Send In the Clowns

For the 2004 Oceans Of Sadness album, see Send in the Clowns (Oceans Of Sadness album). For the 1981 Sarah Vaughan album, see Send in the Clowns (Sarah Vaughan album).

"Send in the Clowns" is a song by Stephen Sondheim from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music. It is a ballad from Act II in which the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life. Among other things, she looks back on an affair years earlier with the lawyer Fredrik. Meeting him after so long, she finds that he is now in an unconsummated marriage with a much younger woman. Desirée proposes marriage to rescue him from this situation, but he declines, citing his dedication to his bride. Reacting to his rejection, Desirée sings this song. The song is later reprised as a coda after Fredrik's young wife runs away with his son, and Fredrik is finally free to accept Desirée's offer.

Sondheim created the song specifically for the actress Glynis Johns who created the role of Desirée on Broadway. The song is written in four verses and a bridge, using a complex triple meter. It became Sondheim's most popular song after Judy Collins recorded it in 1975. Subsequently, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey, Zarah Leander, Tiger Lillies and many other famous artists have recorded the song, and it became a jazz standard.

Meaning of title

The "clowns" in the title do not refer to circus clowns. Instead, they symbolize fools, as Sondheim explained in a 1990 interview:

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.'

In a 2008 interview, Sondheim further clarified:

As I think of it now, the song could have been called 'Send in the Fools.' I knew I was writing a song in which Desirée is saying, 'aren't we foolish' or 'aren't we fools'? Well, a synonym for fools is clowns, but 'Send in the Fools' doesn't have the same ring to it.

Context

In an interview by Alan Titchmarsh, Dame Judi Dench, who performed the role of Desirée in London, commented on the context of the song. The play is "a dark play about people who, at the beginning, are with wrong partners."

Main article: A Little Night Music

Some years before the play begins, Desirée was a young, attractive actress, whose passions were the theater and men. She lived her life dramatically, flitting from man to man. Fredrik was one of her many lovers and fell deeply in love with Desirée, but she declined to marry him. The play implies that when they parted Desirée may have been pregnant with his child.

A few months before the play begins, Fredrik married a beautiful woman who at 18 years old was much younger than he. In Act One, Fredrik meets Desirée again, and is introduced to her daughter, a precocious adolescent suggestively named Fredrika. Fredrik explains to Desirée that he is now married to the young woman, whom he loves, but who is still a virgin and refuses to have sex with him. Desirée and Fredrik then make love.

Act Two begins days later, and Desirée realizes that she truly loves Fredrik. She tells Fredrik that he needs to be rescued from his marriage, and she proposes to him. Fredrik explains to Desirée that he has been swept off the ground and is "in the air" in love with his beautiful, young wife, and apologizes for having misled her. Fredrik walks across the room, while Desirée remains sitting on the bed; as she feels both intense sadness and anger, at herself, her life and her choices, she sings, "Send in the Clowns." Not long thereafter, Fredrik's young wife runs away with his son, and he is free to accept Desirée's proposal, and the song is reprised as a coda.

Score

History

Sondheim wrote the lyrics and music over a two-day period during rehearsals for the play's Broadway debut. He created the song specifically for the actress, Glynis Johns, who created the role of Desirée. According to Sondheim, "Glynis had a lovely, crystal voice, but sustaining notes was not her thing. I wanted to write short phrases, so I wrote a song full of questions" and the song's melody is within a small music range:

We hired Glynis Johns to play the lead, though she had a nice little silvery voice. But I'd put all the vocal weight of the show on the other characters because we needed somebody who was glamorous, charming and could play light comedy, and pretty, and to find that in combination with a good voice is very unlikely, but she had all the right qualities and a nice little voice. So I didn't write much for her and I didn't write anything in the second act.

And the big scene between her and her ex-lover, I had started on a song for him because it's his scene. And Hal Prince, who directed it, said he thought that the second act needed a song for her, and this was the scene to do it in. And so he directed the scene in such a way that even though the dramatic thrust comes from the man's monologue, and she just sits there and reacts, he directed it so you could feel the weight going to her reaction rather than his action.

And I went down and saw it and it seemed very clear what was needed, and so that made it very easy to write. And then I wrote it for her voice, because she couldn't sustain notes. Wasn't that kind of singing voice. So I knew I had to write things in short phrases, and that led to questions, and so again, I wouldn't have written a song so quickly if I hadn't known the actress.... I wrote most of it one night and finished part of the second chorus, and I'd gotten the ending.... [T]he whole thing was done in two days.

