Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
After all, the whole idea of art is bringing order out of chaos. It’s the organization of material and that really is what making a puzzle is. – Stephen Sondheim
More than once, Stephen Sondheim said, “I have a puzzle mind.” He loved cryptic crossword puzzles, designing a few dozen for New York magazine in the late ’60s. He used to run murder-mystery games, and cowrote (with Anthony Perkins) a movie about one that turned real, 1973’s The Last of Sheila. (That was a big influence on the Knives Out movie Glass Onion, in which Sondheim has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo.) And he thought of his songs as puzzles, where he was given clues and worked toward solving them. “Send In the Clowns,” from his 1973 production of A Little Night Music, may well have been his greatest solution.
To begin with, Sondheim had to write for Glynis Johns, who had what Sondheim described as “a nice little silvery voice” and whom a less generous critic called “that cousin of bullfrogs.” He structured the song with Johns’ limits in mind – lots of space to breathe, short phrases, words ending in consonants so there would be little sustain. He gave it a very pretty melody, so a performer could sing the song or act it. He imbued the lyrics with rueful loss for missed opportunities that would strike the heart of any listener. And, like all the songs in A Little Night Music, he set it to waltz time.
“Send In the Clowns” became the unqualified hit of the show, thanks in no small part to Johns’ delivery of it. In The Book of Musicals, Arthur Jackson wrote, “Her odd little non-singing voice added the true heartbreak quality called for in the context of the story.” It remains a smash onstage – Judi Dench’s rendition approaches legendary. But it was out of the story’s context that “Send In the Clowns” truly began to soar, as artists fell over themselves rushing to cover it. Sondheim’s songs were often bound to the show by being plot-specific, but this was one song that made the leap from stages to studios and back again with unusual flair.
Seuras Og’s post found three quality covers from the more than half a thousand released versions out there. Without taking anything away from those excellent selections, I would like to add three more.
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