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Sondheim Saturday

I feel you, Johanna
I feel you
I was half convinced I'd waken,
Satisfied enough to dream you
Happily I was mistaken
Johanna
I'll steal you, Johanna
I'll steal you
Do they think that walls can hide you?
Even now I'm at your window
I am in the dark beside you
Buried sweetly in your yellow hair
I feel you, Johanna
And one day, I'll steal you,
'Til I'm with you then I'm with you there,
Sweetly buried in your yellow hair.


This is among Sondheim's most famous love songs. Bernadette Peters uses it in concert. It was first performed by Victor Garber, in the Broadway debut of "Sweeney Todd," and Garber went on to appear in the James Cameron movie "Titanic"--and now you can see him in "Hello, Dolly!" The song is like something from "Porgy and Bess." I'm sure that's deliberate. Sondheim admires P and B because the verses pack a great deal of meaning into simple language--"fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high"--and, well, isn't Sondheim going for that same trick here?

First, Anthony is smitten. The love is so intense, he can sense Johanna's presence even when he doesn't have "ocular proof." He had briefly imagined she was just a dream, and had half-reconciled himself to this possibility--but it's not true! "Waken" and "mistaken"--it's the penultimate syllable that does the rhyming work. That will happen again in the next verse: "hide you and beside you."

We shift from daydreaming to resolution-making: Anthony will "steal" Johanna. He moves past walls, to J's window; then, through a hormonal fit of physics-defiance, Anthony dreams himself through the locked window and into Johanna's bed, in the dark. (Hitchcock said you should film all murder scenes as love scenes, and vice versa, and there is something slightly troubling about the images in "Johanna." "Theft" of the woman, stalking her "in the dark"--this seems deliberately unsettling, and a little bit sexy, to me. I mean that in a consensual "Fifty Shades" way, not in a pervy way! Anthony's goal is the "little death" of orgasm; he will be "buried sweetly" in Johanna's yellow hair. "Buried sweetly" seems to be a flashy oxymoron, more interesting than "jumbo shrimp.")

The last four lines condense the plot of the song. "I feel you--and, one day, I'll steal you." The "then" of Anthony's realized dream is contrasted with the "there" of the present; today, at least, I'm with you "there," in my head. Sondheim inverts "buried sweetly"; it's "sweetly buried," now, to suggest movement, a transition, the end of a short trip-through-words. (Also, the repetition of the loved one's name--"Johanna, Johanna, Johanna"--makes me think of an earlier Sondheim work, "Maria." "Say it soft and it's almost like praying.")

And that's all for today. Below: see Bernadette!

https://www.google.com/search?q=bernadette+peters+johanna&oq=bernadette+peters+johanna&aqs=chrome..69i57.4027j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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