Lyrics

The lyrics of the song are written in four verses and a bridge and sung by Desirée. As Sondheim explains, Desirée experiences both deep regret and furious anger:

'Send in the Clowns' was never meant to be a soaring ballad; it's a song of regret. And it's a song of a lady who is too upset and too angry to speak-meaning to sing for a very long time. She is furious, but she doesn't want to make a scene in front of Fredrik because she recognizes that his obsession with his 18-year-old wife is unbreakable. So she gives up; so it's a song of regret and anger, and therefore fits in with short-breathed phrases.

Meter and key

The song is written in the primary key of E^b major.

The song uses an unusual and complex meter, which alternates between 12/8 and 9/8. These are two complex triple meters that evoke the sense of a waltz used throughout the score of the show. Sondheim tells the story:

When I worked with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, one of the things I learned from him was not always necessarily to think in terms of 2-, 4- and 8-bar phrases. I was already liberated enough before I met him not to be sticking to 32-bar songs, but I tend to think square. I tend to think ... it's probably because I was brought up on mid-19th and late-19th Century music, and you know it's fairly square; there are not an awful lot of meter changes.

You often will shorten or lengthen a bar for rhythmic purposes and for energy, but ... when you switch in the middle [of a song], particularly when it's a modest song, when you're not writing an aria, you know ... [I mean,] if you're writing something like Sweeney Todd, where people sing at great length, you expect switches of meter, because it helps variety. But in a little 36- or 40-bar song, to switch meters around is almost perverse, because the song doesn't get a chance to establish its own rhythm.

But the problem is, what would you do?: Would you go, 'Isn't it rich? (two, three) Are we a pair? (two, three) Me here at last on the ground (three), you in mid-air.' Lenny [Bernstein] taught me to think in terms of, 'Do you really need the extra beat (after "ground") or not.' Just because you've got four bars of four, if you come across a bar that doesn't need the extra beat, then put a bar of three in. So ... the 9 [beat bars] and 12 [beat bars] that alternate in that song were not so much consciously arrived at as they were by the emotionality of the lyric.

Styles

"Send in the Clowns" is performed in two completely different styles: dramatic and lyric. The dramatic style is the theatrical performance by Desirée, and this style emphasizes Desirée's feelings of anger and regret, and the dramatic style acts as a cohesive part of the play. The lyric style is the concert performance, and this style emphasizes the sweetness of the melody and the poetry of the lyrics. Most performances are in concert, so they emphasize the beauty of the melody and the obscurity of the lyrics.

Sondheim teaches both dramatic and lyric performers several important elements for an accurate rendition:

The dramatic performer must take on the character of Desirée: a woman who finally realizes that she has misspent her youth on the shallow life. She is both angry and sad, and both must be seen in the performance. Two important examples are the contrast between the lines, "Quick, send in the clowns" and "Well, maybe next year." Sondheim teaches that the former should be steeped in self-loathing, while the latter should emphasize regret. Thus, the former is clipped, with a break between "quick" and "send," while the latter "well" is held pensively.

Sondheim himself apologizes for mistakes which he made in the composition. For example, in the line, "Well, maybe next year," the melodic emphasis is on the word "year" but the dramatic emphasis must be on the word "next":

The word 'next' is important: 'Maybe next year' as opposed to 'this year.' [Desirée means,] 'All right, I've screwed it up this year. Maybe next year I'll do something right in my life.' So [it's] 'well, maybe next year' even though it isn't accented in the music. This is a place where the lyric and the music aren't as apposite as they might be, because the important word is 'next,' and yet the accented word is 'year.' That's my fault, but [something the performer must] overcome."

Another example arises from Sondheim's roots as a speaker of American rather than British English: The line "Don't you love farce?" features two juxtaposed labiodental fricative sounds (the former [v] voiced, the latter [f] devoiced). American concert and stage performers will often fail to "breathe" and/or "voice" between the two fricatives, leading audiences familiar with British slang to hear "Don't you love arse?," misinterpreting the lyric or at the least perceiving an unintended double entendre. Sondheim agrees that "[i]t's an awkward moment in the lyric, but that v and that f should be separated."

