Boulevard, brutal boulevard

Just like you, we'll wind up in the ocean

[quote] Chins

Oops.

Every song from the musical “Working.”

“I like the island Manhattan

Smoke on your pipe and put that in”

Terrible managing of an idiom to make a rhyme. And no, it’s not because she speaks Spanish.

“mangling”

Her only good parts are between her thighs

She should stare at the ceiling, not reach for the skies

Or she could be ... his last WHORE

“Then Hallelujah! You are sixteen / And the braces disappear / And your skin is smooth and clear /And you have that happy grown-up female feeling...”

Cringiest of the cringey from Bye Bye Birdie.

Yes, R16. In the meantime, we have to keep hearing SS "apologize" for "I feel fizzy and funny and fine." Over and over.

As if.

From Funny Girl:

"Kid, my heart ain't made of marble

But your rhythm's really horr'ble!"

of course it's because she's a Spanish-speaker, r16; she's mangling the idiom. It's just screamingly funny.

Geraniums in the winder

Hydrangeas on the lawn....

Feh!

EVITA is great fun, but it's filled with inexplicable lyric choices. Has anyone ever referred to Buenos Aires as "the Big Apple"?

And what does "dangerous jade" even mean?

"I am taking my time / Watching the afterbirth of our nation..." from Hamilton. Did anyone really need that mental image?

well, maybe not screamingly funny, but funny nonetheless.

You sound easily amused, R24/R26.

R24: A "jade" is a disreputable woman or a prostitute. So in Evita when the Army refers to Eva as "dangerous jade" they are saying she is a whore who will bring Peron trouble. That use of jade goes back to Shakespeare...

Thanks, R28. Is it a familiar term among the English? I'm sure I've never heard an American use it.

(Yes, I know Rice is English, and EVITA premiered there as a concept album and then a stage musical before hitting America.)

Q: is it a bad idea to use language/terminology in a theatre song that's not immediately familiar to most listeners?

Time Rice is not god's gift to lyric writing, but his use of the word jade was not an obscure reference -just an educated one.

I'll march my band out

I'll beat my drum

And if I'm fanned out

Your turn at bat, sir

At least I didn't fake it

Hat, sir, I guess I didn't make it

"Fanned out" is an archaic baseball term that is not likely to be understood by everyone (anyone???) attending a performance of FUNNY GIRL. It has long been replaced by "struck out." Mixed metaphor, anyone? It's not clear that even Fanny Brice would have known the term. How popular was baseball for young Jewish ladies on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago? It is only marginally aided by the fact that the fucking lyric is buried in a mish mash of other fast moving and clumsy lyrics and might not be heard at all. And it's in such a great song!

But FUNNY GIRL has worse to offer. "Meet a mortgagee." Fanny is not a mortgagee. The bank that holds the security interest to secure the loan is the mortgagee. Fanny is the mortgagor. They got that one straight up WRONG. And no one bothered to address it all through rehearsal.

“The constable is responstible.” HORRENDOUS!

What did people think of Mandy Patinkin's performance (the falsetto and the rage-y emoting) when Evita was running on Broadway? Did any critics mention those things? Why did Colonel Peron have a (very inaccurate) accent but no one else did?

Did anyone notice how horrible Mandy's supposedly upper-crust English accent was? "They had never seen a social occasion QUOITE LOIKE it." bleeeeargh.

Funny Girl's lyrics are ghastly, which is why when most of them were eliminated from the film version they were never missed.

[quote]Funny Girl's lyrics are ghastly, which is why when most of them were eliminated from the film version they were never missed.

There were so many bad rhymes, some made it into the film.

"Isn't this the height of nonchalance?

Furnishing a bed in restaurance."

I’m now convinced that Bob Merrill looked at the DL before he shot himself.

"Don't tell me not to live

Just sit and putter

Life's candy and the sun's

A ball of butter."

That imagery is so wrong. There is nothing appealing about a big, hot, exploding blob of butter.

The sun spit morning into this guy's face!

"...Think of it as personality dialysis."

And pretty yet every other lyric in Wicked.

Yet I somehow enjoyed it. Go figure.

One from Hammerstein

“Never have I asked an August sky

Where has last you lie gone”

Only a terrible lyric because of the way it sits on the music, which makes its meaning (“where has last July gone”) unintelligible.

The entirety of that Q-word song in [italic]Carousel[/italic], even if it does use the correct meaning of that horrible word. The built-in attempts at New England dialects are cringeworthy. I’m glad the movie dropped it.

In a year or so, when she’s prematurely gray

And the blossoms in her cheek have turned to chalk,

She’ll come home, and lo!

He’ll have up and run away

With a social-climbing heiress from New York.

Oh, R40. Oh, no. Just no.

“The plot is took; the Queen foresook!”

Henry Purcell - Dido & Aeneis

“One day more, another day another destiny, this never ending road to Calvary...”

"I've known cruel cruel men, with Christian names, who taught me manners" from Catch me if you Can. Don't most people have Christian (first) names?

"I insist on miracles, if you do them, miracles, nothing to them" from Everybody Says Don't. The stressing of 'you' seems off and it confuses the whole thing.

Put your left foot up

When your right foot’s down,

Come on, let’s keep moving,

Don’t you lose your ground.

[quote]"An old lady is waltzing in her flat / Waltzing with her cat" -- Sondheim, DO I HEAR A WALTZ?

Is that the same cat, in the tiny flat, with just a bed and a chair?

"I love play rehearsal

Because it's the best!

Because it is fun "

- Joe Iconis, 'Be More Chill'

r40, what are you saying?

r49....and they wonder why Sondheim walked out at intermission.

R49 Be More Chill is a perfect example of how Broadway is dead and its body has gone cold. Even the original musicals that aren't staged versions of 90's movies are garbage now. Just listen to this shit. You'll lose your faith in the arts.

".... like a lark who is learning to pray." Seriously?

And what was it with Hammerstein and all those goddamn birds?

"Braah! Braah!/I am Hercules Mulligan/ Up innit', Lovin' it/Yes, I heard ya mother say 'cum again'!"

-Lin Manuel-Miranda, Hamilton

Weren't we chuckleheads then?

Sometimes people leave you Halfway through the wood Do not let it grieve you No one leaves for good You are not alone No one is alone

We are all alone, Steve.

My least favorite Sondheim lyric:

But not with trumpets or lightning flashing

Or shining armor.

He maybe daring, he may be dashing,

Or maybe he's a farmer.

Bob Merrill (who did "Funny Girl") had some real lulus. This is from his lyrics for the song "Yes, My Heart" from Carnival, which has an enchanting score (which is his too):

"I am dizzy, I am whirling,

I feel like my hair is curling,

Like a lucky bird landed on my head!"

(and then later from the same song...)

"Ordinarily I'm meek

But I must raise a fuss and shriek!

See that star? I just might

Just right up and take a bite."

None of that makes any sense at all. How do you feel that your hair is curling? When does a lucky bird land on your head so you can speak of it as a comparison point? if the song is about being really happy (as it ostensibly is--the character, who was desperate for work, has just been given her first job), why would you shriek?

Sorry: that should read "JUMP right up and take a bite..."

MANFRED: "It's nice to get your just reward this time of year--"

JOE: "Get outta here!"

MANFRED: "And all my merchandise is strictly kosher! When you've thrown away all your old worn-out stuff--"

JOE: "Hey, that's enough!"

MANFRED: "Perhaps you'd like to model for my brochure!"

r54, I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant. I think he was writing about consequences. "No one acts alone....no one is alone."

From The Life. Lyrics by Ira Gasman. (I could list about 95% of the lyrics of this show as being bad).

From the song "The Hooker's Ball"

We're gonna eat and drink and be merry, We're gonna dance all over the floor,

Every party at the party's gonna party Like they never partied before

-----------------------------

Soon the crowd is bustin' loose, A great big free-for-all,

And though there is no Mother Goose, There really is a Hookers' Ball

-----------------------------

From "Go Home"

Last week my brother's best friend Mike, decided I was what he'd like

And Mike, he really packs a punch, so he had me for lunch

It's not the Brady Bunch, back home

We'll be down on our knees

Outside Graumann's Chinese!

Footprints there on the street--

Immortality's neat!

Jerry Herman being lazy, probably because a rent boy was getting bored and wanted to go out drinking

If a sky full of crap Always lands in your lap

Make a curtsey and Tap your troubles away

That's one of the worst lyrics ever, r62.

Ca'ad I always assumed was not a forced lyric but an affected way of saying Coward's name at the time. Or even the way he said his own name when he was the toast of everywhere and frightfully full of himself? There was a Moss Hart skit in As Thousands Cheer in which at a hotel where Coward has just stayed all the staff end up speaking like him. With time we lose references.

Never have I asked an August sky

Where has last July gone

is a wonderful lyric and always has been comprehensible to me without ever having read it. Clean the wax out of your ears.

[quote] And what was it with Hammerstein and all those goddamn birds?

Beats us!

I very much like the "Where has last July gone" lyric too, r64; but there's no need to throw a tantrum if someone else doesn't like it.

Lighten up, Francis.

"Warm all over, warm all over, Gone are all the clouds that used to swarm all over."

Yes. Truly awful. ^^^

If you‘re stressed,

It’s fine dining we suggest.

"You mean that a king who fought a dragon

Hacked him in two and fixed his wagon

Goes to be wed in terror and distress? Yes."

He's complaining because he claims it's terrible only because it sits poorly on the music so it makes it incomprehensible. I'm simply calling him out for not being able to hear. No harm in that. As a child I understood the words but not the meaning. When I finally did I thought ' that's wonderful.'

What about when nobody understands a lyric? Like in Sondheim's case, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. It's not a bad lyric, it's just that nobody understood it.

Why watch me die like Eliza on the ice?

r72 That's from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

[quote][R72] That's from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

And how many people sitting in the audience of the original Company had read that book?

Actually, it is likely many of them had read it in school or at least knew the story. And most had seen the film of The King and I...

Elaine Stritch thought Mahler was a delicatessen.

Marble/horr'ble wins this one.

Sondheim's worst: "Love is a lecture on how to correct your mistakes."

Actually, Stritch thought Mahler's was a Jewish bakery. So "a piece of Mahler's" would be like a Danish or a cinnamon roll.

From “Sweet Transvestite” in RHPS:

“If you want something visual

That’s not too abysmal,

How about an old Steve Reeves movie?”

For the inventors of the language, the English sure have some crappy rhymes.

Of those oogly-boogly feelings I'm free, They've been banished by a royal degree.

“Hootenanny” is marginal and I refuse to except “salammy.”

Accept

[quote]Of those oogly-boogly feelings I'm free, They've been banished by a royal degree.

Decree.

Still a dreadful lyric.

[quote] We'll be down on our knees

[quote] Outside Graumann's Chinese!

[quote] Footprints there on the street--

[quote] Immortality's neat!

This might have been changed from "hideous" to just "weak" had they simply swapped out the word "neat" for "sweet." But it still makes little sense, since the footprints outside Graumann's Chinese are immortalized on the sidewalk, not the street.

I actually like the lyrics that precede it very much:

"Cut to the moment

When they open the envelope--

Pass the statuette to Bob Hope--

And it's my name you hear!"

It's nice because "Bob Hope" places it correctly in time, and "statuette" not only scans exactly right with the melody but is also a word almost only ever used to refer to the Oscar.

We’re gonna sco - o - ore tonight!

We’re gonna sco - o - ore toni -ight!

"What made it so right together/is what made it all wrong"

Blecch. So false and totally untrue to the character.

Some of you seem to forget that rhymes like "sad/Ca'ad" (as a toff English would pronounce it) and "marble/horr'ble" are intentional and comedic BECAUSE of their mismatched, unexpected rhyme scheme. Part of good lyric writing is an element of surprise.

"Only a terrible lyric because of the way it sits on the music, which makes its meaning (“where has last July gone”) unintelligible."

Said no one since 1943.

You're really showing your ignorance, r72. I would bet that 95% of the audience in 1970 got that reference.

I re-subscribed just because I had to say, Haha, R38, thank you for your sense of humour! The Pussycat (smiling like the Cheshire cat)

Discussed in a pre-CV19 Theatre Gossip thread: Sondheim's "updates" to COMPANY lyrics for the gender-swapped version are horrendous.

I wish I could recall them all right now: I remember one was replacing LIFE with TIME, I think:

Here's to the girls who play wife

Aren't they too much?

Keeping house but clutching a copy of LIFE

Just to keep in touch

"It's what we used to dream about

"Think twice before you poo-poo it."

--Rent

[quote]Some of you seem to forget that rhymes like "sad/Ca'ad" (as a toff English would pronounce it) and "marble/horr'ble" are intentional and comedic BECAUSE of their mismatched, unexpected rhyme scheme. Part of good lyric writing is an element of surprise.

