Sondheim, Send in the Clowns
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Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) had one of the longest and most successful careers on Broadway, spanning almost 70 years.
His musical A Little Night Music premiered in 1973. Sondheim had, by that time, an impressive list of successes, beginning with West Side Story (1957) and including Gypsy (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and Follies (1971). A Little Night Music would win 12 Tony Awards, and one of its songs, Send in the Clowns, would arguably become Sondheim’s best known (and best loved).
In the musical the song is sung by the character Desiree, who was played in the original Broadway production by Glynis Johns. Sondheim tailored the song for Johns’ limited vocal skills, constraining the melodic range and using short phrases for the lyrics’ series of questions. In the London production, that role went to Dame Judy Dench. And while Dench has won just about every award there is for acting, singing is not her primary talent either, but her acting abilities carry this performance.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Henry Mancini took much the same approach, limiting the vocal challenges of Moon River, which was to be sung by Audrey Hepburn. That song became Mancini’s most memorable. Both songs say something about the power of simplicity. Of course, simplicity can be very difficult to achieve.
The title and the meaning of sending in clowns prompted some questions, to which Sondheim responded:
I get a lot of letters over the years asking what the title means and what the song’s about; I never thought it would be in any way esoteric. I wanted to use theatrical imagery in the song, because she’s an actress, but it’s not supposed to be a circus […] [I]t’s a theater reference meaning “if the show isn’t going well, let’s send in the clowns”; in other words, “let’s do the jokes.” I always want to know, when I’m writing a song, what the end is going to be, so “Send in the Clowns” didn’t settle in until I got the notion, “Don’t bother, they’re here”, which means that “We are the fools.”