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Cabaret

 The Tony Awards this year could be a showdown between "Cabaret" and "Merrily We Roll Along." Sondheim admired Kander and Ebb, so I like this possibility.


"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is diegetic music: It's a folk song that exists within the world of "Cabaret," so characters are *aware* when a waiter begins to sing it. Other characters can comment on the song (and, by contrast, you would not have a character commenting on "Defying Gravity" or "Send in the Clowns," as these are not diegetic songs).

Again and again, "Tomorrow" starts with beauty and ends in corruption:

The sun on the meadow is summery warm;
The stag in the forest runs free.
But gather together to greet the storm....
Tomorrow belongs to me.

The "storm" is almost buried in the stanza; it rears its head toward the end. This is like Katie Britt cooing at us in her kitchen, then slipping in some racist rhetoric before the big finish.

The branch of the linden is leafy and green;
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea.
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen....
Tomorrow belongs to me.

The "glory" lurks in the shadows; it's like the hidden wolf in the fairy-tale forest.

The song reproduces the structure of the musical "Cabaret"; we have two appealing love stories that occupy Act One, and we see both deteriorate, very quickly, in Act Two. This isn't the world of Richard Rodgers; no one makes it out with a marriage "intact."

The woman who sings "Tomorrow" has a shot at a Tony Award (see the Tony results from 1967). She has been an invention of Victoria Clark, and Gayle Rankin, among many others....I look forward to seeing Natascia Diaz.
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