"Yes, intentionally awful lyrics are wonderful."

Here’s to the girls in their prime—

Aren’t they too much?

Keeping house but clutching a copy of TIME

Just to keep in touch

Has anyone actually ordered a vodka stinger since the Reagan administration?

Just wondering.

I still can’t believe that Sondheim would rather they make Bobby a woman than let him be the gay man he always should have been..

[quote]Here’s to the girls in their prime—Aren’t they too much? Keeping house but clutching a copy of TIME Just to keep in touch

The lyrics are:

Here’s to the girls who play wife —

Aren’t they too much?

Keeping house but clutching a copy of Life

Just to stay in touch

[quote]Why watch me die like Eliza on the ice?

Even if people get the reference, it's a really stupid lyric.

It seems very forced.

True, there were some clunkers in the Funny Girl book and lyrics; on the other hand, Bob Merrill did hit my funny bone with this line from the Original Cast album: "Who taught her how to whack a joke from here to Hackensack?" (from "Who Taught Her Everything She Knows?")

From Maltby and Shire's 1984 musical "Baby", which actually got a Drama Desk nomination for lyrics: Young newlyweds - He: "I'll go to work, and bring home the bacon." She: "I'll stay home, and not feel forsaken."

Merrill has some terrific lyrics in Funny Girl.

'If they could have paid the price they'd have hired Rosie Brice

Who stands after every show selling matches in the snow

But in the world of greasepaint that's the way it goes.'

I'm confused by the complaints that the lyrics for "Company" are dated.

The show would make no sense today if you set it in the present day. It has to be set in 1970 or it makes no sense.

Complaining that it does not anticipate the present day is like complaining about the same for "Bells are Ringing" or "Lady in the Dark"--they are very much about their individual snapshot in time.

I was 10 when the movie version of CAMELOT opened. I remember seeing it in a road show release and being overwhelmed by it all. I got the record album for my 11th birthday. But, you know, sometimes the details escape us. "Guenevere" in the film is a wordy little song. Not all of it is intelligible, as most of it is a choral arrangement. I was in college before I realized I had entirely misapprehended the end of the following passage.

Oh, hurry. Oh, Lancelot hurry, there isn't too much time. Oh, hurry. For soon the steeple bells in the tower will chime. Oh, hurry. The guards will soon be gath'ring around the stake. And soon they will come to bake Guenevere.

At 11, listening to my LP, that's what I thought they were singing. And I still think it has more pizzazz than to merely "take" her.

Had heebie-jeebies for Beebe's Bathysphere - Could there be anything more recherché than that?

Foxy Leshin's boy genius, Steve

Yeah, I tried to tell Sondheim his shit was too scholarly, but he wouldn't listen. He was also a homosexualist and that wasn't my scene.

[quote]He was also a homosexualist and that wasn't my scene.

That would be me.

This thread proves you're all philistines. Just because lyrics go over your head doesn't mean they're shittily written, it just means that you're a dumbass who doesn't understand lyrics more complex than what you'd find in 'Oklahoma'.

Some of the people in this thread can't even comprehend [italic]Oklahoma![/italic]

The lyrics aren't bad at all, but it always bothered me that in "You Must Love Me" from EVITA the emphasis is on 'must,' which makes it sound like she's demanding to be loved. Instead, the emphasis should be placed on 'love,' because the song is Eva's realization that Peron loves her for herself and not just for what she can do for him.

[quote]Some of the people in this thread can't even comprehend Oklahoma!

As it has ever been, R106. Have you not followed the 400 Theatre Gossip threads? What is passed off there as analysis is often little more than free association.

R18 What is wrong with those lyrics? The military did say similar or worse things about her. You have to understand that being an actress was looked down upon in high society back then. Also, Eva was promiscuous and utilized the casting couch. She was very much persona non grata.

[quote]Also, Eva was promiscuous and utilized the casting couch.

That explains why they cast Vadge.

Starlight Express, Starlight Express

Are you real, yes or no?

Starlight Express, answer me yes

I don't want you to go

Obviously Fred Ebb had a bored rent boy wanting to go out clubbing so he rushed this lyric.

Dear one, I don't miss you inside me.

r107, I think you're misunderstanding the song.

Obviously, Ed Kleban had a bored rent boy waiting to go out clubbing so he rushed this lyric.

Give me a job and the rest of the crap will get solved.

R111: They actually did that show with the 5th graders at the elementary school I went to in the 1990s.

This is what I think of whenever someone mentions STARLIGHT EXPRESS.

I applaud this thread and harken back the good days of Gilbert, Coward and Porter when lyrics were meant to be heard.

Unlike the inaudible gibberish with which we've suffered since The War.

R113 How so?

I'm the part that's underneath With my sword inside my sheath

- Someone in a Tree

What dreck.

[quote]“Be Italian, you rapscallion” - Maury Yeston, Nine

Lyricist Dorothy Fields apparently heard "Nine" in its earliest incarnation at the Lehman Engel's BMI Music Theatre Workshop in 1973 and reportedly said, "If he rhymes "Be Italian" with "Eva Le Gallienne", I'm leaving!"

Literally everything Andrew Lloyd Webber has ever written except for Memory. It's so bizarre that someone could write nothing but garbage, create one song so beautiful that it becomes culturally relevant outside of the theatre world, and then continue to turn out nothing but garbage for the rest of his career.

It's insane that a man who wrote what is arguably the most hauntingly beautiful ballad/torch song of all time could follow it up with Starlight Express.

Webber isn't a lyricist.

R121, you do understand.... ALW doesn't actually write any of the lyrics, don't you?

Just the tunes.

Several years ago, I was at a show and the Big. Dramatic. Number. in the second act reduced me to fits of laughter. The show: Jekyll and Hyde. The song: "A New Life".

It wasn't just a lyric or two. It was the whole fucking song. Truly the most godawful crap I had ever heard. Sample:

"A new dream -

I have one I know that very few dream.

I would like to see that overdue dream -

Even though it never may come true!

A new love -

Though I know there's no such thing as true love -

Even so, although I never knew love,

Still I feel that one dream is my due!"

Jekyll and Hyde is such a mess. The only good thing to come of it is the underrated diva song waiting to happen: 'Bring On The Men'.

Another one from Sunset Boulevard:

"LA's changed a lot over the years Since those brave gold rush pioneers Came in their creaky covered wagons"

LA is not San Francisco. Dummies.

[quote]Another one from Sunset Boulevard:

"With one look I'll be me!"

Huh? Really? Who else would you be?

The whole show is so gaudy yet threadbare, I recall being almost embarrassed for everyone onstage. Redeeming event of seeing this show on Broadway: I smoke a cig with Alice Faye during intermission pretending not to recognize her. She was very cool.

R127 What did she think of the show?

'Oh, we like sheep'

R129, it isn't 'Oh, we like sheep'. It is 'All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.'

Sort of like DL.

And the text is taken from the prophet Isaiah, compiled by Jennens, not written by him. Jennens was himself an interesting character, a friend of Handel's. Both remained unmarried their entire lives. Handel often makes his way onto 'gay composer' lists, and it looks like Jennens might well have been similarly disposed.

Isaiah is another matter altogether.

Could Handel have been like Gershwin and simply asexual?

OP, isn't it "One day it's kicks, then it's kicks in the shins, but the planet spins. . . "?

That makes sense: there are good days and bad days.

So, senator! So, janitor! So long for a while....

Senator and janitor do not rhyme.

I wonder if you're sitting in the audience there is something that sweeps you up and you get carried away in the moment when seeing a great show. In the light of day there are all these examples of bad, or at least odd, lyrics. And they're mostly from hit shows.

This one has always bothered me and it seems to illustrate my point: "You make the old magnolia tree bud, Mame / You make camellias bloom in the mud, Mame." Is this saying that Mame is so magical that flowers will grow at the mention of her name? It's an ungainly and unattractive metaphor to use, but were I to be in the audience watching Lansbury I can imagine barely noticing it.

How about, "You make old bovines enjoy their cud, Mame" or "You make Count Dracula eschew blood, Mame"?

R70 Alan Jay Lerner had his share of clunkers,

From MY FAIR LADY: 'The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears'. Scotch is a drink. The correct term is 'Scots'. Higgins also says 'By rights she should be taken out and hung', where the correct term is 'hanged'. In a spoken dialog, he says that English is the language of the bible, which of course is also not true. For a linguistics professor, Higgins sure gets things wrong a lot.

In England, they refer to fall as 'autumn', so the lyric "Don't talk of June, Don't talk of fall, Don't talk at all, Show me' wouldn't make sense.

Lerner himself wrote he was bothered by the lyric "Some day they'll flash and send you crashing through the ceiling" from GIGI. He said you crash through the floor, not the ceiling. But I guess he couldn't come up with something better.

[quote] New York, New York (soon to be on stage)

Really? Do you mean the Liza Minnelli movie version?

Meat and potatoes, Fried eggs and ham That's the kind of guy i am! Meat and potatoes Blueberry pie That's the kind of guy am i! She'd be yearning for a soufflé; I'd be longing for a stew. The girl that i marry Will have to be Meat and potatoes, Potatoes and meat, Like me!

Do (supposedly) intentionally bad lyrics count?

Bianca , oh, baby

Will you be mine?

Bianca, Bianca

You'd better answer yes, or Poppa spanka

To win you, Bianca, there's nothing I would not do

I would gladly give up coffee for Sanka

Even Sanka, Bianca, for you

According to lore, during rehearsal rewrites for KISS ME, KATE, there was an open spot for a song for the character Bill. The actor playing Bill kept pestering Cole Porter for the song, and Porter tossed off "Bianca" sarcastically, making it intentionally bad, but the producers loved it and it stuck.

That's not a very good retelling of the lore, R138.

The problem is that there was no spot in the 2nd act for a song. But Harold Lang, the actor playing Bill Calhoun, had it in his contract that he would get a song in the 2nd act. The plan was to give him a song, as required, but make it so bad he would reject it and that would be the end of it.

Harold Lang knew what was going down, but he took the song and poured on the charm. While it did nothing for the show, he made it a showcase for himself.

A similar thing happened with Ruth Etting and Whoopee! and the song Love Me or Leave Me. She was a huge star and the producers wanted her name on the marquee. She was contracted to appear only in the 2nd Act and only to sing one song with a few lines of dialogue to set it up.

With Eddie Cantor at the helm, the show was in such good shape, the producers thought they didn't need Etting, after all. They wanted to get rid of her and save her star salary for themselves. "Love Me or Leave Me" was written deliberately to be awkward to sing, with a very large range and riddled with large skips through out the song. They played her the song. She knew what was going on, but her choice was to accept the song or reject it. If she rejected it, she was out. And she, too, thought the show was in great shape with Eddie Cantor at the helm. She, too, smelled a hit. So she took the song, the star billing, and the star salary and showed up each night just to sing one song.

R139, I stand corrected, and thanks for the story about "Love Me or Leave Me." Interesting that that's become a standard now (unlike "Bianca").

From Jekyll and Hyde:

"To kill outside St. Paul's requires a lot of balls."

The story I heard was that Lang was fucking Porter until Lang signed his contract for the role and couldn’t be (easily) fired.

So he dumped Porter

So Porter wrote him “Bianca” as revenge.

I always thought "La Vie Boheme" was meant to be callow.

I love Hedwig but 'My mother made my tits out of clay" is weird and forced.

From "Sugar"

JOE & JERRY: Hello world, they call us Daphne and Josie

A thousand pounds of paradise from head to toesy

Here is the kind of beauty

The drives a man m-m-m-mad

Please watch how close the kiddies get

This ain't no erector set

This here's the beauty that drives a man mad

Ooh what looks we get from cabbies and truckers

When we go by it's like the whole world puckers

Here is the kind of beauty

That drives a man m-m-m-mad

The way this stuff undulates

It should carry license plates

This here's the beauty that drives a man mad

Our beauty rocks 'em and our perfume slays 'em

They say it's bottled in a French gymnas'yum

Here is the kind of beauty

That drives a man m-m-m-mad

This here fancy frillery

Just hides big artillery

This here's the beauty that drives a man mad

When you wish upon a star

Sometimes angels can go too far

With the beauty

That drives a man

M-M-M-Mad M-M-M-Mad M-M-M-Mad!!

Patti LuPone hasn't been at it quite that long, R117.

From “Kinky Boots”

“Everybody say ‘yeah’!”

Really Cindy? You did some good work on this show, but that’s just lazy.

r94, the sexual politics of the show don't work if Bobby's gay. Now, making the couples in "Follies" gay might actually work.

A few more from Be More Chill

"Dude, you are cooler than a vintage cassette. It's just that no one else but me thinks that yet."

