“Witches can be right. Giants can be good.”
This line comes from Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. The film adaptation is released next month – starring the compulsorily adored Meryl Streep. It’s a good time to defend the beautiful language contained within the lyrics of many musicals.
The line is typical Sondheim – widely respected as our greatest living lyricist – in that it captures every nuanced paradox between the traditional binaries of “good” and “evil” with beautiful simplicity.
It’s the perfect example of a man who meticulously minds his language. He has to – to make all his eloquence melodic as composer as well as lyricist.
For many theatre-lovers, there are musicals, then there are Sondheim musicals. The latter is a category of its own because with Sondheim, every single word, every rhyme has been laboured over to the point that it’s mellifluous and articulate (if a little garrulous).
Musicals are often lampooned for not minding their language at all. Detractors highlight how irritating it is when characters burst into song arbitrarily. Then, they claim, the lyrics they belt are cursory, cheesy and slapdash. Rhyme swallows meaning; melodrama gulps away feeling.
Lyn Gardner made the point on the Guardian’s theatre blog that musical theatre haters are often snobs, like the Evening Standard’s David Sexton, who dismissed musicals as repellent, embarrassing and stupid – even Sondheim’s work: “The cleverer such an innately idiotic form tries to be, the more annoying it is.”
But some of the English language’s most profound and powerful language can be found in the lyrics of musicals – and not just Sondheim’s.
There’s a reason, though, that he’s worshipped. “I chose and my world was shaken – so what? / The choice may have been mistaken – the choosing was not” from Move On, in Sunday in the Park with George, is a line that reveals why. It’s one of the few verses I’d consider tattooing across my lower back, such is my confidence in its timelessness. In Company’s Being Alive, the spine-tingling second part of the song sees Bobby singing the same lyrics as the first – but with subtle changes shifting his attitude to love from one of cynicism to a movingly vulnerable yearning for all of love’s practical and emotional inconveniences: “Somebody hold me too close / Somebody hurt me too deep / Somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep / And make me aware / of being alive.”
Sondheim has no truck with mawkishness, though. In Now You Know, from Merrily We Roll Along, the counsel from one friend to another who’s just been dumped is a crash course in toughness: “All right now you know, life is crummy, well now you know / I mean, big surprise! People love you and tell you lies / Bricks can fall out of clear blue skies … It’s called flowers wilt, it’s called apples rot, it’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot / It’s called God don’t answer prayers a lot.”
In I’m Still Here – which the late Elaine Stritch often sang with unique aplomb (when she remembered the lyrics), a grande dame sings a life-affirming ditty of all the historical events she’s endured in her life – from J Edgar Hoover to Shirley Temple. One of the best lines is a biting commentary on life for the ageing actress: “First, you’re another sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone’s mother / Then you’re camp / Then you career from career to career.’ But the ultimate tone is triumphant: ‘Plush velvet sometimes / Sometimes just pretzels and beer – but I’m here.”
Non-Sondheim musicals are underrated for their lyrical eloquence. Arguably the most empowering feminist line ever penned comes from a non-Sondheim musical when Chicago’s Velma Kelly sings: “No, I’m no-one’s wife, but, oh! I love my life!’ In a similar moment of inspiring feminist assertion, in Annie Get Your Gun – written in 1945 – Annie defiantly sings that she wants ‘A ceremony with a bishop who will tie the knot and say / Do you agree to love and honour, Love and honour, yes, but not obey.”
Oliver’s Nancy, meanwhile, sings a moving number about domestic violence, bringing an often overlooked darkness to the perceived frivolity of musicals; in It’s a Fine Life she sings: “Though you sometimes do come by / The occasional black eye / You can always cuddle’im / Till he blacks the other’un / But you don’t dare cry.”
The plight of the prostitute/erotic/taxi dancer is covered with equal beauty in Miss Saigon and Gypsy as it is in Sweet Charity. The Movie in My Mind, You Gotta Get a Gimmick and Big Spender all give poignant insights into the jaded resilience of these women, although the latter loses all poignancy when belted by Dame Shirley Bassey. MacLaine is the superior Shirley when it comes to appropriately embodying the metaphor of popping her cork. Sardonic wittiness runs through all of Sweet Charity’s lyrics, but the highlight comes during There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This when the dancers imagine their potential parallel office 9-5 life as one of glamour and excitement: “As I sit at my desk on the 41st floor in my copy of a copy of a copy of Dior.”
The restless ecstasy of discovering a new city is wonderfully articulated in Evita’s Buenos Aires; Madonna’s version gives you a glimpse of what New York was in for when this determined powerhouse first burst on the scene: “Fill me up with your heat, with your noise, with your dirt, overdo me /Let me dance to your beat, make it loud, let it hurt, run it through me … All I want is a whole lot of excess.”
Miss Saigon contains my bid for the most beautiful lyric when Kim calls her child “God’s other son” – whichever way you look at it, a wonderful compliment.
Like them or loathe them, the language of musicals can be as poetic as anything by Ted Hughes, Yeats or Shakespeare. To dismiss them all as cheese is plain snootiness.
Share below the best (and worst!) lines from musicals you’ve heard.
Gary Nunn is a regular contributor to Mind your language. His posts appear on the last Friday of every month. Twitter: @GaryNunn1
