At sixty, Madonna is about to go on tour once again. This news brings to mind some lines from Madonna's all-time best lyricist, Oscar winner Stephen Sondheim: Yesterday it seemed the world was about to end, didn't it? Looked as though it wouldn't last out the year... Yesterday, disaster waited around the bend. Well, my friend: Spring is here. The source of humor here is that our speakers are gangsters. They're out to rape and rob and pillage. So the celebratory song--the song we might assign to a cheery, do-gooding Shirley Temple--is really a song about doing destructive things. Bye-bye, blues; so long, adversity! Happiness, hello! Keep the status quo Permanently so! "Dick Tracy" is set in the past, and so Sondheim seems to be writing in his Cole Porter voice. There's something old-timey in the choice of words. The diction feels less "current" than--say--Mary's diction in "Merrily We Roll Along." (The idea of anthro...