"Add some swagger to your gait or you'll like like a masturbaTOR"

"He's gone from a guy that you'd never be into, into a guy that you'd kinda be into"

"We'll get all sporty and play cricket, or get a forty and just kick it"

Nah. But if Carlotta was a bulldagger, that might be interesting.

Note to all Americans - at no time did ANY English person ever pronounce "Coward" in a way that sounds remotely like "Ca'ad".

You may recall Coward's [real] poem to Gertie, quoted in Star!, and think when you hear the rhyme, how he must have pronounced his own name, and how his godson Daniel Massey did pronounce it in the film:

"Dear Mrs A: Hooray Hooray/ At last you are deflowered/ On this as every other day/ I love you, Noel Coward."

That lyric you quoted is just an example of the Extreme Contortion school of lyric writing I always associate with Larry Hart. If only someone could have made him understand that when he was simple he was divine, and when he was clever he was [often] cringemaking.

P.S. "Clutching a copy of LIFE/Just to keep in touch" is a truly great lyric. One of the master's best. Anyone who doesn't think so has no idea of the way housewives lived in the 1950s and 60s.

Plus, clutching a copy of LIFE is a substitute to embracing one's actual life. Which goes to the heart of the song. All the wealthy East Side ladies are clutching at some status-symbol East Side substitute for an actual life and Joanne holds them all in contempt for doing so.

From Jerry Herman's song Love is only Love:

But if you're really wise The silence of his eyes Will tell you Love is only love And it's wonderful enough

Eyes are always silent.

Christ, you are dull and dim, R152.

from "A New-Fangled Tango, " [italic]Happy Hunting[/italic], 1956:

"You are like no other, You're for me--oh my god, it's Mother!!"

Was Norman Bates a co-writer on this?? Can't make this shit up. Start at 1:45 in the clip.

Gee, if Hammerstein or Sondheim or Merrill had you guys to advise them, they might have written a hit or two.

Never understood the problem with "like a lark who is learning to pray." It come from the mind of a young postulant who's all about nature and God. Seems perfectly in character to me.

But you have to concede, r152, that Ockie overdoes the ornithological references. They are everywhere.

[quote] In a spoken dialog, he says that English is the language of the bible, which of course is also not true.

That's a joke. It's trying to show how Anglocentric Higgins is: of COURSE English is not the language of the Bible, but someone in Edwardian England who was part of the Establishment might idly (& wrongly) think that having spent his life with the King James Bible.

"Why watch me die like Eliza on the Ice?" But in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eliza doesn't die.

Peter Pan: I fly and I'm all over the place You try and you fall flat on your face

Brigadoon: Lads say a prayer I'm afraid Harry Beaton is dead. Looks like he fell on a rock and it crushed in his head

"Jade" use as disreputable woman came into use after Shakespeare. Shakespeare used it to reference a poorly behaved horse: Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice (to Benedick): You always end with a jade's trick: I know you of old

Even if Hammerstein had his allotment of clunkers, you're never going to get me to believe anyone who wrote the fo0llowing was not exceptionally clever:

FRANK: "Little girl, you are safe with me

I can protect what's mine!

I am a sturdy maple tree,

And you're my clinging vine!"

ELLIE: "Woods are just full of maple trees,

Cedar and oak and pine!

Let me look them over please

And I will let you know

If you have a show..."

I don’t mind a lyricist changing a word’s pronunciation to make a rhyme if it’s clever or funny, but “We do not flee from a mortgage (mor-ga-jee)” in “How Can Love Survive” from The Sound of Music is, I think, neither clever nor funny.

[quote]Lyricist Dorothy Fields apparently heard "Nine" in its earliest incarnation at the Lehman Engel's BMI Music Theatre Workshop in 1973 and reportedly said, "If he rhymes "Be Italian" with "Eva Le Gallienne", I'm leaving!"

My friends and I felt the same way attending Blood Brothers. "What is she going to rhyme with fucking 'Marilyn Monroe' next?"

r161, they're not singing "We do not flee from a mortgage"--they're singing instead "We do not flee from a mortgagee." A mortgagee is a lender of a mortgage (like a bank), which in the 1930s would indeed have been a problem for the financially-distressed Bohemian couples to which Georg and the Baroness are comparing themselves. They are pronouncing "mortgagee" correctly in English.

^^Which is why Fanny Brice singing "Meet a mortgagee" in "Funny Girl" is an incorrect use of the word. She's referring to herself. ^^

I think the mortagee is the person who has been given a mortgage (or the borrower), and the mortgagor is the grantee of the mortgage (or the lender).

Cindy actually did anything on "Kinky Boots"?

I thought she was just the face and that she contributed nothing of substance. Good OR bad lyrics.

Don't touch my boy. He's what I live for. He's my only joy. Miss Saigon

[quote]I think the mortagee is the person who has been given a mortgage (or the borrower), and the mortgagor is the grantee of the mortgage (or the lender).

You have it backward. The mortgagee is the lender (typically a bank); the mortgagor is the person doing the borrowing.

One of Sondheim's lyrics that has consistently driven me up the wall:

[italic]Witches can be right / Giants can be good[/italic]

Sung mere moments after the crew has ganged up on the Witch and while they are lying in wait to kill the Giant.

r169

The Witch WAS right though, the others didn't want to give her Jack. The Giant was good UNTIL Jack stole from them... isn't that the point of the show that your actions directly impact others

[quote]they're not singing "We do not flee from a mortgage"--they're singing instead "We do not flee from a mortgagee."

I can understand the confusion because later in the song, they mispronounce Mercedes.

You reach your goals, in your comfy old Rolls, or in one of your mer-ce-DEE-zes.

Thanks for setting me straight R163 We did The Sound of Music in 5th grade, and I remember our teacher used “flee/mortgage” and “breezes/Mercedeses” as examples of how words might be pronounced differently in a song than in real life in order to torture out a rhyme. For some reason as I got older it never occurred to me that of course the word Hammerstein actually used was “mortgagee.” My small town public school education and my own idiocy shining through, I guess. Sorry for maligning you, Oscar!

R161/172 -Did you ever think to look at the word in the script or score?

No not really. That experience in middle school has really been my only encounter with the stage version of Sound of Music and I guess I just took the lyrics our teacher typed up as authoritative. I don’t believe I’ve ever used the word “mortgagee” in my life, so it never really clicked that of course that’s the right word in the song. I really haven’t thought about it in years, until I saw this thread and remembered how awful I thought that “rhyme” was. And now I know better.

Dorothy Fields in "Seesaw" Finale: Single nights in a double bed alone/And I'll miss his fingers touching each erogenous zone.

I also hated "Give me a job and the rest of the crap will get solved" from ACL

Every Sondheim lyric listed here has been intelligent, especially his stuff from Into The Woods. I'm shocked that some of the people critiquing it are even familiar with Sondheim, they seem like the kinds of people who should be attending NASCAR events and rodeos, not the theatre.

"She made compliance into a science,

One of the giants -- loud or lewd or lah-dee-dah-dee,

Everything to everybody."

This lyric is often brought up as being flawed because of "lah-dee-dah-dee."

And while that is true, there are other reasons why it's a bit shoddy.

Giants does not rhyme with science.

And the purpose of the lyric is to show that the subject could go from one extreme to the other, to suit whatever was required. So "loud or lewd" isn't a very effective choice. They seem similar. "Prude or lewd" would show opposites and add another rhyme.

[quote] Dorothy Fields in "Seesaw" Finale: Single nights in a double bed alone/And I'll miss his fingers touching each erogenous zone.

It's been decades since I've seen the show so forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe that lyric refers back to spoken dialog when Gittel first meets Jerry

Back in 1978, when I was a young thing, I played in the pit band of the very first production of 'Flowers for Algernon', by Charles Strouse and David Rogers. The show eventually played, briefly, in the West End and on Broadway, but was a long way from being a hit. Since Broadway, the show has been called 'Charley and Algernon', and it still gets some amateur productions.

In the 1st production, a young and mostly unknown Christine Ebersole was the lead. She and David Rogers, the lyricist, got into a quite heated argument over one lyric: "Throw me a dinner", which was sung as part of a song celebrating Charley's success. Rogers thought the line made perfect sense, the sort of thing you'd do for somebody who's 'made it'. Ebersole thought it sounded like someone was going to shove a plate of food into her face, and hated the line.

Surprisingly, if I recall correctly, Rogers won the argument, and the line stayed in the show.

It was a quite good show, with a couple of very fine songs. One of them still remains in my musical memory, all these years later. And Ebersole was terrific, and actually very nice and sweet to work with.

Don't throw briquettes at me

Don't please my folks too much

Don't laugh at my jokes too much

People will say we're in love

—[italic]People Will Say We're In Love[/italic]

I've never thrown briquettes at anyone.

I've always loved that song, R179. Thanks for the story.

[quote]Don't throw briquettes at me / I've never thrown briquettes at anyone.

What about bouquets, the actual lyric?

Joe Iconis is one of the least talented people who ever worked in the theater. Baffling how he gets produced....

I hope R180 is a joke.

Some of these remind me of Sondheim's story about a critic hearing "the best you'll agree" in Beautiful Girls as "the bestial agree" and took issue with Sondheim comparing the Follies women to animals.

Another Bob Merrill Funny Girl You are Woman awkward line is "In my soul I feel an inner lack/Just suppose he wants his dinner back?"

Sally standing at the door

Sally moving to the bed.

Sally resting in my arms.

Sally standing on her head.

not opposite extremes, r177; rather a variety of affects.

I don't think anyone's joking, r184, including r180. Such a bewildering array of ignorant comments and stupid jokes in this thread--particularly from those who've taken it upon themselves to correct Sondheim, and those who just can't read.

well this went downhill fast. [Actual lyric from Mame from cut Beauregard skiing scene]

r184, that wasn't just "some critic." That was Arlene Croce, dance doyenne of The New Yorker, and it was a stupendously ignorant comment.

My response to Worst Lyric is often"

Action! Action! Lovely, lively action! A word that often has the prefix re! Reaction! Reaction! It's like the breath of life to you and me!

From "Eager Beaver" in NO STRINGS, words and music by Richard Rodgers

"That no good, shiftless, shameless, low down, chippy chasing drug store Indian, courtin' me while he's playin' house with some snake-hipped Jezebel! That beer drinkin', tooth pickin', pomade headed, dog-faced gulch rat. I've been his door mat, dish rag and pin cushion looooong enough."

etc., etc., etc.

Ah, r192, but it sounds like poetry coming from the lips of the great Susan Johnson!

R180 I never understood why Laurey mentions her folks. Isn't she an orphan who was raised by her Aunt Eller?

[quote]those who've taken it upon themselves to correct Sondheim

How dare they blaspheme the Sacred Cow?

R183 Joe Iconis keeps getting produced because of nepotism. Do some google research about his family. Long story short, he owes his entire career to the fact that his family has good connections in the theatre world and has donated a lot of money to Broadway. If they didn't he would probably be working in an office somewhere.

R194 I take it as folks = family in general. But to be honest, I really don't think about it too much.

"I'm waiting for my porno to load/My brain is gonna freakin explode/And now of course it's time to hit the road/Which means I'll be uncomfortable all day/But that really isn't such a change/If I'm not feeling weird or super strange/My life would be in utter disarray/Cause freaking out is my okay/Good morning, time to start the day!"

Literally how Be More Chill opens. Jesus.

Blaspheme all you want, r195. But for anyone on this board to suggest they can improve on a Sondheim lyric is pretty funny.

Don’t worry, Steve isn’t too thrilled with that lyric either.

"You're a girl and I'm a fella"

"Stanley, stop! Or I'll tell Stella!"

I'm not going to champion Joe Iconis as a great lyricist--he's not. But remember that he usually writes about adolescents in a contemporary setting (like BE MORE CHILL). I think these characters sound like they should. Junior high kids in contemporary America don't sound like teens in BYE BYE BIRDIE or GREASE, or like anything from Sondheim or Oscar Hammerstein.

Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (DEAR EVAN HANSEN) have a gift for well-crafted lyrics that also sound plausible coming from contemporary characters, some of them teenagers.

Theatre evolves. Living writers can't take us back to the 1940s or 50s merely because some of you wish it were so.

Always hoped that I'd be an apostle Knew that I would make it if I tried Then when we retire we can write the gospels So they'll still talk about us when we've died.

— Tim Rice is the absolute worst

Craft is craft, r202. Contemporary voices and characters don't change that.

It's a simple little gig

You help me kill a pig

As long as we’re ragging on Tim Rice, from Chess:

“Tea girls, warm, sweet

Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite”

Wow the idiocy on this thread concerning Oscar is beyond belief. And because of Sondheim's grotesque criticism of him as a talent people conveniently forget that he was the most important figure of the American musical theater in the 20th Century.

