[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. :))