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.

Kander and Ebb’s The Act was one of the most relentlessly mediocre musicals of the Seventies. One of their many vehicles for Liza Minnelli, it was basically a glorified nightclub act masquerading as a musical. Granted, the idea of a Minnelli-fronted nightclub act doesn’t sound all that unpalatable in itself, but when you add in the least interesting score of Kander and Ebb’s career and the star being in extremely poor voice for most of the run, the result was a severe disappointment. That said, in the early stages of the show’s creation, it seems to be trying for something more ambitious than just a dressed-up nightclub act, as this cut song from an early draft of the show indicates. But while this song certainly doesn’t lack for serious content, it’s still a spectacularly unpleasant piece. It consists of an incredibly disturbing musical narrative from the perspective of a wealthy society lady who was abused as a child and now hires random thugs to beat her up because she gets off on it. The show this song was written for certainly sounds more interesting than the finished version of The Act, but it doesn’t really seem any more likely to succeed, or, frankly, any less awful.

This song was reportedly cut because the scene it was designed to be in would have cost too much money, but when it was reinserted for the ill-fated film version, it became clear that they made the right choice for more reasons than one. Firstly, they made a much better decision to focus this moment in the show on Max sitting forlorn in jail rather than showing Leo in Rio…Max’s showstopper “Betrayed” wound up being one of the show’s finest moments. Second, this just isn’t a very good song, and certainly not up to the material in the finished score. The Latin tune is incredibly synthetic and cheesy, sounding rather like a slower, less earworm-y version of “The Macarena”. And the shock humor in the lyrics (‘The tropic breezes always blow there/And so, I hear, do the girls’) just comes off as heavy-handed and lame rather than raucously funny like the numbers in the finished show. If this had wound up being the show’s eleven-o’clock number (remember, it was slated to go where “Betrayed” is now), it might have actually hurt the show’s chances for success, but thankfully, Brooks was smart enough to get rid of it. Now, if only he had shown that kind of sense about pretty much every number in the Young Frankenstein musical…