Don't throw briquettes at me indeed! I mean tell me that's a joke please! How about Don't throw brickbats at me?!

More awful No Strings lyrics: "loads of lovely love"

Sail Away: "and it's hard to make them accept a steak that isn't served rare and smeared with ketchup" - typically isn't the stereotype that uncultured boors that the song it taking aim at like their steak burned to a crisp and covered in ketchup?

Grotesque? Get a grip, please. Sondheim said that Hammerstein was a pioneer, THE important force in 20th century musicals, that he changed the course of musical theater because of the properties he sought and the way he wanted to present stories. He just wasn't , in Sondheim's view, such a wonderful lyricist. Please don't suggest that he's responsible for the denigration of Oscar Hammerstein.

r206 I actually kind of love that. I also like:

"We'll get Leontyne Price to sing her medley from (Die) Meistersinger" (Sondheim; "Merrily.")

You don't remember Sondheim calling him a ' a man of 'limited talent' in front of the entire nation? I think you're the one who needs to get a grip. That's fucking grotesque and stupid.

R211 Well, not the ENTIRE nation. I have a couple of cousins in St. Louis I think might have missed it.

Rodgers wrote stupid, saccharine, shallow swill and Sondheim knew it.

Bon Jour (the Language Song) from The Unsinkable Molly Brown

"When A Frenchman speaks my language, I'm a slob not to try to speak his. "Bonjour". There lots of German folks talk United States, why shouldn't I know "Wie gehts"?

And then there's Tammy as Molly channeling the voices of both Glynis Johns and Betsy von Furstenberg simultaneously!

*Rodgers and Hammerstein

It's important to say the whole thing, printed in Newsweek.

Hammerstein had limited talent, but infinite soul. Rodgers has infinite talent but limited soul.

I'd say, a very good match, and Sondheim knew it.

In context it's no better. She's a dog but she's such a nice person. And I'd hardly call one of the most influential musical theater talents ever 'limited.' Even a talent such as Rodgers never artistically recovered from his death and probably personally as well.

That's pretty cunty of Sondheim.

No wonder he's such a favorite on DL.

Sondheim is a genius, Hammerstein is a relic of a past time that is better forgotten. Hammerstein is vaudeville, Sondheim is the talkies. Sondheim's work is still being studied for its intellectual depth, Hammerstein is remembered only as golden age nostalgia. Sondheim wrote Send in The Clowns, Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma. It's clear who the artist and who the hack is between the two.

There is nothing wrong with what Sondheim stated. Every talent is limited. Every artist must contend with his the shapes and depth and contours of his or her own talent. One cannot be what one is not. Even in the most sniveling of ninnies would know that instinctively.

But there are sniveling ninnies and then, somewhere down the line, there are show queens.

I'm the world's biggest Sondheim fan, R219, but I disagree. There is room in the world -and the history books -for both Sondheim and Hammerstein. You can praise and appreciate both without denigrating one or the other. Hammerstein was no hack! He was an intelligent craftsman who wrote many classic songs and shows. Sondheim wrote about New York sophisticates. Hammerstein wrote about working-class people and farmers. So what? Hammerstein's lyrics are never less than well-crafted, whether they talk about larks, tall corn, or being taught to be afraid.

Oklahoma! is great, a masterpiece. The big four (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific) are monuments to musical theater. And the B list is pretty good, too (The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, Cinderella).

Sondheim has said of Hammerstein many times, he wasn't just a writer of musicals, but an experimenter of theater. He didn't mean to demean him, but to elevate him.

Sorry, the fourth of the big four is The King and I.

Anyone who calls the music of Richard Rodgers shallow swill doesn’t deserve to have ears.

Sondheim, Porter, Hammerstein, Ebb — whatever their relative lapses — do not belong in the same thread as the writers of Be More Chill, Starlight Express or Jekyll & Hyde. It's not even apples and oranges, it’s apples and cigarette butts.

Sondheim called Rodgers talent 'unlimited.' R222 Never write or make a comment before you read. Even the most sniveling of ninnies and show queens know this. I guess that puts you far below in the mindless ignoramous category.

R222 I apologize. That was clearly meant for the dope at R220.

If you don't like Noel Ca'ad how about

Folks go to London and leave me behind

I'll miss the crowning, Queen Mary won't mind

I don't play Scarlett in Gone With the Wind

That's why the lady is a tramp

More TIm Rice Jesus Christ Superstar King Herod's Song "Prove to me that You're no fool/Walk across my swimming pool".

Precisely, r222. I really wonder if some of these posters don't read (or think) before they comment.

[quote]Wow the idiocy on this thread concerning Oscar is beyond belief. And because of Sondheim's grotesque criticism of him as a talent people conveniently forget that he was the most important figure of the American musical theater in the 20th Century.

He was NOT the most important figure in American musical theater. He can't touch Irving Berlin. Or Cole Porter. Or even Sondheim.

Even Rogers' music was usually better than Hammerstein's lyric.

A few thoughts related to the Sondheim/Hammerstein conversation here. Earlier this year, I finally read [italic]Something Wonderful[/italic], the Rodgers and Hammerstein story as told (beautifully, I thought) by Todd S. Purdham. Something this book clearly showed about Oscar was what a tireless worker he was, and to a large degree, a servant to a Broadway and Hollywood system very different than the one under which Sondheim labored. He was not only beholden to the demands of producers and a host of others, he was dependent on the talent (and personal character) of his many collaborators. All this would surely have some impact on Hammerstein's lyrics, as compared to Sondheim, who was as much a genius musician as lyricist, and therefore independent when it came to composition. Moreover, Sondheim grew up in a time when creators of musical theater were, for better or for worse, much more free agents when it came to their work.

I think they were (and are) both pretty remarkable gents who gave us a lot.

New brain. Just hideous. Especially this

Damn these books, so much flotsam, I could plotsum I distressed, Who'd have guessed, books would make his brain explode

From the Frances Farmer musical: "Mama has sent me to the snake pit/where there is screaming and horror and shit"

Sondheim's first collection of lyrics "Finishing the Hat" was a fun read because he was such a cunt about other lyricist.

It should have been called "Finishing the Hate."

I imagine he got A LOT of blowback from that. Because PART TWO (which came out a year or so later) was completely defanged.

He doesn't, and didn't, comment on living lyricists. But that's a very amusing title change you made, r235--how clever you are.

It's ridiculous to argue who was THE greatest. There were many, many greats. Musical theatre as we know it today probably wouldn't exist without Oscar Hammerstein. He and his work were important to the form. (And not just his partnership with Richard Rodgers.) Without Hammerstein there would be no Sondheim -quite literally. Steve has said if Oscar were a plumber, he would have become a plumber. The man was more of a father figure to him than his own father. Again, you can praise one person without it demeaning the others. Hammerstein was important. Berlin, Porter, Kern, Gershwin, and Bernstein were important. Jerry Herman and Andrew Lloyd Webber were/are important. They created shows that changed the the art form, or put butts in seats at crucial times. You can acknowledge that Evita was a monster hit that launched a sea change in musical theatre without it meaning that Starlight Express was a work of art...

Whoooooooo cares? The cow is gone! Get it back!

Moo moo moo moo!

Moo with me!

[quote]Oklahoma! is great, a masterpiece. The big four (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific) are monuments to musical theater. And the B list is pretty good, too (The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, Cinderella).

The Sound of Music is not B list. It is the sixth highest grossing movie of all time.

The Sound of Music, stage musical, is definitely one of the B list, of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The Sound of Music worked as a movie, as it had star power and the cinematography was glorious.

As a stage show, it is very underwhelming.

I saw a really good production of SoM a few years ago. I like the songs and story much more than "South Pacific".

Dancing through life, down at the Oz Dust

Only because dust is what we come to

R243: that makes it a triumph of form over substance.

[quote]Sondheim is a genius, Hammerstein is a relic of a past time that is better forgotten.

The Golden Age of Broadway is better forgotten?

R247 Yes, it is. Like it or not, the boring stale musicals of the 40's and 50's are better off forgotten. They bring nothing to the table in a world where theatre is now allowed to explore boundaries beyond kitschy bullshit like Cinderella and Oklahoma. Sondheim represents the death of the Hammerstein musical and the birth of the new age of theatre, an age that allows musicals to be an intellectual exploratory art form rather than what musicals like South Pacific and Oklahoma were.

R248 I see you're one of the 'message kids.'

Just a story won't do.

"I hate every chimp I see / From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z."

From: Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off

R248: And yet for all of those new windows opened, all we get is [italic]SpongeBob[/italic] the musical, brownwashing of white slaveowners, and one bad adaptation of a popular Hollywood movie after another.

Some lyrics sound clever and intriguing when you first hear them, but after you hear them over and over and start to think about them, your opinion can change. For me? "Today, the earth was just an address ... " (West Side Story.)

Wow, R253 I have remembered that lyric for years from long before I found out that Mr Sondheim was worshipped by his desperate cult members.

The words are rather metaphysical, like a poem by John Donne.

"Today, the world was just an address, A place for me to live in, No better than all right"

At least Hammerstein attempted to make the characters sound like the people of their region/status. Most everyone in a Sondheim show sounds like an educated wordsmith, even maids and other lowly peoples. In fact, Sondheim has himself complained that he made Maria in WSS sound too much like a sophisticate, instead of a naive Puerto Rican girl fresh off the boat.

"What's the muddle in the middle?

That's the puddle where the poodle did the piddle."

Sunday in the Park with George. Too overtly clever by half and always takes me right out of the show.

r207, what on earth do you think the word "grotesque" means?

"As a stage show, it is very underwhelming."

That original production sure wasn't. Listen to the ancient bootleg of a live performance. It is by turns humorous (who knew TSOM was FUNNY?), moving and loaded with charm (when was the last time you were charmed at a musical?). The audience is completely engaged (the applause at the end of Climb Every Mountain/Act One is spontaneous and torrential).

We could probably have a thread just on Tim Rice.

Jesus, in Gethsemane:

[italic]God, Thy will is hard

But you hold every card![/italic]

Nevertheless, my favorite Tim Rice lyric is from "Rainbow Tour" in EVITA when Che sings, "Franco's reign (rain) in Spain should see out the forties." I've often wondered if it was a tribute to Alan Jay Lerner?

There's no arguing with anyone who calls Hammerstein a hack.

[quote] We could probably have a thread just on Tim Rice.

“My teeth and ambitions are bared,

Be prepared!”

That sounds a bit daft, honestly. How does one bare one’s ambitions, even a lion singing about fratricide?

Did anyone actually call Hammerstein a hack?

R237, what I heard him say was that if Oscar had been a geologist, he would have become a geologist. It is hard to imagine the inspiration which could have Stephen Sondheim styling himself as a plumber.

The people rubbishing Tim Rice are citing some of his best lines, not his worst.

"My teeth and ambitions are bared" is wonderful use of syllepsis, and totally meaningful: Scar has just revealed his plans to the morons, and so now it's do or die.

The Apostles song is meant to show them sozzled after the Last Supper, talking the kind of rubbish drunk or stoned young people talked in 1970. They're not great lines but they're not meant to be.

Of course "Franco's reign in Spain" was a tribute to Lerner - what kind of moron do you think Rice is?

Herod's Song is meant to be done as a vaudevillian star turn. It was camped up to high hell and was JC Superstar's show-stopper in the 70s. "Prove to me that you're no fool/Walk across my swimming pool" was the highlight when it premiered, getting a huge laugh every night.

The lines R259 quoted from Gethsemane do suck. I'm not saying Rice doesn't ever do clunkers, but he has also succeeded often. "Pity the Child" from Chess is a terrific lyric, as is "Endgame". "Oh! What a Circus" from Evita prefigured Princess Diana's death to a degree I found startling, given that nobody so much as knew who she was when he wrote the lyric (and even allowing for what happened when Eva actually died). On the other hand, the last line of the "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" chorus is nauseating bathos in both lyric and music.

Who had swimming pools during Jesus’s time?

'Did anyone actually call Hammerstein a hack?'

Read R219. And also probably the Sondheimite who needs to ask other people what grotesque actually means.

Well, no, r219. that "Sondheimite" knows what grotesque actually means. The poster who used that descriptor in trashing Sondheim's comments about Hammerstein apparently doesn't know, however.

There's a real problem with reading comprehension on this thread.

Sondheimites! Caught right in a sex orgy! Filthy, dirty, filthy!

Sondheim keeps talking about how his lyrics for Maria are embarrassing "It's alarming how charming I feel" but had no problem writing the most ridiculously intricate, sophisticated and intelligent lyrics for Petra in ALNM "It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch/To the paunch and the pouch and the pension."

