This is the other ballad from Damn Yankees that didn’t make it into the movie version, and it has significantly more defenders than “A Man Doesn’t Know”. Said defenders like to point out the undeniable fact that the situation that provides its setup is so poignant that it almost couldn’t help but be moving. For those who don’t know this show, in this scene Joe (as his younger, enchanted self) is talking to his wife and assuring her than her beloved husband (whom she has no idea is exactly who she’s talking to) will return to her soon. In short, we have the emotional torment of a man trying to comfort the woman he loves but unable to even tell her that it’s him she’s speaking to, as well as the sad irony of a woman pining for her lost love while unaware that he is right there in the room with her.

The song’s detractors argue that despite the goldmine of a scenario, the actual song itself is dull and dreary, but I blame most of that impression on Stephen Douglas’ lack of acting ability; the man certainly had a strong baritone, but he was so wooden as a performer that he made Nelson Eddy look like Carol Channing.

The song is actually fairly intense as a composition, with its passionate tango melody and vivid lyrics. That said, the 1994 revival unwisely moved it into an entirely different context in the show, and it did lose a lot by doing so. But the debate seems almost irrelevant—apart from that one revival (which is generally considered a misguided mess today anyway), the context is part of the song, and you can’t really judge the composition as some kind of pure aesthetic principle independent of its dramatic situation in the musical…that’s not how show tunes work.

While Adler and Ross’ score for Damn Yankees has a great many items that are almost universally agreed to be absolutely delightful (“Heart”, “A Little Brains, A Little Talent”, “Whatever Lola Wants”, “Those Were the Good Old Days”), the ballads for the real romantic couple, Joe and his wife Meg, have always been regarded as the dull baggage that comes along with the sparkling specialty material. Granted, the two major ballads in their last show, The Pajama Game, were co-authored by an uncredited Frank Loesser (the genius-level composer of Guys and Dolls and Adler and Ross’ mentor), so one would only expected them to be somewhat weaker working entirely on their own. Still, these ballads are so often the subject of complaints that I thought I’d examine them here.

Really, of the three ballads in question, this is the only one that I’d argue more or less deserves its reputation for being dull and uninteresting. The tune is certainly pretty, especially in original leading man Stephen Douglas’ polished baritone, but it has a stilted quality to it that just makes the emotional content of the song ring false. As for the lyrics, they’re so cliched and simplistic that they sound like a parody…it’s hard to imagine how Adler and Ross were allowed to get away with putting them in an actual Broadway show.

The song’s dullness is an especial letdown in the final scene, where it is sung as the counterpoint to the villain’s last-ditch efforts at temptation. Granted, this song is still vastly superior to the one that replaced it in the show’s film version, “There’s Something About an Empty Chair”, but it’s still fatally weak in a score that places it next to classics like the ones mentioned above.

This was written for one of the later, Opera-house productions of Leonard Bernstein’s musicalization of Voltaire, and features lyrics by Bernstein himself (although there’s reason to believe a portion of the lyrics may have been cribbed from the show’s primary lyricist, Richard Wilbur). This is widely considered, along with “Quiet” and “Sheep Song”, to be one of the few duds in the score of Candide, and I would actually debate that label in all three cases.

This particular song was added primarily to provide a solo number for the pessimist philosopher Martin, who serves as the counterpart to Candide’s optimist mentor Pangloss (and indeed, was originally supposed to be played by the same actor until the decision was made not to kill him off when Pangloss reappears). It mostly seems to be regarded as a ‘dud’ because the lyrics are loaded with exceptionally ugly, even disgusting imagery, but I must ask the show’s fans what exactly they expected the antithesis to Pangloss’ candy-coated “The Best of All Possible Worlds” to sound like.

Despite the degree of graphic detail provided about Martin’s job as a sweeper in the song, the lyrics are on the same ultra-literate and immensely sophisticated level as all of the lyrics written for this show, and become especially penetrating on the final verse, set to the tune of “The Best of All Possible Worlds”, where he catalogues all the disgusting forms of garbage and excrement he’s forced to clean up in a bitter litany (“every sort of residue/in process of reduction to/the final state of dust”), which he turns into a surprisingly potent and strikingly bitter metaphor for his view of life as a whole (and yes, that particular section was, evidently, really written by Bernstein on his own…the man really was a splendid lyricist, and the only reason he didn’t provide his own words more often was that his heavy workload as composer, conductor, orchestrator and dance arranger left him so little time for it).

So, I’d argue the song’s disgusting imagery, which is really the only substantial complaint against it, is a feature rather than a flaw. And in any case, if you have a weak stomach, this show…which let’s recall contains two different songs about syphilis…is probably not the show for you in the first place.

This was an additional song written by the team of Bock and Harnick for the 2004 Broadway revival of their most famous show, Fiddler on the Roof. And while that production certainly had no shortage of other problems, this one was probably the most baffling. The most obvious problem with this song is that it doesn’t remotely live up to the rest of the score. Even with one of Broadway funniest comediennes, Nancy Opel, on hand to perform it, it’s still a thoroughly mediocre song, and when you surround a mediocre song with one of the great theater scores of all time, you make it sound even worse than it actually is. The song it replaced, “The Rumor”, wasn’t one of the Fiddler score’s highlights to begin with, but it was a genuinely amusing comedy number that made an insightful (if well-worn) point about the way gossip travels, and it was certainly a hell of a lot more interesting than this. But even more annoying than this song’s mere presence in the show is the rationale for why it was added; Bock and Harnick’s statement on the matter is that this song was added ‘to clarify the show’s themes’. Please note that this is Fiddler on the Roof, the show that had been an international smash hit for forty years when this song was added, the show that, although its creators expected it to appeal primarily to the Jewish culture that was its subject matter, has wound up resonating just as deeply with virtually every culture on the planet. This is the show of which the producer of the first Japanese production famously asked, “Do they understand this show in America? It’s so Japanese!”. I think it’s pretty obvious that everyone already understands the show’s themes pretty well, and this is thus one of the most unnecessary additions to a classic show since the Annie Get Your Gun revival reinserted “Who Do You Love, I Hope?”. Granted, a lot of aging theatrical legends have unnecessarily tinkered with their past masterpieces in revivals, but even when, say, Sondheim got Lin-Manuel Miranda to translate half of West Side Story into Spanish, we could at least understand the theoretical logic behind his bad decision. This, on the other hand, is an attempt to fix a problem literally no-one had, and I’m just grateful that, like most of these dithering revisions of classic shows, it has vanished without a trace from any future productions.

