[Continuing to combine the Story Up My Sleeve and Midweek Music Break series for Wednesdays in May…]
Doing this Story Up My Sleeve series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story anthologies. I’ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with John Cheever); but I’ve read the entirety of many anthologies of stories by multiple writers. I just haven’t done so in a long time.
So when casting about for a song to feature today, I was delighted to suddenly think of this number, from the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago. The lyrics present an anthology of six short-short stories, each with a different first-person narrator; while the stories are spoken rather than sung, each has a certain built-in crescendo-to-climax as the “murderesses” take turns describing their crimes murders, and as each story is told the other women sing the background refrain: He had it coming.
[Lyrics]
(Those lyrics are a little squirrely, so to speak. I began with lyrics commonly found around the Internet, but must’ve spent at least 45 minutes stopping the song, adjusting the lyrics, re-starting and backing up in the song to make sure I had it right so far, continuing, stopping again… (The lyrics I had obviously came from some production other than the film. Maybe they were the original lyrics as published, I don’t know. They sure didn’t fit flush with the lyrics as sung.) Finally I just said the hell with it and posted what I had to that point. :))
Froog says
I got my first introduction to this song one Sunday afternoon several years ago in a little piano bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the rousing party piece of a rather charming young lady I’d been introduced to just a few hours earlier. I was, of course, even more smitten on discovering that she could both sing and play the piano very well – and deliver a theatrical song with great verve and wit. Perhaps it hadn’t previously occurred to me that my ideal woman might be a female Tom Lehrer…
I learned a few minutes later that she was planning her wedding – to her girlfriend. I should have noticed that she delivered these little tales of misandry rather too pointedly.
If were to compile a ‘Top 50 Romantic Disappointments’, this incident would be pretty near the end of the countdown.
John says
What an excellent story. (Although the specifics of the incidents wouldn’t match up other than blurrily, I’m pretty sure I can empathize.) The young lady in that memory of yours probably turned more than a few heads (and broke more than a few hearts)… not that that’s any consolation, but still.
Because of Fosse’s original staging of the number, most subsequent productions have probably also done it up as something bordering on softcore porn. But I never understood that approach; even in the fantasy context of a smartass and noir-musical, what are the odds that women in jail — even beautiful women — would have access to expensive/provocative lingerie and hosiery? Not to deny that I enjoyed watching it, but doing so felt a little… sneaky. If we hadn’t been watching it in a darkened theater, I can easily imagine pretending not to like it.