Sondheim

Beyond "Good Thing Going," there's at least one more major standard from "Merrily We Roll Along," and it's "Not a Day Goes By":

Not a day goes by
Not a single day
But you're somewhere a part of my life
And it looks like you'll stay
As the days go by
I keep thinking when does it end
Where's the day I'll have started forgetting
But I just go on thinking and sweating....

This became a Bernadette Peters staple. It's the ultimate Bernadette Peters song. No one does inner conflict like BP, and this number has conflict in spades: The speaker is trying to remain composed while relaying, to us, just how devastated she is. (A classic BP gesture: the quick, furious wiping-away of tears.)

Sondheim likes to think about time and space. One of his earliest songs, "Somewhere," gave us a bit of both: "There's a place for us.....There's a time for us...." Here, in "Not a Day," years after "Somewhere," we're still looking to time and space. WHEN does it end...WHERE'S the day.... (And how often do you see the future perfect tense in a show tune: "I'll HAVE STARTED....")

...And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying
And no, not a day goes by
Not a blessed day
But you're still somehow part of my life
And you won't go away
So there's hell to pay
And until I die
I'll die day after day after day
After day
After day after day after day
Til the days go by
Til the days go by
Til the days go by

Several things happen in the famous list that starts this passage. First, the relentlessness of BP's suffering is echoed in the relentlessness of the list: GERUND and GERUND and GERUND and GERUND. The alliteration, the hardness of "cursing and crying": It's like getting pelted with hail. Then there's a turn. The earliest gerunds are not meant to be understood in sequence; we're not getting a cause-and-effect story with "cursing and crying." But then we DO get a little story. "Turning and reaching and waking and dying." Do you see that? BP has been asleep, and in her sleep, she has reached for her lover. Then, upon waking, she DIES. She DIES from the knowledge that the guy isn't there anymore. Her brain is at war with her heart: Her heart has continued to insist that the world is something that it isn't. I'm obsessed!

One other note: Sondheim pays close attention to each individual word. Our first major adjective is fairly neutral: It's "single." "Not a day goes by....Not a single day...." But notice how the adjective changes toward the end of the song: "Not a day goes by....Not a blessed day..." BLESSED is not neutral; it is charged and sarcastic. This is how the actress can build a one-act play out of a few lines. Early in the song, she was fairly restrained; now, toward the end, she is letting loose. That's intentional.

P.S. "Merrily We Roll Along" shares DNA with "Follies": Both are, in part, about unrequited love. Sondheim sees love, or one version of love, as a kind of paralysis. Love can cause you to "die day after day after day." Or it can cause you to stand in the middle of the floor, "not going left, not going right." We're a long way from bright-golden-haze-on-the-meadow, at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eCTc2w6dPY