In the line of the fourth verse, "I thought that you'd want what I want. Sorry, my dear," the performer must communicate the connection between the "want" and the "sorry". Similarly, Sondheim insists that performers separately enunciate both "t"'s in line, "There ought to be clowns."

The differences are illustrated and may be compared in the performances of Glynis Johns and Judi Dench with those of Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra. The former are dramatic and meant for the theater; the latter are lyric and meant for the concert:

• Glynis Johns personifies Desirée: She created the character on Broadway, and her interpretation highlights Desirée's regret and anger, for example, when she sings, "Isn't it rich?" As Glynis Johns did in the U.S., Jean Simmons created Desirée for the U.K. stage in 1975 to similar effect. A popular revival of A Little Night Music in 1995 starred Judi Dench, and her rendition of the song has become highly acknowledged as one of the best. In her performance, she does not sing so much as tell the story, with bitterness as she hisses the line, "Isn't it rich?," and the hard "k" in "clowns." She won the Olivier Award for her performance.

• In contrast with the Johns and Dench, Judy Collins's performs not as an actress portraying Desirée but as a pop singer of a sad ballad. She never played Desirée in the theater; instead, she used the beautiful lyrics and melody to create a major pop hit. Similarly, Frank Sinatra performs a traditional ballad.

Popular success

Sondheim has composed more than 800 songs, but this is his only song that became a major pop hit.

In 1973, the play and song debuted on Broadway. The song become popular with theater audiences but had not become a pop hit. Sondheim explained how the song became a hit:

First of all, it wasn't a hit for two years. I mean, the first person to sing it was Bobby Short, who happened to see the show in Boston, and it was exactly his kind of song: He's a cabaret entertainer. And then my memory is that Judy Collins picked it up, but she recorded it in England; Sinatra heard it and recorded it. And between the two of them, they made it a hit.

In 1975, Judy Collins recorded "Send In the Clowns" and included it in her album, Judith. The song was released as a single, which soon became a major pop hit. It remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks in 1975, reaching Number 36. Then, in 1977, the song again reached the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for 16 weeks and reached Number 19. At the Grammy Awards of 1976, the Judy Collins performance of the song was named 'Song of the Year'.

After Judy Collins recorded the song, it was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Kenny Rogers, Lou Rawls and many others.

In 1985, Sondheim added a verse for Barbra Streisand to use in her concert performances. and recording, which was featured on The Broadway Album. In 1986, her version became a Number 25 Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary hit.

The song has become a jazz standard with performances by Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, the Stan Kenton Orchestra and many others.

Recordings

The song occurs on over 900 records by hundreds of performers in a wide variety of arrangements[1]. Among these are:

• Frank Sinatra recorded it on his 1973 album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back
• Shirley Bassey recorded Arthur Greenslade's arrangement of the song on the 1975 album "Good, Bad, but Beautiful"[2].
• Judy Collins in 1975 recorded the song on her album Judith.
• Bing Crosby, at the age of 71, recorded it for his 1975 album "That's What Life Is All About".
• Frida (Anni-Frid) Lyngstad (of ABBA) recorded this song in Swedish for her 1975 album Frida Ensam.
• Stan Kenton on his 1976 album Kenton '76
• Jazz guitarist Pat Martino recorded an instrumental version of the song for his 1976 release 'We'll be Together Again.'
• Guitarist and educator Ted Greene arranged the song in his seminal 1977 release, Solo Guitar.
• Model, singer and actress Grace Jones recorded a disco version of the song for her debut album, Portfolio, in 1977.
• Mel Tormé recorded an uptempo version for his 1977 album The London Sessions, arranged by Christopher Gunning. Taken at a sprightly pace, with a bright, slowly building big band arrangement and a joyous saxophone solo by Phil Woods, it would seem at cross purposes with the material, but Tormé gives a suitably wry reading which highlights the absurdity happening around him.
• Pop group Brotherhood of Man recorded a largely a cappella version for their 1978 album Twenty Greatest.
• Frankie Laine on his 1978 British album Life is beautiful. It was issued on a single in England.
• Elizabeth Taylor, although hitherto not a singer, recorded the song for the 1978 film adaptation of A Little Night Music, in which she starred.
• Jazz vocalist Carmen McRae recorded this song on her 1981 album "Live at Bubba's".
• Angela Lansbury sings the song live on the 1983 CD A Stephen Sondheim Evening, with Sondheim himself accompanying her on the piano.
• Barbra Streisand recorded Jeremy Lubbock's arrangement on her 1985 The Broadway Album [3].
• A version was recorded by Bryan Ferry during sessions for his abandoned album Horoscope in 1991 but has not been legitimately released. Some bootleg editions of the album contain the song as the final vocal track.
• Glenn Close performed the song live at Carnegie Hall in the 1992 concert Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall. Her performance was seen on the subsequent televised version of this concert, and can be seen on the CD and DVD releases.
• Renato Russo, a Brazilian singer, recorded it on his solo album called The Stonewall Celebration Concert in 1994.
• Howard Keel recorded the song and it is available on the 1995 album "The Best of Howard Keel".
• Dame Judi Dench performed the song in 1998 during an evening celebrating British theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh ('Hey! Mr. Producer').
• Tom Jones recorded the song several times, putting it on 50+ albums between 1998 and 2005.
• Covered by the Tiger Lillies on their 2000 album Circus Songs.
• Mandy Patinkin performs the song on his 2002 album Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim.
• Jean Shy performs a unique version of the song with the JBBO on their 2003 album The Other Side Of Blue.
• Olivia Newton John on a 2004 cover album Women of Song
• Opera Babes performed a classical version of the track on their 2006 album "Renaissance."
• Peter Criss on his 2007 album One for All
• Mark Kozelek recorded this song and released it on his 2008 album "The Finally LP."
• All Angels recorded a four-part version of the song for their third album, which will be released June 29, 2009.
• Zarah Leander recorded a German version titled Wo sind die clowns?
• Elaine Paige recorded a version for her 1983 album Stages.

