"Adelaide's Lament" is an extraordinary song because it squeezes someone's entire adult history into a couple of footnotes. The song is ostensibly about "psychosomatic cold/cough symptoms," but really it's about being human.
You can give her a shot for whatever she's got--
But it just won't work.
If she's tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel clerk--
A person can develop a cold.
Miss Adelaide has been "playacting" the role of a tourist wife at a certain hotel--so she can spend time with her boyfriend. The hotel clerk isn't fooled.
You can feed her all day with the vitamin A
And the Bromo Fizz...
But the medicine never gets anywhere near
Where the trouble is...
If she's getting a kind of a name for herself--
And the name ain't "his"--
A person can develop a cough.
Adelaide understands that her forbearance is viewed as desperate behavior. To me, the rhyming of "Bromo Fizz" with "trouble is" cannot be topped elsewhere in the history of musical theater.
When they get on a train for Niagara--
And she can hear church bells chime--
The compartment is air-conditioned--
And the mood sublime...
Then they get off at Saratoga...
For the fourteenth time...
Well...a person can develop la grippe....
Here, the run-on sentence helps to recreate Adelaide's sense of exasperation; we feel her frustration in the space between the lines. And note the details: You have to admire the work that Loesser accomplishes with the words "air-conditioned" and "fourteenth."
They call this the gold standard musical--a literary work so skillful, even a high-school cast cannot fully ruin it.
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