It’s basically a no-fail number, with all its longing and pain and wisdom and pathos embedded in the lyrics and the slow, jazzy tempo. In the end, though, “I’m Still Here” honors the one who steps on stage to sing it (they’ve included greats like Elaine Paige, Carol Burnett, and Judy Collins). “Song after song was clever, insightful, harsh, sad, penetrating, funny and honest,” he wrote in “Everything was Possible,” his recollections of the making of “Follies.” “In some ways, the song seemed to be as much about Yvonne De Carlo herself as it was about Carlotta Campion.” Later, Sondheim’s party line was that he wrote the song about Joan Crawford, after going home and watching her entire filmography from her early years through her mawkish last act in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” Maybe he wouldn’t offend De Carlo by suggesting she was in her flop era. When Chapin took Sondheim’s manuscript home to write it into a manuscript, he could not believe what he was reading. Sometimes you land in diamonds, sometimes in stones.
“So anyone’s mother, then you are camp / So career from career to career.” You roll with the punches, you improvise, you take the next paycheck. “First, you’re still another blindfolded vamp,” she sings. What you need to do to succeed in America, Carlotta suggests, is just to keep going – and lower your expectations. Sondheim’s lyrics effortlessly weave Carlotta’s personal struggles (having to dance in her delicate for “three bucks a night”) with the country’s great lyrics, transforming a stubborn persistence of a courtier into a sharp parable of what it takes to “succeed” in a the world that often knocks you down. I Met a Great Financer!”), The Wallis and Windsor affair, the immersive Bathysphere, “coolers and vino”, the communist blacklist in Hollywood. ” She sings about the whole of the twentieth century: The Great Depression (“Was I Depressed? Not Nearby. You know exactly who Carlotta is and the war stories she has to tell, from the first lines: “Good times and bum times / I’ve seen them all, and my dear, I’m still here / Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer / But I’m here. “I’m Still Here” is a bluesy, blatty showstopper, tailored to an alto voice that has become as scratchy as an old gramophone – a song to a smoker’s rasp. “The show’s book author, James Goldman, suggested that” it should be a song about survival, you know, ‘I’m still here.’ “” The only thing Sondheim needed to hear was the three He thanked Goldman and disappeared for “several days,” according to his then-assistant Ted Chapin. “It did not really have to do with the emotions or the story of the evening. “The number was just a kind of filler,” Sondheim said in a later interview. The punch line was fun once, maybe twice, but there was certainly not enough zazz to sustain the audience’s interest in the song’s nearly seven-minute duration. Carlotta sang “Can That Boy Foxtrot!”, A long, mostly insane song about a fellow dancer’s sexual endurance (cut “the trot” from the end of the title, say it again, and you get the gag). When the Boston race began, De Carlo’s signature number in the second act was literally a joke. on CBS’s “The Munsters.” She fit perfectly with Carlotta, a minor supporting character in “Follies,” whose main function is to serve as a beacon for showbiz’s lifetime.What she did not have was the perfect song. De Carlo was a big name in herself, having had her own mark period in the films – she was a go-to “temptress” in the 1940s and 50s, starring in “Salome, Where She Dance”, ” Song “by Scheherazade,” and “The Ten Commandments,” in which she played Moses’ slender wife Sephora. Actress Yvonne De Carlo, then in her fifties, played the role of Carlotta Campion, a former showgirl who had a short, fiery Hollywood career followed by a decade or so of disappointments and dead ends. His new musical, “Follies” – about a bunch of remorseful, aging vaudevillians reunited for a night in the dilapidated theater they once were in – was about halfway through the rehearsal outside the city, and the second act was not completely frozen.
In early March 1971, Stephen Sondheim, then forty years old, entered the lounge area of the Boston Colonial Theater with a stack of fresh manuscript pages for a brand new song.
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