We All Need a Good Torch Song, Don’t We?

Looking for distractions from the political scene, I found a gem. Some say this song from the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies is the greatest torch song ever written.

That works for me … and the audio youtube clip above is the best performance of it ever, IMHO.

There’s a history here: The original cast recording of the 1971 show was a disappointment because several songs were shortened, including this one, to fit onto a single LP album. Truncated is the painful-sounding word some critics use to describe what happened to Sondheim’s glorious score.

Through the wonders of youtube and new editing technology, however, some stalwart soul has taken the original recording and edited in the missing middle section from a very good live performance by Dorothy Collins, who played the lovelorn Sally Durant Plummer in the original Broadway production. (The principals in that production are shown below.)

You can find the youtube page featuring the repaired recording here. The description of how it was done, and the comments about the finished product from dedicated Follies fans, are delightful.

Dedicated fans ourselves, Ted and I have seen the show twice–once at New Jersey’s Papermill Playhouse in the late 1990s, when A Chorus Line‘s Donna McKechnie played Sally (beautifully, I might add) and again in 2011 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., before the revived show moved to Broadway. In that production, Bernadette Peters played Sally. We love Bernadette, but she was sadly miscast in the role.

Though the song’s subject is unrequited love, both Ted and I have found the piece therapeutic when mourning the loss of our parents and other loved ones. It feels like grief, regardless of the flavor. Especially the line about “standing in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right…” Yep, we’ve all been there.

The lyrics sound deceptively simple. But on a second or third listen, you’ll see how complex and tightly woven they are. They pack a wallop, about as much concentrated emotion as one can find in a four-minute song. It’s gorgeous writing as well as gorgeous musical composition. And the arrangement? Broadway eleven-o’clock-number heaven.

The song is durable, too. Here’s a clip of Kelly Clarkson singing a very passable rendition in 2022.

And so Losing My Mind has been part of Ted’s and my relationship since the beginning of “us” in 1977.

I hope you enjoy it and, even better, find some solace in it during these difficult days.

BTW, isn’t the poster for the original production amazing?