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Happy Birthday, Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim's Other Favorite. Beyond Heyward and Loesser, there's Sheldon Harnick. Mr. Harnick is still alive; he is ninety-five! He once wrote a little show called "Fiddler on the Roof."

Harnick's great subject was love. In song after song, he looked at new facets of love, weird facets, suspenseful facets, comic facets. "When Did I Fall in Love?" has Audra McDonald (famously) asking when her sense of respect for some guy grew into a bigger feeling. ("Where was the blinding flash? Where was the crashing chord?")

"Will He Like Me?" simply, directly describes how it feels to await a first date: "Will the shy and quiet girl he's going to see... be the girl that he's imagined me to be?"

We all tend to be a bit foolish--and love exposes that, as well. In "Vanilla Ice Cream," a woman, unfamiliar with her own heart, tries to feel enthusiasm for the wrong guy (while continuously veering back toward a speech about the *right* guy). And, in "Matchmaker, Matchmaker," young ladies mock the idea of a professional set-up: "You've heard he has a temper...He'll beat you every night....But only when he's sober....So you're all right!"

Sondheim likes  Harnick's ability to write vividly for specific characters, and you can see this in my favorite Harnick love song, "Do You Love Me?" A wife--half of an arranged marriage--must let her husband know how she feels. The question makes her uncomfortable, and so she seems to turn to God, even though her spouse is right next to her: "Twenty-five years I've lived with him, fought with him, starved with him....Twenty-five years, my bed is his...If that's not love, what is?"

Love, then? "I suppose," says the wife, bluntly, anticlimactically. It's the language she *would* use. Harnick was really, carefully considering character (while giving the appearance of effortlessness).

So--three cheers for Harnick, and for Sondheim! And Happy Birthday to SS, once again.


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