This song is cut from nearly every modern production and is today regarded by many as an offensive caricature almost on the level of the Minstrel-Show “coon songs”, only aimed at another minority. But while there are certain undeniable pressures to not perform it anymore, its negative reputation, like most politically correct overreactions, is something of an oversimplified exaggeration. Unlike the numbers for the “Indians” in Peter Pan, which were completely innocent and unironic and thus are far more uncomfortable to watch today, this song was already intended as a tongue-in-cheek sendup of stereotypes when it was written. Remember that the proudly ignorant and dangerously naive Annie has no real knowledge or understanding of what Native American culture really entails, so she substitutes a laundry list of cliche cultural trappings associated with them…and from the very beginning, that was intended to be the joke. The reason this song tends to make modern listeners uncomfortable is that this satire is delivered far more bluntly and  heavy-handedly than anyone would dare to attempt today on such a topic. So while the show has admittedly dated enough that certain corrective revisions are needed for most productions, this song, like the rest of the show’s portrayal of Native Americans (including the character of Chief Sitting Bull), isn’t as straightforwardly offensive as it seems to some modern ears, and in fact contains several subtly subversive elements that were actually quite progressive for the era in which the show was written. I understand why it can’t be in the show anymore, but it was an effective and even subtly progressive joke in its day, and even now it doesn’t deserved to be pilloried as “racist” the way it generally is these days.

This song was written for Sting’s only Broadway musical, The Last Ship, and was actually included on the Sting concept album of the same title. It was intended to be proposal from the ‘older man’, Arthur, to the show’s heroine Meg. And while The Last Ship was essentially one long series of misguided decisions, had they actually kept this song, it would have been the most disastrous of all. This is a ‘proposal’ that wallows in its own miserable lack of love or any kind of conceivable appeal. It’s a heartbreaking song, which I think was the intention, and is actually quite effective when heard out of context, but no-one would ever hear this proposal and say ‘yes’, no matter how desperate they were. In the finished show, Sting replaced it with one of the score’s highlights, the much more positive and persuasive “What Say You, Meg?”. While “Practical Arrangement” is the polar opposite of love song, “What Say You, Meg?” is a genuine love song…just down-to-earth, comfortable, share-our-life-together love rather than wild, passionate romance. Some other shows…The Baker’s Wife, for instance…would argue that that is real love, rather than the Romeo-and-Juliet romanticism of the show’s central couple. In any case, “What Say You, Meg?” is not only a ravishing song, but a vastly more appropriate choice for this moment in the story…and indeed, one of the few dramatic moments in The Last Ship to be completely satisfying.

This is one of those matched pairs of numbers written for the same slot in the same show, and because Jekyll & Hyde is one of those shows with a huge body of semi-apocryphal songs rather than a stable tunestack, each production essentially gets to choose which of them it prefers to use for this scene. This had led to endless debate about which of these numbers is superior, and to be honest they both have certain claims. “Bring On the Men” does admittedly sound far more like something you might actually hear at a seedy cabaret that doubles as a brothel in any remotely realistic setting. On the other hand, “Good’n’Evil” actually contributes to the show’s central theme of moral duality and hypocrisy, whereas “Bring on the Men” is, from a dramatic perspective, essentially a waste of time. And while “Bring on the Men” has a much livelier tune, “Good’n’Evil” has vastly more interesting lyrics (with such juicy lines as ‘Good may be thankable/evil is bankable!’). And frankly, like most of the Jekyll & Hyde score, both are such fine and exceptionally enjoyable songs that it seems like a shame that it isn’t a feasible option for any production to just use both. In any case, both are perfectly valid options for this moment in the show, and both are well worth hearing on the show’s many recordings, where you fortunately can hear and enjoy both without having to choose between them.

For those who haven’t heard of it, Simply Heavenly is an obscure but widely admired flop musical with a book and lyrics by the great Langston Hughes. Ken Mandelbaum, author of the legendary compendium of Broadway flops Not Since Carrie, considered it one of the three best musicals ever to flop, and while that may be a slight exaggeration, the fact remains that this is an utterly charming and unobtrusively meaningful piece with a lovely blues-influenced score. This song was sung in the original production by the show’s vampy semi-villainess Zarita, but was dropped from the show’s only major revival, and to be honest I can see why. It’s about the only song from the original score that has proven to be less than timeless…it consists largely of topical jokes about then-contemporary Black celebrities that were probably hilarious in the Fifties but don’t make a lot of sense to modern listeners. And the song that replaced it, “The Hunter and the Hunted”, is not only a far better song, but provides some radical insight into Zarita’s mindset that changes the whole nature of her character…in her mind, she’s the one being relentlessly pursued by her lovers, and she’s not entirely happy about it. It’s a shame that “The Men In My Life” has dated so severely, but frankly “The Hunter and the Hunted” contributes more to the overall show anyway, so maybe it was for the best after all.