[quote] In my soul, I feel an inner-lack / Just suppose he wants his dinner back.

OK, I can understand wanting the money for the dinner back. But the actual dinner?

Did Fanny think enemas would be involved?

Has anyone mentioned "From the gutter theatrical" from Evita's High Flying Adored. Tim Rice again.

Were there stars in your eyes When you crawled in at night From the bars, from the sidewalks From the gutter theatrical Don't look down! It's a long, long way to fall

The gutter theatrical is the lyric nethermost.

Uggh.

I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music has some odd lines. "So, let them bring on all their problems/I'll do better than my best".

You can't do better than your best!

Also: "When you wake up, wake up!/It's healthy!"

[quote]You can't do better than your best!

Some of you really need to lighten up and be a bit less literal-minded. Theatre songs are expressions of heightened emotions and might include poetic or metaphoric or exaggerated turns of phrase. Or--gasp--wordplay. Or even humor.

They're not legal briefs or court documents.

In fairness, you can do "better than your best."

Your best is only your best so far.

You always have the chance to do better in the future.

My favorite thread in quite a while. A needed break from the Chalamet trolls, etc.

No that poster who used grotesque to describe Sondheim's description of Hammerstein's talent knows exactly what grotesque means. The stupidity that overwhelms DL can only be attributed to Trump's stupidity infecting the entire country.

In Andrew Lloyd Webber's autobiography, he gushes over Tim Rice's ability.

I was wondering how long it would take before some asshole would find a way to connect this thread to Trump somehow.

That same asshole should invest in a good dictionary.

Tim Rice can be awful, but one lyric that people mock, I think it quite clever:

"Although I'm dressed up to the nines, at sixes and sevens with you."

Clever use of those idioms.

"Better than my best" is akin to someone saying, "I'll give it 110%!!" Remember that Maria is not a scholar.

No the people who are taken over by Trump idiocy need to. Anybody who can defend Sondheim calling Hammerstein 'a limited talent' and not call it twisted and distorted has issues that can only be explained by the assholes taking over DL.

[quote]I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music has some odd lines. "So, let them bring on all their problems/I'll do better than my best". You can't do better than your best!

But people talk like that. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where the leader said, "I need 150% on this." Can you do more than 100%?

R283, do you really think Trump supporters come here, to DL, and make a beeline to threads debating the minutiae of Sondheim's commentary on Hammerstein?

You have a rather high opinion of the cultural nous of Trump supporters.

Context. And character. It’s fine for Maria to speak in silly, over-enthusiastic phrases. It’s not like someone gave that line to a jaded academic like Henry Higgins or John Adams.

I'm not saying they are Trump supporters per se. They just have the reasoning and intellectual capacities of them. Democrats can be dimwits too.

[quote]It’s fine for Maria to speak in silly, over-enthusiastic phrases.

I think The Sound of Music has the same problem as Gypsy: age of actress vs character. Maria is supposed to be 18-20 years old. We've never seen it played as the teenager she's supposed to be.

And r287 proves that thesis. ^^^

"Ah cain't wait ta get to tha Tractor Pull, Cletus! Don't fergit your chawin' tobaccy and MAGA hat!"

"You bet, Billy-Bob! But we gotta get home in time fer the NASCAR race on the Tee-Vee! By the way, you ever seen that bitchy quote from Sondheim about Hammerstein?"

"Aw, HELL no, Cletus! That little cocksucker wouldn't dare criticize the man who practically created the modern Broadway musical! Now that little Jew done gone too far!"

[quote]I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in where the leader said, "I need 150% on this." Can you do more than 100%?

Yes.

Monday: Sell $100 of your product.

Tuesday: Sell $150 of your product.

In this context, 100% stands for either a quota or past benchmark, not the highest possible amount.

[quote]Never understood the problem with "like a lark who is learning to pray." It come from the mind of a young postulant who's all about nature and God. Seems perfectly in character to me.

Only if that postulate is an idiot who knows nothing about the habits of birds.

Only idiots think birds pray, much less take time to learn to do so. And a Roman Catholic postulate would know that birds are not "fallen" creatures and would have no need to pray, even if they could.

The words are just faux-poetic nonsense.

You addled Sondheimites who can defend Sondheim's words prove that stupidity today is flourishing not only in the country but on DL. It is spreading like a fever.

And you are proof of that, r293. Now, have a seat, please.

[quote]You addled Sondheimites who can defend Sondheim's words

That sounds like the easiest job description in the world.

[quote] "like a lark who is learning to pray."

It's not "pray". It's "prey". Maria is a young girl, stuck against her will with a bunch of old women. She is looking for a rich husband, double quick.

r292 has no imagination whatsoever.

Worth noting that Hammerstein had died by the time the film of The Sound of Music went into production and Rodgers himself wrote the lyrics for the two new songs in the film, I Have Confidence and Something Good.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's lyricists have come up with some doozies:

"Miss Daae has returned/I trust her midnight oil is well and truly burned" -- POTO (they changed it, thank God)

"You put the 'fun' in 'funeral'" -- Aspects of Love

Blah, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-blah blaaah! -- Spring Awakening, or, let's throw in a bunch of four-letter words and gibberish, and boom -- "edgy" millennial musical!

[quote]Worth noting that Hammerstein had died by the time the film of The Sound of Music went into production

He was really most sincerely dead by the time the "Sound of Music" movie went into production. He died 9 months after the Broadway show opened in 1959.

Hoping things are really ba bah da

So exciting da ba da ba da

Lee bee dee bee doo bee dee

Love him very ba bah da

Wasn't Margo ba bah da?

Thought the play was dee bee dee

Set and lights were dee bee dee

What a hot, hot opening, wow!

A heeby deeby deeby deeby dee!

A heeby deeby deeby deeby doo!

[quote]I'm not going to champion Joe Iconis as a great lyricist--he's not. But remember that he usually writes about adolescents in a contemporary setting (like BE MORE CHILL). I think these characters sound like they should. Junior high kids in contemporary America don't sound like teens in BYE BYE BIRDIE or GREASE, or like anything from Sondheim or Oscar Hammerstein.

R202, a musical is not a Harmony Korine film. We're not there to see a documentary of actual adolescents. We're there to see an absurdly heightened version of the world in which people burst into song whenever emotion moves them.

By the same token, it's very unlikely a slatternly failed pie-baker and a barber in mid-19th c. London would be able to come up with "A Little Priest" off the cuff. We, the audience, understand that. We don't see it as a fault.

If I wanted to see authentic teens expressing themselves inarticulately and inartfully, I could look on TikTok, Reddit, or Instagram, or just hang around a park and listen.

r292, you really are a pedant. But you ]should learn to spell "postulant."

While I agree with most of those people finding fault with (some of) Tim Rice's lyrics, I actually like the JCS couplet, "Prove to me that you're no fool / Walk across my swimming pool."

The whole point of that show was putting the Passion into a modern vernacular, stripping it of its religious fancy dress. Those lyrics were perfect for Herod's lowbrow burlesque.

Exactly, R306. Making the disciples hippies who sing "What's the buzz? Tell me what's happenin!" is just another example of the same.

Do people believe that Rice and ALW were actually striving for biblical era accuracy, whatever the hell that would look and sound like?

Likely I'll spend my days hearing her turn of phrase

Raisin bread and mayonnaise right now would be sublime....

Ugh.

You'll have listen to Peter Marshall sing "I'll Only Miss Her When I Think of Her." I'm not typing it out. And don't come back stating that Julie Harris's character eats a raisin bread and mayonnaise sandwich in the show and, therefore, it's okay. It's not okay!

When Frank Sinatra recorded the song, he handed it back for revisions in this lyric. Peter Marshall should have done the same. The lyrics for this song suck.

From the flop West End musical Mardi Gras:

Pro gambler to hooker:

Everythin’ about you

The things that songs forget

Like blemishes and sweat

That make you real

[quote]What did people think of Mandy Patinkin's performance (the falsetto and the rage-y emoting) when Evita was running on Broadway?

Do you mean THIS, R33?

[quote] Democrats can be dimwits too.

That’s a lie. The dumbest Democrat is still 150 IQ points ahead of the smartest Republican at minimum.

Marry me, r290! Jesus, I'm still laughing.

Jesus, really?

I wanna wedding with a HONK HONK and a HONK HONK

[quote]He died 9 months after the Broadway show opened in 1959.

You would too if you had to watch a menopausal lesbian play an 18 year old ingenue.

Lesbian? Her? First I ever heard of it!

Meet Me in St. Louis was originally a film musical but it's been adapted for the stage more than once, so it's not really off topic. At any rate, the original lyrics to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas were so depressing that Garland refused to sing them and director Vincent Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed backed her up. Freed sent the song back to Martin and Blane for a rewrite. When Sinatra recorded it, he asked for even further changes to lighten it up.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last.

Next year we will all be living in the past.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork.

Next year we will all be living in New York.

....

Faithful friends who were dear to us

Will be near to us no more

....

And so forth.

[quote]Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last. / Next year we will all be living in the past.

If I were singing to that fucking hammy brat, Margaret O'Brien, I'd be threatening her with death, too.

Well, who the hell was she supposed to sing it to in that picture, Chill Wills?

She could have sung it to one of those lezzies who were eyeing her up on the trolley.

That scene took place way before Christmas.

Good Prince Lancelot from The Operetta

I am the good prince Lancelot I love to sing and dance a lot

“Oh Ophelia,

I just wanna feel ya...”

I don't think "gutter theatrical" is meant to be a contortion. It's meant to refer to the type of show she was in. "Theatrical" is a noun (as in amateur theatricals).

And face it, it's a step up from the bars and the sidewalks!

[quote]“Oh Ophelia, I just wanna feel ya...”

Buttocks!

R265 doesn't appear to know what "camp" means. Poor dear must have got disoriented somewhere on the internet and stumbled across this site by accident.

R323, we should share with those too young to know of what you speak. These are some of the most intentionally dreadful lyrics ever crafted - and a delight!

I know camp and that ain't it. It's more like what the English call "naff."

R311 Democrats who lean far-left are rather dumb. Like their far-right cousins, they think in black-and-white terms and have no critical thinking skills.

What show are those lyrics from, R328? Nothing seems to rhyme.

I've always thought this song shits its way from start to finish. It even has some very good things about it, but the authors could not put it over the top.

We know almost from the beginning that, no, she does not have everything she wants. They establish that nicely in the melody and orchestration. But then it just keeps hammering away at that one point until they get to the inevitable cat/flat rhyme (things are always bad in a musical if you have a cat and a flat. Get a dog!) And then, whatever interesting there was about the song gets lost in a sea of bombast.

"Life is a One Way Street" from JIMMY. The title of the song is a cliche (and the music no better.) Every phrase that follows lives up to the dark promise of the title. This song is a one way street to a garbage heap of awful songs. The orchestrator keeps building, building, building, and the percussionists beat the shit out of the drums, but no one could ever save this awful song.

Bitch all you want about the failings you imagine Sondheim to have committed over his long career. But he's a fucking God compared to most of the people who have written for Broadway. Most of the Broadway catalogue is crap. Rodgers, Hammerstein, Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Bernstein, Styne, Coleman, Sondheim and a handful of others regularly climb above the worst of it and gave us something great. But for everyone of them, there are many more who never worked their way up to even acceptable. Yet they got produced. The great ones are the exceptions. For every "Pacific Overtures," there are ten others like "Jimmy." And few people here are mentioning them. Why? Do you all not know just how dreadful much of the Broadway catalogue really is?

While bashing "Jimmy," I forgot it's another musical with a lonely woman, a cat, and a small apartment.

Please find an original way to signal 'unlucky in love' when y'all write your next musicals.

My turn to be a pedant: Catholic morning prayer is always referencing birds and other creatures praising and blessing the Lord. That Maria would sing this is completely reasonable.

To be a pendant, too: I think the problem isn't with a bird singing to the glory of God. That is an easily digested metaphor and illusion.

The problem is the awkward, added bit about a bird "learning" to pray.

How long does that take? A year? Is it a master's degree?

It's a rather silly idea.

A bird can learn to pray at lot faster than you can learn to think.

[quote] It's a rather silly idea.

It's a lovely, simple metaphor. Most lyrics and poems could be dismissed as "silly" if you're earthbound and spend too much time trying to tear them down.

R329 You must've fallen asleep during the part of 'Annie' where the plucky redheaded orphan performs a 10 minute long soliloquy about QAnon.

"I go to the hills when my heart is lonely...."

When is your heart not lonely? It's there in your chest, all by itself, except for lungs and kidneys and spleens and shit like that which nobody cares about. It's always lonely. Your only heart is destined to be a lonely heart. So fuck you, Oscar Hammerstein.

[quote]It's a lovely, simple metaphor.

