Stephen Sondheim Archives

Good, Better, Best: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” (Part 1)

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:01 pm 1 Response »

Sep 192025

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.

Is there a ghastlier song than “Send In the Clowns”? The epitome of musical thea-ter (dahling), a go-to for any and every luvvy guesting on a TV show, invited then to sing us a song. Unspeakably vile, it is a song that must surely have some redeeming feature, to be drawn out of its saccharine turgidity. I mean, the bible of cover songs, Second Hand Songs, lists five and a half hundred iterations of the damned song, so surely there must be a “5 Good Covers” amongst them? Surely? I fear the title of this piece reveals the sickly truth.

Let’s get the details out the way. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: “‘Send In the Clowns’ is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles Of a Summer Night. It is a ballad from Act Two, in which the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life.” Two shocks there. First: I thought it came out a lot longer ago than 1973. Second: Bergman? It seems impossible to imagine the dour Swede having much truck with such lightweight frippery. But that is merely my view, with untold experts subsequently citing the song’s magnificence. It took a while for it to transcend the stage musical, not broaching the Billboard charts until Judy Collins brought it to #36 in 1975, and to #19 in 1977.

Frank Sinatra, in the meantime, had released it on his comeback album, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, setting the song along the road to it becoming a jazz standard. Sure, Sinatra tackles it with characteristic brio, and, vocally, it can’t faulted. It is just the wretched source material. Jazz, of course, in the context of standard does not generally equate with anything exciting or innovative, or indeed anything much to do with what I call jazz, it smacking more of big band MOR, easy listening for the easily pleased. Sure, otherwise reliable artists have given it a go, as an instrumental, but, even shorn of the pompously execrable lyrics, most come up short, shackled by the limitations of the melody. (Honorable exception is country maverick, Tyler Childers (here), who found a pearl within the snail shell.)

Disclaimer: I didn’t listen to every version. I couldn’t, on health grounds, and would challenge anyone of a normal disposition so to do. But I did take a look at the list, in no small detail, cherry picking names of those who might be able to step outside of expectations. Indeed, in particular, I had high hopes for Pete Burns and for Stan Ridgway. Burns, the flamboyant frontman of Dead and Alive, must be able, I thought, to buff it up into something idiosyncratic and memorable. Wrong. And Ridgway, the Wall of Voodoo man, turning then to oddball narrative songs, he’d give it some grit. Also wrong. So that’s my 5 gone for a burton.

Who’s left?
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Good, Better, Best: “Send In the Clowns” (Part 2)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 12:00 pm 4 Responses »

Sep 192025

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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In the Spotlight: Mandy Patinkin

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 2:00 pm No Responses »

Apr 262019

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

You know Mandy Patinkin best for playing the part of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, or you may know him best as a regular on Showtime’s Homeland. If you fall in either of those camps, you may not know that Patinkin is a living legend in the musical theater world. He created the role of Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George, and he won a Best Actor Tony for his performance as Che in Evita. He’s performed on Broadway over the course of five decades. And, as you can imagine, he knows his way around a cover song.

Pick Five: David Olney

Posted by Ray Padgett at 10:00 am No Responses »

Aug 222018

In Pick Five, great artists pick five cover songs that matter to them.

In 1991, Townes Van Zandt wrote the following: “Anytime anyone asks me who my favorite music writers are, I say Mozart, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bob Dylan, and Dave Olney. Dave Olney is one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard — and that’s true. I mean that from my heart.”

Twenty-seven years later, Townes is gone, but Olney keeps on keepin’ on. He may not have become a household name in that time, but his reputation among his peers has only grown. Emmylou Harris has sung three of his songs. Linda Ronstadt tackled a pair herself. When Steve Earle covered Olney’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” he noted it took him four or five years of playing the song before he realized it was “so perfectly constructed that it doesn’t have a rhyme in it.” He added that Olney was “one of the best songwriters in the world.” Continue reading »

Pick Five: David Ford

Posted by Ray Padgett at 11:12 am No Responses »

May 092018

In Pick Five, great artists tell us about five cover songs that matter to them.

Plenty of musicians write songs about politics. Fewer write songs about economics. But that’s the subject of all ten tracks on British singer-songwriter David Ford’s new album Animal Spirits, out Friday.

If an album about markets and trickle-down theory sounds kind of, well, dry – it isn’t. At all. Like all of his albums, Animal Spirits is brilliant: bluesy barn-stormers mixed with a few wedding-worthy love songs. Check out the title track: Continue reading »

Review: Mike Doughty, ‘The Flip Is Another Honey’

Posted by Zac Taylor at 11:00 am No Responses »

Nov 132012

Who is Mike Doughty? The ex-frontman of Soul Coughing? An acoustic singer/songwriter? An acclaimed poet and writer? The latest offering from Mr. Doughty, whoever he may be, is The Flip Is Another Honey, a smattering of cover tunes ranging from John Denver to Cheap Trick to Guys and Dolls. And, as you may expect, Doughty will break some rules. Continue reading »