Other Versions & Parodies

• Stars of the Lid recorded a version called "Don't Bother They're Here" for their 2007 album And the Refinement of the Decline.
• The Santa Clara Vanguard uses an instrumental version as its official corps song, which is played at the anniversary dinner, as well as in encore performances.
• The song was sent up on an episode of The Simpsons, "Krusty Gets Kancelled". The episode concerns Krusty the Clown hosting a comeback special to rival his puppet competitor, Gabbo. He opens the special by singing the song in a baleful croak, all the time on the verge of weeping, and on his final chant of "Send in the clowns," he does indeed break down, and Sideshow Mel enters and completes the verse: They're already here. The lines sung here (Send in the clowns/those daffy, laffy clowns!/Send in those soulful and doleful, schmaltz-by-the-bowlful clowns) are clearly not the original lyrics.
• Also, in Treehouse of Horror XIII, the episode "Send in the Clones", is a parody of the song.
• The song was performed as a snippet during "The Electric Co." on the U2 release, Under A Blood Red Sky. However, the band did not have the appropriate licensing and did not pay the required royalties and were fined $50,000 (US) and had to make sure any further pressings of the release had an edited version of the song.[4]
• In season 5 of the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun (episode 20 "Dick Solomon's Day Off"), character Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), upon missing a balloon ride with love interest Mary Albright (Jane Curtin), muses, "Isn't it rich? Aren't we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air."
• In episode 36 of the Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats, "King Ten Pin", Phil wonders, "Maybe they'll send in the clowns!" His sister Lil replies, "Don't bother; they're here." [5]
• The song figures prominently in a plotline on the daytime soap opera Ryan's Hope in October 1988 when villain Max Dubujax plants a bomb in a music box that plays the tune. Before he dies from a gunshot wound, he tells his ex-wife Siobhan Ryan, the intended victim, about "losing my timing so late in my career". The bomb detonates in November 1988, killing Siobhan's husband Joe Novak. Tichina Arnold sings a version of the song that is used throughout the storyline.
• In the episode The Hive (211) of the science fiction TV series Stargate: Atlantis, Lt Col John Sheppard reveals to Pegasus galaxy native Neera that while Wraith don't frighten him, clowns "scare the crap outa me." When she questions him later about how the war with the clowns is going, he replies, "Oh, yeah, the clowns. We fight them, too. Entire armies, spilling out of Volkswagens. We do our best to fight them off, but … they keep sending ‘em in."
• On July 30, 2009, a broadway opening dance number, choreographed by Tyce Diorio, was shown on TV for So You Think You Can Dance Season 5 Episode 21 Top 6 Results.

External links

• Sondheim.com
• Sondheim Guide to the Play
• Sondheim Review
• Notes to the Play
• Upcoming Performances of the Play
• Guide to Musical Theater for the Play