Some of you must spend hours at your local drug store, reading all the Hallmark sympathy cards and weeping uncontrollably.

R339, focus on the "lovey and simple" and the pitiful tale is told.

R338 must lead a sad life.

No one gives a smidge When you're in an orphanage.

When I heard there was a musical about Jimmy Walker, the former mayor of New York I was relieved it wasn’t actually about Jimmie “J.J.” Walker.

R341 He is trying to be funny. Trying very hard.

[quote]A heeby deeby deeby deeby dee!

I don't see the problem.

Which is less insensitive: “Ugg-a-Wug” from the Mary Martin [italic]Peter Pan[/italic] or “What Makes the Red Man Red” from Walt Disney’s [italic]Peter Pan[/italic]?

Lyrics (and title) aside, "Ugg-a-Wug" was sung by a blond, blue-eyed Native American.

[quote]"Ugg-a-Wug" was sung by a blond, blue-eyed Native American.

I don't see the problem.

R338: it's a synecdoche.

r342 Not that it's much better, but the actual lyric is:

No one cares for you a smidge

When you're in an orphanage!

Thanks, r350. I should know better.

I guess now that Martin Charnin is dead, Stephen Sondheim can let loose on pointing out his flaws.

I guess this counts as musical theater, since it was adapted for the stage:

In "Good Mornin'" (Singin' in the Rain):

"Buenos dias!

"Muchas frias!"

Many cold feminine things?

"My pussy stinks.

It really do!

My boyfriend thinks

It smells like poo!"

-- The 11 O'clock number in "Cheryl!"

Is Martin Charnin the one who reportedly paid someone to come in and boo Liv Ullmann during her curtain call in I Remember Mama. Maybe he didn't even have to pay them.

The lyrics to the attempted rape in "Ann Frank!" the musical were excruciating:

If you touch me, then you’ll rue it.

But if I tell them you’re a Jew, it

Won’t be good for you, it

Would mean you're in true shit.

Very well then, just do it!

As a Spanish-speaker, I think one of the flaws of EVITA is that is alternated between calling her 'Eva' and 'Evita' without much explanation. A friend actually asked me, "I thought her name was Eva? Why do they call her Evita?" Yes, Eva, was her name, but Evita is a diminutive; the same as calling someone Johnny instead of John in English. However, in Hispanic culture, diminutives are only done with close family and friends. What made Eva Peron different is that she actually encouraged the masses to address her as Evita, which otherwise would be seen as disrespectful. The president's wife was usually referred to as "La Señora." However, Eva only insisted that the higher-ups address her that way.

A definite lapse, R357. I also wonder why Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice didn't include Evita's solo hit single in the show?

Sometimes a false rhyme or anachronistic slang can mar an otherwise delightful lyric and take you out of the intended time and place. From “Toot Sweets” in [italic]Chitty Chitty Bang Bang[/italic]:

“Don’t waste your pucker on some all-day sucker

And don’t try a toffee or cream.

If you seek perfection in sugar confection,

Then there’s something new on the scene.”

So far so good up until the mis-rhyme/of “cream” and “scene.” And “on the scene” sounds more like a late 1960s expression than something one would hear in early 20th century rural England.

Now we're analyzing the Sherman Brothers? Lord have mercy.

An M is not an N. It’s close, but it’s just not the same. I don’t play favorites.

Just to be fair, Stephen Sondheim pulled this particular boner in “You Gotta Have a Gimmick”:

“Dressy Tessie Tura

Is so much more demurer”

R362

I always think it's cheating when a lyricist makes up a name -- and then rhymes it. Charm felt, anyone?

[quote]From “Toot Sweets” in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

I can't get beyond that cutesy title alone -- the cloying play on 1st grade French. Ugh.

What's the problem, R362? When Faith Dane spoke, "demurer" and "Tura" did rhyme.

All over Brooklyn and Queens, you will still hear it. Sondheim was writing for a character. It totally works.

The character is from Texas.

.....except that it was pronounced "deumurrah," r362. And really, r363, do you think Sondheim "made up" a character's name just to make a single rhyme? Or made it up at all, for that matter--not his job.

The Idiocracy is alive and well, clearly.

And in fact, the character's name in the film was Desiree Armfeldt. Does r363 imagine that Bergman anticipated that in 15 years' time an unknown composer-lyricist would want a rhyme for "charm felt"?

I’m more convinced Arthur Laurents thought of the name just to piss Sondheim off.

How shrewd of you to think of it, r369.

[quote] Now we're analyzing the Sherman Brothers? Lord have mercy.

Mary!

[quote]I’m more convinced Arthur Laurents thought of the name just to piss Sondheim off.

You do know that tessitura is a musical word? It means when a voice is in its most comfortable range and producing the best sounding timbre.

More truly awful Don Black and Christopher Hart lyrics for ALW:

"How can I commencer

If you won't parler français with me?"

Betty Bruce was also from New York City and she did not affect a Texas twang when she played the Texas Twirler. There is nothing in the script that says Tessie is from Texas, except that stage name.

I can think of 10 ways she became the Texas Twirler that are more interesting - and better for an actress to play - than drawing a short, straight boring line, from that stage name to being born in Texas.

there's a difference between calling out bad lyric-writing and pedantry.

R374, none of those things preclude her actually being somebody who moved from Texas to Kansas City and tried to hide her accent.

R363 Sondheim didn't make up the name Tessie Tura. She's a character straight from Gypsy's own memoir.

[quote] I always think it's cheating when a lyricist makes up a name -- and then rhymes it. Charm felt, anyone?

What an incredibly ignorant statement

What does Gypsy Rose Lee have to say about her?

This doozy of a couplet is courtesy of Jerry Herman’s “The Man in the Moon”:

“So don’t ever offend her,

Remember her gender.”

Clink, clank, clunk!

This thread is full of ignorant statements. An unusual number, even for this board.

[quote]An M is not an N.

And a house is not a home.

[quote] I can't get beyond that cutesy title alone -- the cloying play on 1st grade French. Ugh.

It’s still demonstrates more and better knowledge of French than [italic]Be More Chill[/italic] does of English.

It’s = it

Tim Rice, "Hosanna" from Jesus Christ Superstar:

Nothing can be done to stop The shouting, If every tongue were still The noise would still continue The rocks and stones themselves Would start to sing

"March of the Falsettos" from Falsettos. Falsettos don't march, they sing!!

R385, you've put me in the awkward position of having to defend Tim Rice. He's picking that language up from the Gospel of Luke in the Bible.

[quote]As [Jesus] went along, people spread their cloaks on the road. When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

[quote]Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied,[bold]“if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”[/bold]

[quote] And a house is not a home. —Hal David

And the world is not a circle, but an oblate spheroid.

I'll try anther Tim Rice from Evita this time from the cut number "The Lady's Got Potential".

The lady's got potential, she was setting her sights On making it in movies with her name in lights The greatest social climber since Cinderella.

^ Forgot the following bit:

OK, she couldn't act but she had the right friends And we all know a career depends On knowing the right fella to be stellar.

But Eva DID sleep her way to the top. What's the problem?

That only rhymes in England.

R380 And another idiot heard from.

That lyric is in what is supposed to be a bad song in a clunky operetta.

How many times have I heard Leslie Bricusse say that?

"Your only heart is destined to be a lonely heart. :

Not when it's one with the cosmos.

'And a house is not a home."

And a secretary is not a toy.

That was Frank Loesser.

[quote] This thread is full of ignorant statements. An unusual number, even for this board.

Mary!

"That was Frank Loesser."

R33, my favorite critic’s comment about Mandy Patinkin’s high pitched vocals as Che is he sounded like “a pissed off choir boy.” I forgot who wrote that.

But was he wrong?

No, he wasn’t, R401. It was totally apt. That’s how Patinkin sounded as Che. I think Che should always sound like David Essex in the original London production-a raspy, laid back sort of sound helped along by whiskey and cigarettes.

Sondheim using the rhymes “flat/cat” in both Do I Hear a Waltz? and Follies is particularly irritating because Leona and Hattie are Americans and Americans have rarely used the term “flat,” it’s always been “apartment.” Sondheim’s anglophilia gets the best of him on occasion.

That's just not so, R403. New York City is filled with rail road flats, sometimes called shot gun flats. Those terms would be instantly recognizable to any Noo Yawker and probably to anyone in any city on the East Coast, at least. And the use of simply "flat" is not at all uncommon there. It's exactly the kind of apartment one would expect the girl in "Broadway Baby" to have.

That might be so, R404, but I’ve lived in NYC all my life and even my grandmother never referred to her apartment as her “flat.” That’s a British term.

It's a term used there. But it's used in the US, too.

New Yorker here. I've also heard "cold-water flat." The word is only really used here in those expressions. Someone might say, "I've lived in a lot of apartments. My first apartment was a railroad flat." So it is authentic to this city.

Do NOT challenge the supremacy of Sondheim, R403.

The master (and his Sondheimites) are NEVER wrong. Not ever.

R404 and R407, you’re failing to grasp my point. Must you be so obtuse? That rhymes with Toulouse, right?

Yes, those terms are used to describe certain types of apartments but my point is the term “flat” has never been used in common conversation. Nobody here has said “I need to get the plumber up to my flat to fix my pipes.”

OK to continue trashing Sondheim(and yes dear god he's a fucking genius and has given me some of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life. so go ahead and Mary! me a little) and his trashing of dear Oscar what's his problem with 'When the sky is a bright canary yellow'? We know the sky is not literally yellow. We know the sun is yellow. We know an afternoon can be golden which is a type of yellow. So EVERY english speaker gets instinctively what 'When the sky is a bright canary yellow' means except Steve.

The sky was extremely yellow after I got to it.

Forget "canary yellow skies."

I want "MARY Me A Little" as the title of the next Theatre Gossip Thread.

[quote]'When the sky is a bright canary yellow'

I would imagine that this only happens during a tornado or a nuclear aftershock.

...And that's pretty much what Sondheim said, r413.

My takeaway from this thread?

I wish Sondheim HAD become a geologist.

Musical theatre, and the people who love it would both be a lot more fun.

"You do know that tessitura is a musical word? It means when a voice is in its most comfortable range and producing the best sounding timbre."

Dude, please don't rely on unsourced Wikipedia articles for everything. That is not the definition of tessitura. From Encyclopedia Britannica: Tessitura, (Italian: “texture”), in music, the general range of pitches found in a melody or vocal part.

Tessitura refers to the distance between the lowest and highest notes of a composition, not the comfort of the singer.

[quote]...but my point is the term “flat” has never been used in common conversation.

And your point is WRONG. Few of us care about you or your grandmother. But must of us know that neither of you are the last word on English usage. Especially when people have given you examples of the word "flat" in 20th century New York City.

"Apartment" is the more commonly used word. But it is not the only word. And the young woman singing "Broadway Baby" in 1923 is very likely to have used, as evidenced by shotgun flat/railroad flat, and cold water flat. They were often both. And they were just the sort of digs an aspiring young actress could afford.

And here's a hint. Avoid words like "never" unless you want to be shot down. The word is both too expansive and too absolute to be used the way you have used it.

For r410:

Also for r410:

And also for r410:

Last one:

[quote]And your point is WRONG. Few of us care about you or your grandmother. But must of us know that neither of you are the last word on English usage.

R417 sounds nice. And fun.

Those shots were clearly taken during a tornado or a nuclear aftershock.

[quote] But must of us know that neither of you [bold]are[/bold] the last word on English usage.

Apparently you're not, either.

Oh, [italic]dear.[/italic]

I must be the only person on DL who has no problem with Broadway's greatest lyricist rhyming flat and cat.

Let's get back to Tim Rice. From Evita "A New Argentina": "All exiles are distinguished, more important, they're not dead." and "Don't think I don't think like you." (This second one must be from the original cast recording cos I don't remember it from the Broadway cast recording).

The ultimate in bad lyrics is Paris Makes Me Horny from Victor/Victoria. Imagine having to try sell this to an audience?

[quote] Rome maybe hot, sexy it is not. Paris is so sexy. Ridin' in a taxi gives me apoplexy. Been ta Lisbon and Lisbon is a has-been. Schlepped ta Stockholm, an' brought a lotta schlock home. Also Oslo, and Oslo really was slow. Paris makes me horny; It's not like "Californy" Paris is so dizzy; Jack , it's such an aphrodisiac! oooooh! It's true. Paris thrills me. When I see the Eiffel Tower, I have to go and take a shower. It's true, I do. Paris kills me, And it makes me sexy. As for Madrid, save it for El Cid. Dinin' at the Lido loosens my libido Like a big torpedo. Seen Geneva, it's hardly jungle fever. Been ta Bussels could use some red corpuscles. Tried Toronto, departed "molto pronto". Paris makes me tingle; Makes me glad and single. London's okay, if it's for one day. Oh, but Paris makes me sexy In this solar plexy Been ta Munich, where ev'ry guy's a eunuch. An' ta Dublin, things ain't exactly bubblin'. Hate Helsinki, the Finns are kinda kinky But Paris...my ...ah, ah, ah, Paris!

