This song was in the original London production of the Song and Dance double bill, but was cut from the more famous Broadway version of the show, which is kind of a shame. This is the moment where the protagonist finally snaps and tells her mean-spirited, hypocritical ‘best friend’ exactly what she thinks of her. It’s an incredibly satisfying moment, all the more so because of Don Black’s deliciously venomous lyric, and it’s a moment that kind of needs to happen in the show. In the Broadway version, the show doesn’t really acknowledge the unpleasant qualities of the ‘friend’ (called Viv in that version), but it’s still abundantly clear that she richly deserves a moment like this, and the fact that the show seems to gloss over her bad qualities only makes her more unlikable. This song is the payoff to a very important running theme of the show, and I’d argue Webber’s decision to reinstate it for the 2003 revival was a wise move.

There’s a pretty obvious reason this song was cut from the 2003 Broadway revival of Nine. It’s an artifact of a subplot from an early version of the show, about a Romeo and Juliet-esque relationship between the children of German film producers and Italian spa owners. Because this subplot was abandoned early on, and the characters who were originally supposed to sing this song were deleted from the show, in the finished version this number has no relevance whatsoever and is in fact a total waste of time. That said, I can see why Maury Yeston couldn’t initially bring himself to cut it. It really is a fantastic song, a dazzling contrapuntal showcase with fiendishly clever lyrics. Then again, pretty much everything in the score of Nine is on the same level, so it’s not quite as much of a loss as it sounds.

This was one of two songs that were included, in the form of surprisingly well-sung demos by composer Cy Coleman, on the CD re-release of the Barnum cast album, and were so obviously lovely that fans immediately wondered why they had ever been cut. Granted, both this and “So Little Time” (the other song in question) were ballads, which are often trimmed because they tend to slow down the pace of the show, especially in large numbers. But frankly, Barnum was an unbelievably frantic and exuberant show that actually could have used a few more ballads to provide the audience with a chance to catch its breath. And like most of the ballads in the finished show, this song is actually pretty extroverted as old-style Musical-Comedy ballads go. It serves as a kind of counterpart to the explosively joyous “Out There” at the end of the first act (this song was supposed to be the second-act opener). Both are songs about risk, but “Out There” is an exhilarating anthem about how life without risks is not really living, whereas “At Least I Tried” is the ‘no regrets’ philosophy of a man who has to face the consequences of his failed gamble. And given that this was ultimately replaced by a reprise of the show’s weakest song, “Love Makes Such Fools of Us All”, it might have actually been wiser to keep it. In fact, since Barnum isn’t one of those all-time classics that it would be sacrilege to tamper with, I’d argue that the next revival should try re-inserting this one, and see what happens.

This song began its life as a cut number from the score of the classic Lerner and Loewe film musical Gigi. After being excised from the film, the bittersweet waltz ballad was recorded by a couple of second-tier crooners and wound up becoming a very minor semistandard that is still heard occasionally on radio stations dedicated to so-called Traditional Pop. Years later, when a stage version was made of the film, the team co-opted the melody of “A Toujours” for one of the new numbers they were composing for the stage. Written to give a musical opportunity to the great Agnes Moorehead as Gigi’s mercenary Aunt Alicia, it set a cold-blooded negotiation about the terms of Gigi’s status as Gaston’s mistress to the rhapsodic waltz melody, a juxteposition that is both hilarious and a perfect illustration of the scene’s concept…the reduction of love and romance to a mere business negotiation. The stage version of Gigi has never worked in either its original stage production or its surprisingly long string of revivals, but what sets it slightly apart from the other terrible stage adaptations of great musical movies from around the same time (Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Meet Me In St. Louis, Singin’ In the Rain) is that it at least contains five new Lerner and Loewe songs that are pretty much on the level of the original score, and “The Contract” is easily the best of them.

This song is far too much of a forgotten gem, given that it’s an essential part of virtually every stage production of one of history’s most successful musicals, but because it was left out of the movie, it seems to be largely unknown outside of hardcore theater-buff circles. It’s the principle character song for Oklahoma’s villain, Jud Fry, and reminds us of why he’s one of musical theater’s most fascinating antagonists. The thing about Jud is, he isn’t evil; he’s crazy. He’s genuinely too insane to help any of the thing he does, and is simultaneously a psychotic sexual predator and potential killer and a tragic outcast who just wants to be loved. This song focuses on both sides of this persona, developing his desperate loneliness and his fantasies about Laurie but climaxing in a burst of psychopathic rage. It might have been cut from the film because the filmmakers were uncomfortable with its sheer darkness and ferocity (it is easily the most intense and dramatic number in the score), but since those filmmakers were, essentially, Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves, and since the movie version is so authentic to the stage show’s spirit in every other respect, I’d tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. It probably had more to do with Rob Steiger, the actor playing Jud, who was absolutely perfect for the part in every other way but probably didn’t have the voice for a number as challenging as “Lonely Room”. And given how hard it would have been to find a Hollywood studio ringer with a suitable sound for the character, it may have actually been the lesser of two evils under the circumstances to simply cut the number. Even so, it seems regrettable, since the only songs from Oklahoma that aren’t household-name tunes are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie, and this song certainly does not deserve to be forgotten the way it has.