"Got a one-bedroom flat/Got a self-sufficient cat"

—Karen Morrow, I HAD A BALL

R426 has taken both lines out of context in order to laugh and point (and even then I can't really see why). In fact, A New Argentina is an excellent lyric.

"For distance lends enchantment/And that is why/All exiles are distinguished - more important, they're not dead" explains Peron's case for wanting to cut and run succinctly and in no way clunkily.

What is wrong with "Don't think I don't think like you/ I often get those nightmares too"? She sees him losing his nerve and she's playing him: yes, we think alike, we're totally on the same page, only let's do the opposite of what you just said. Throughout the play Eva's intentions are often at odds with Peron's, but he never realises it because of the way she manipulates him. (Hence the ire of the army.)

I think Rice's best attribute is psychology. Judas in JC Superstar is one of the best-drawn characters in musical theatre, and that's NOT thanks to the Bible. Songs like High Flying, Adored and Rainbow High expose real truths about Eva (and, eerily, Diana). Waltz for Eva and Che is written so that Elaine Paige could read all the emphases as jabs of pain from Eva's cancer and show its contribution to her exasperation with Che. I agree there are occasional clunky lyrics even in some of these songs, but nowhere near as many as people are saying, and what he is saying more than makes up for them.

I suppose the problem is that to get this aspect you have to see an actor in the role, and most of you have only seen Patti LuPone. (I did too, and it was horrible, but at least I had already seen an actress do it.)

There's a lyric in Sondheim's "Good Thing Going" that has always bugged me: We took for granted a lot; But still I say; It could have kept on going; Instead of just kept on."

"Instead of just kept on"? Isn't there something missing there?

And I get that Sondheim had a bad experience with homophobic and alcoholic Rodgers on "Do I Hear a Waltz," and Sondheim was probably trying to make a clever remark by comparing Rodgers to Hammerstein, but I will never understand that "limited talent" insult. The man who wrote the lyrics to Ol' Man River, If I Loved You and Something Wonderful (not to mention the books for the three shows the songs came from) had LIMITED talent?!

I also think Sondheim is wrong to denigrate the lyrics of Hart and Ira Gershwin.

He's not allowed to express an opinion?

There's nothing missing there, r430. It's a very succinct description of a relationship that failed to grow.

I think Sondheim may have regretted the Rodgers-Hammerstein comparison, not least because it caused a rift in his relationship with that family. But I think he meant what he said, and I think he valued Hammerstein's unlimited soul far more than Rodgers' unlimited talent.

There are so many blockheaded comments on this thread. Where do you all come from?

Actually, the sky turns green in anticipation of a tornado. So the lyric should go:

"When the sky is a bright tornado emerald...."

""Instead of just kept on"? Isn't there something missing there?"

Not at all. "Keep on keepiing on" is an idiomatic phrase. "Kept on" would be its past tense.

Isn’t the lyric “We could have kept on [bold]growing[/bold], instead of just kept on”?

Sorry, “It could have kept on growing”

That would not only make it over-rhymed and sing-song-y but also would not set-up "on/gone" which resolves the song's title at its conclusion.

This was a good idea for a thread . . . that went straight to hell when people actually started posting on it.

[quote] That would not only make it over-rhymed and sing-song-y but also would not set-up "on/gone" which resolves the song's title at its conclusion.

And yet, “growing” is what Sondheim wrote

If we’re going to pick apart lyrics, can we at least quote them correctly?

How does turning “going” into “growing” add any rhymes?

It doesn't. But apparently it helped to clarify the meaning for some people. The rhymes in that lyric are fine either way.

Canary yellow. What's the problem???

“Growing” makes perfect sense in that line.

If the word were “going”, then, yes, it makes no sense.

(But it’s not)

I always thought that, in the climax of "Soliloquy" from "Carousel," the lyrics about Billy needing to get money for his child don't quite match the power of the music.

"I'll go out and make it, or steal it, or take it, or die!"

What, exactly, is the difference between stealing money and taking it? That ending always bothered me.

I saw that as Billy diminishing the crime he’s about to commit, trying to justify it.

[quote] 'When the sky is a bright canary yellow'

I grew up listening to the OBCR and soundtrack of South Pacific and I always heard "When the sky is a bright and merry yellow." I was flummoxed years later when I saw the sheet music.

[quote]"I'll go out and make it, or steal it, or take it, or die!"

And dying isn't the best way to make money for your kid unless you're already rich.

Dying was the best thing he did for his child.

I love The Wheels of a Dream but someone who doesn't care much for Lynn Ahrens once pointed out to me that for such a soaring melody and hopeful, optimistic context, wheels are an earthbound metaphor.

"That car full of hope/Will always gleam" doesn’t exactly soar.

Sondheim on "A lark that is learning to pray"

[quote]And while we're at it, how can you tell a lark that is just learning to pray from one that's actually praying? Wait a minute -- a lark praying? What are we talking about?

[quote]What, exactly, is the difference between stealing money and taking it?

At the time he sings this, they are living with Nettie Fowler. I always understood the lyric to mean he would take Nettie's charity in the form of money if she offered it.

"I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair."

That's such a stupid lyric. I don't care how big a bouffant you have, you could never get a whole man inside it.

A girl might try. Which hair are we talking about?

There must be some gayling on this thread who can come up with a clever retort involving "bouffant," "man," "(w)hole" and "inside." Any takers?

"The Wheels of a Dream...wheels are an earthbound metaphor."

And perhaps a smidge too close to sounding like an ad for the Ford Foundation that housed the show?

"And while we're at it, how can you tell a lark that is just learning to pray from one that's actually praying?'

Easy. It mispronounces the Latin.

Lynn Ahrens? Who?

Oh, right. The little TV jingle writer.

dull thud.

Only boring people are bored.

Don’t call us “gaylings” if you don’t even know how to post quotes, bitch

How prescient of r438!

R454 - She is not being literal. She is washing that man out of her hair in the colloquial sense of getting him out of her life. Thus "... and send him on his way."

Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?

R462 I was joking -- making fun of people taking lyrics too literally.

[quote]Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?

It's cumming, not coming!

And it's for me! For me! FOR ME!

In "Fugue for Tinhorns," Nicely-Nicely sings, "I got the horse right here. The name is Paul Revere."

However, there is no horse in the scene as staged. He doesn't have a horse, he has a racing form.

Furthermore, the character's name is not Paul Revere, it is Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

One of many garish errors from the sloppy and cloth-eared Frank Loesser.

I think your stupid point has been made by now, asshole

[quote]Sometimes a false rhyme or anachronistic slang can mar an otherwise delightful lyric and take you out of the intended time and place. From “Toot Sweets” in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

“Don’t waste your pucker on some all-day sucker

And don’t try a toffee or cream.

If you seek perfection in sugar confection,

Then there’s something new on the scene.”

So far so good up until the mis-rhyme/of “cream” and “scene.” And “on the scene” sounds more like a late 1960s expression than something one would hear in early 20th century rural England.

R359, I agree! I wonder if, for the last line, "Then there's something sweet as a dream." would work, or would that be too saccharine?

Oops! I didn't use the quote function very well. Only the last part is mine. The rest was from R359's post.

'But I think he meant what he said, and I think he valued Hammerstein's unlimited soul far more than Rodgers' unlimited talent.

There are so many blockheaded comments on this thread. Where do you all come from?'

And exactly where did he say he valued Hammerstein's unlimited soul more than Rodger's unlimited talent? You think? No you're simply pulling shit out of your ass. People knew what he said and Irving Berlin wrote a letter to Newswekk he was so enraged. Before you call people blockheads know what the fuck you're talking about.

Didn't Sondheim have some relationship with Hammerstein growing up? Like they were neighbors or something?

I love you, R470.

[quote]Dying was the best thing he did for his child.

Sometimes it works the other way around.

I think "Wheels of a Dream" ties in nicely with the scene, because Sarah and Coalhouse have just taken their first ride in his new car, which had been celebrated shortly before.

Saying that wheels are an earthbound metaphor strikes me as a weird criticism and oddly literal. The imagery works fine in the show.

I don’t mind the metaphor, but thelyrics are so clunky. Easily the worst in the show.

[quote]I don’t mind the metaphor, but thelyrics are so clunky. Easily the worst in the show.

But it's a power ballad so nobody notices.

Alan Jay Lerner. I talk to the trees But they don't listen to me I talk to the stars But they never hear me The breeze hasn't time To stop, and hear what I say I talk to them all In vain

I talk to the trees,

And they came and took me away.

Cole Porter used me as a rhyme.

""You're the top, You're an ocean liner, You're the top, You're Margaret Vyner.

When Nellie sings I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair, maybe a fella shot his load on her bush, and she's trying to clean her pussy, but the water is just making the cum sticky and hard to remove...

R478, The Smothers Brothers (especially Tommy, of course) made fun of this lyric on "The Judy Garland Show" (episode 9, October 1963, the episode Barbra Streisand appeared on).

"The hills are alive....

...and it's pretty fright'ning...."

"I'm not singing now, I am pre-recorded.

I'm just mouthing words that I've sung before.

And what is it like to be singing nothing?

It's an awful bore."

If MAD Magazine in the 1960s could publish lyrics that scan properly, why can't we have that today in our new musicals? Sadly, much of what is being produced on Broadway is not even up to MAD Magazine standards.

“Or steal it or take it” is weird because the money note is “take,” and it should be “steal.”

[quote]“Or steal it or take it” is weird because the money note is “take,” and it should be “steal.”

The "a" in take is easier to sing because it's an open mouth sound. "Steal" has the "e" sound and is more closed and harder to sing. So they put take on the money note because it's easier to sing.

"Lark that is learning to pray"

Everyone always criticizes this lyric, including Sondheim. But I think it's perfectly apt.

Maria is talking about herself. She is the lark (singing bird) that is learning to pray (postulant training to be a nun).

It does seem a slightly awkward metaphor, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned this. Hammerstein was writing for a character, who might have used this allusion.

"A lark [italic]who [/italic]is learning to pray"

The correct lyric sounds much more musical. I can't see anyone criticizing this line. Maria is very young and innocent, and has been steeped in religious mysticism via her convent studies. To her, in her joy, every bird sings for the glory of God. I think it's an very apt piece of character writing.

r488 is exactly right. There is SO MUCH to hate in The Sound of Music. But that one line is the least of it.

"La, a note to follow so...."

The biggest cop out in the R&H canon.

We got the red blues

We got the red blues

We got the red blues

We got the red blues

We got the red blues

We got the red blues

We got the red red red that's what we said

Red blues.

Indeed, Cole got tired and bored after delivering the first few choruses of genius. By the third go 'round, things could get dicey. And it only got worse if he kept going.

You're the top! You're the Tower of Babel.

You're the top! You're the Whitney Stable.

By the River Rhine, You're a sturdy stein of beer,

You're a dress from Saks's, You're next year's taxes, '

You're stratosphere.

You're my thoist, You're a Drumstick Lipstick,

You're the foist in the Irish svipstick,

I'm a frightened frog that can find no log to hop,

But if, Baby, I'm the bottom,

You're the top!

Irving Berlin wrote the best lyrics to You're the Top:

You’re The Top!

You’re a gin and tonic

You’re The Top!

You’re a high colonic

You’re the rhythmic beat

Of a bridal suite in use

You’re the mound of Venus

You’re King Kong’s penis

You’re self-abuse!

You’re an arch

In the Rome collection

You’re the starch

In a groom’s erection

I’m a eunuch who

Has just been through an op

But if, baby, I’m the bottom

You’re The Top!

Interestingly in a long song Hart could sustain a comic lyric. Listen to Vivienne Segal's full version of To Keep my Love Alive which is rather lengthy. It's as good at the end as it is in the beginning.

I was watching the bluray of Deep in My Heart which is rarely seen but I highly recommend it. It's got some terrific numbers and god forgive me but Jose Ferrer who I usually hate I find charming in it. He and Traubel doing The Leg of Mutton Rag are wonderful. And I even like his Jazza Jazza Doo Doo number which most people find as obnoxious and tedious as Isobel Elsom does in the film.

Anyway Oscar wrote with Romberg some of Sigmund's most imperishable songs. Romberg, Kern, Rodgers. Limited talent. Ha!

Seriously? Irving Berlin?

I’ve been to Nice and the Isle of Greece.... and I’ve sipped champagne on a yacht?

That isn’t a showtune, R496. And you should thank God for that every day of your life.

[quote]That isn’t a showtune, [R496]. And you should thank God for that every day of your life.

I'm workshopping "Charlene - The Musical!" as we speak!

The title has been changed to "Charlene the Teen!"

Well then more power to you.

Boom chick-a chick-a chick-a

Pah pah-ka wa-ka wa-ka

Ka ka-ka wa-ka wa-ka

Poo poo-soo woo-sa woo-sa

Pah pah-ka wa-ka wa-ka, wow!

Love boom chick-a chick-a chick-a

I make you lucky love pah pah-ka wa-ka wa-ka

You lucky ducky love ka ka-ka wa-ka wa-ka

When you met up with me poo poo-soo woo-sa woo-sa

You met up with lady luck boom chick-a chick-a chick-a

Pah pah-ka wa-ka wa-ka, wow! Wow!

Yes, r487, you're right, but that point has been made two or three times before earlier in the thread.

Yes and I made them! I was just watching the movie last night having forgotten about his relationship with Romberg(we were talking about his relationships with Kern and Rodgers) and I thought Jesus Christ this man was a giant in 20th Century popular culture.

God forbid anyone pick through the Sondheim catalog and apply the same nitpicking literalism to his imagery that he did to Hammerstein's.

The full lyric is "to sing through the night, like a lark who is learning to pray." So, Maria must learn to sublimate her natural ebullient inclinations, to be pious.

Makes perfect sense.

Tim Rice in Jesus Christ Superstar: "This Jesus Must Die"

What then to do about Jesus of Nazareth? Miracle wonder man, hero of fools No riots, no army, no fighting, no slogans One thing I'll say for Him, Jesus is cool

er, fools and cool does not rhyme.

Almost-rhymes don't make a lyric inherently bad. This is "worst musical theatre lyrics"

I'm not sure if it was intentional (probably though), but Tim Rice referencing three Cole Porter songs in the Terrace Duet in Chess takes me out of the song. Begin the Beguine is not a common phrase, especially for a Russian to use.

Listen, I hate to break up the mood How do you say, begin the beguine Haven't you noticed We're still one character short In this idyllic, well-produced scene? [FLORENCE] How could I not? Miss Vassy regrets Anything goes, with your opponent.

Such whining and carping about Sondheim, sitting at home with the hubs and the dogs and not bothering a living soul on the DL.

And exactly how do you know that? He won't shut up about that fucking lark.

Guess, r510.

Yellow bellied sap sucker wouldn’t have fit the melody.

[quote]The full lyric is "to sing through the night, like a lark who is learning to pray."

Do larks sing at night?

With an owl, you lose the alliteration of “like a lark“.

Maria is the one singing through the night. But she does it like a lark who is learning to pray which I assume the bird can do at any time of day it can find the time for practice.

From DL's favorite show:

"I have gone to Moscow, it's very gay/ Well, anyway on the first of May..."

I get the joke here, but no one has ever been able to deliver that line so that it makes sense, or is even funny. By the time you get past that clunky internal rhyme of "anyway," the rest of the line just becomes tortured.

The man was dying, cut him some fucking slack.

Hey, I'm too damn busy flying around looking for food and making a nest. Who has time to learn to pray?

Moscow is only gay(as in happy)one day out of the year on May 1st labor day when there is national celebrating. And she just happened to be there on that one day. And it still can't compare to Paris any day of the year. Maybe not funny but it's not tortured and it makes sense.

The most horrific thing that happens in Steve's dungeon is that he reads twinks his worst lyrics.

She thinks of the Ritz, oh it's so schizo

She thinks of the Ritz, oh it's so schizo

And teaches them The Miller's Son.

[quote] The most horrific thing that happens in Steve's dungeon is that he reads twinks his worst lyrics.

At least he doesn’t dress them like Dainty June and make them sing the cow song.

If Hammerstein had never met Rodgers, he'd still be considered a theater giant, with SHOWBOAT and his other operetta contributions.

We are still waiting for that rendition Julie Andrews promised us she could still do. And in her case, I bet she wouldn’t mind doing the original introduction.

Of “Ol’ Man River.”

Red red red red Red red orange Red red orange Orange pick up blue Pick up red Pick up orange From the blue-green blue-green Blue-green circle On the violet diagonal Di-ag-ag-ag-ag-ag-o-nal-nal Yellow comma yellow comma Numnum num numnumnum Numnum num... Blue blue blue blue Blue still sitting Red that perfume Blue all night Blue-green the window shut Dut dut dut Dot Dot sitting Dot Dot waiting Dot Dot getting fat fat fat More yellow Dot Dot waiting to go Out out out No no no George Finish the hat finish the hat Have to finish the hat first Hat hat hat hat Hot hot hot it's hot in here... Sunday!

Better far than a metaphor Can ever, ever be. Love! You are love!

Steve is trying to capture in his staccato words and notes Seurat's pointalism. It's still shit but everyone else thinks it's genius so what the hell do I know?

I'm sure he'll be crushed to learn this, r530. Devastated, even.

One word:

“Shipoopi”

[quote]Of “Ol’ Man River.”

It'll never top Dorothy Zbornak's.

"I get the joke here, but no one has ever been able to deliver that line so that it makes sense, or is even funny."

I'd like to know what you think the joke is.

Hammerstein also co-wrote both book and lyrics to Rudolph Friml's best work, Rose-Marie. It was a huge hit both on Broadway and in London in the early 1920s. Despite being popular enough to receive three film versions, it is almost never revived today because the main subplot involves miscegenation (sound familiar?) Interestingly, there was a note in the original program that the musical numbers would not be individually listed since they were so heavily interwoven into the dramatic action.

^ Rudolf, not Rudolph.

^ Rudolf, not Rudolph.

R532: You're right. What crap.

Onna White turned Shipoopi into a fantastic production number.

[quote]Di-ag-ag-ag-ag-ag-o-nal-nal

He's giving me a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack!

Hammerstein also did a great job writing new English lyrics to Bizet’s Carmen music to create Carmen Jones, although I know that some people dislike the “Black” dialect: dem, dat, etc.

Peter Griffin's version of Shipoopi is definitive.

What’s a shipoopi?

An absolutely perfect production number for a period piece set in the Hawkeye State, plus the romance-centered lyrics reflect the plot at large.

It was the only way you could get away with a feces joke in 1957.

R452 Those Peter Griffin musical numbers are brilliantly orchestrated and choreographed.

I'd rather have one Peter Griffin instead of a hundred Sondheims.

You do realize that Sondheim neither orchestrates nor choreographs, yes?

I'd rather spend a night out watching Peter Griffin's many and varied, brilliantly orchestrated and choreographed production numbers instead of a hundred nights with Sondheim.

And I'm sure you do, darling, I'm sure you do.

At least they don’t autotune the singing like that Ryan Murphy abomination.

Any of you queens who would mention Stephen Sondheim in a thread titled, "Worst Ever Musical Theater Lyric," are an embarrassment to the homo race. Not only that, you should all have your membership in the International Thespian Society revoked posthaste.

It you are criticizing Sondheim in this thread, you know nothing about theater, nothing about art, nothing about taste or discernment. All of you doing so are all no better than Republicans.

R551: “Love is a lecture on how to correct yer mistakes”

R551 He is not above criticism.

R553, read the title of the thread.

Sondheim on his worst day never wrote the "Worst Ever" lyric.

I don’t know. The one quoted at r552 is pretty damn bad.

Does anyone really enjoy his sour sentimentality?

I love Sondheim, and is is frequently brilliant, but he has written a few clunkers over the years.

Even Sondheim admits this.

[quote]Even Sondheim admits this.

He has admitted to writing clunky lyrics? I’ve never read that. Which ones?

“It’s alarming how charming I feel”

Here you go, R558.

I am so tired of hearing him bitch about “it’s alarming how charming I feel.” Why the fuck didn’t he change it then in one of the WSS revivals by the time he was widely acknowledged as the God of All Lyricists?

I love reading his assessment of the lyrics of others. Doesn't mean I have to agree with him. And often don't. I appreciate these opinions the way that I'd love to hear Albee or Miller discuss Shaw or Wilde or O'Neill. The masters have a right to criticize their predecessors.

Come on, everyone. Lyrics are almost always weak when typed out and read on paper or on screen. As Sondheim and so many others have said, they are different from poetry; they are not created to live apart from their music and their performance aloud. Thus almost every great lyric can seem puerile when posted here out of context to make some bitter queen’s petty point.

So the “worst ever” lyrics we should be citing here are the ones that land with a thud or a giggle or a shrug on stage.

[quote]“It’s alarming how charming I feel”

Sondheim didn't criticize that lyric for being a "clunker." He criticized it for being too clever. The character was not as clever as he is.

Humblebrag.

Indeed, Sondheim said that “It’s alarming how charming I feel” is worthy of Oscar Wilde, which makes it appropriate for a "young immigrant girl" to be so witty.

I think what Sondheim said was that, with this lyric, this young immigrant girl "would not be out of place in Noel Coward's drawing room," and that therefore it was inappropriate for her to sing.

One could say the same thing about anyone speaking in rhymed verse.

But Maria isnt't. She's singing. Once you've heightened the moment with music, you have to heighten the language used, too.

Bravo, r567.

Oh for lord's sake. Sondheim was asked once upon a time about the WSS lyrics. He made this observation—which he has every right to do—that he thought the lyric a mistake. If you do a bit of research, you'll find in FINISHING THE HAT that it was Sheldon Harnick (no slouch he) who pointed out that there were parts of I Feel Pretty that might be a little untrue to Maria's character. Sondheim agreed and attempted to simplify the phrases, but he was outvoted by his collaborators. That he seems to have harped on this is only because he has been asked over and over again about the initial observation and has to continue to repeat the story. Debating about whether he is correct about his own work seems silly to me.

Didn't Sondheim say (quite awhile back) that, of his contemporaries, Bock and Harnick were his favorite writing team?

One could see why. B&H were among the most "character-ful" writers of the Golden Age.

Not worst at all, but I've always been partial to this one from Sunset Boulevard: "I must say RKO are okay!"

Why does Sondheim hate immigrants? Just because Maria was from Puerto Rico doesn't mean she was stupid. She probably had access to books and movies. The lyric doesn't have to be precisely how she speaks. In her giddy with excitement state of mind, she could be quoting a line from an old movie she saw.

[quote] She probably had access to books and movies.

Probably? Based on what?

You don't know the first fucking thing about the kind of economic changes that occurred in Puerto Rico after World War 2. Nor do you know about the poverty that drove a half million people to leave agrarian Puerto Rico to take their chances in New York City.

Books and movies? Maria was lucky to have shoes.

r573, in a thread rife with stupid and/or ignorant comments, yours stands out.

[quote]"I must say RKO are okay!"

It should be RKO is OK.

Not as clever, but correct.

Right, R576.

Now come back and primly chastise Cole Porter for "It's de-lovely," etc.

I dare you.

Cole Porter was just being playful with words, not forcing wordplay.

"De-lovely" doesn't offend because it's not even a word. It doesn't stop the listener with bad grammar.

I made a new thread to continue our pointless bitchery on

r576 But the British (which the lyricist is, but the character presumably isn't) would say "are."

One thing I've always disliked since I really noticed it is actually from "The Wizard of Oz":

"The Wizard of Oz is one because

Because, because, because, because, because

Because of the wonderful things he does!

We're off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizard of Oz!"

This is a terrible lyric, because "does" and "because" do not rhyme with Oz.

To make it worse, Judy Garland (who has by far the most powerful voice among the cast, so you can really hear her) pronounces them as if they do rhyme, so instead of singing "because" and "does" as they are normally pronounced (and as Bert Lahr and Jack Haley and Roy Bolger do, if you listen closely), she sings it like this:

"The Wizard of Oz is one beCOZZ

BeCOZZ, beCOZZ, beCOZZ, beCOZZ, beCOZZ

BeCOZZ of the wonderful things he DOZZ!

We're off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizard of Oz!"

Masquerade! Papers faces on parade! Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you! Masquerade! Every face a different shade! Masquerade! Look around; there's another mask behind you!

[quote] so instead of singing "because" and "does" as they are normally pronounced (and as Bert Lahr and Jack Haley and Roy Bolger do, if you listen closely), she sings it like this:

Actually, if you listened really closely and knew anything about it, you'd know that Buddy Ebsen, who originally began filming as The Tin Woodsman, obviously had to have his solo number re-recorded with Jack Haley, who replaced him, but We're Off to See the Wizard was never re-recorded and it's Ebsen's voice on the soundtrack for those sequences .More trivia available on the subject if you want it but it's Ebsen's voice in We're Off.

^ And who the Hell is Roy Bolger?

^ And who the Hell is Roy Bolger?

Boy Bulger?