“Something’s
Coming”
Composers:
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Larry Kert (original Broadway production, 1957)
Composers:
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Richard Beymer (film version, 1961)
Composers:
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Judy Garland (TV show) [incomplete]
Composers:
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Shirley Bassey, 1979
Composers:
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Barbra Streisand, 1985 album
When I began this
series of musical theater songs I created a strict artificial rule: I could
only pick two songs from any one musical, a determination I made to keep my
list from blooming out of possibility to choose simply 50 such favorite titles.
For some musicals, of course, this created nearly impossible problems, for
example in West Side Story, where one
might have chosen nearly every song as a different kind of masterpiece.
Fortunately, the limited lyrics of “Maria,” has always rather irked me, and
even Sondheim felt his lyrics for “I Feel Pretty” somehow missed the mark. The
deeply operatic “A Boy Like Him,” followed by “I Have a Love” is more operatic
than strictly song-like; and the wonderfully powerful music and rhythms of “Cool”
are more those of dance (which I did discuss as dance in My Year 2000). But then, there is the marvelous “Tonight,” the
beautiful marriage ritual performed in “Make of our Hands,” and so many more
that wave out with their lovely delights.
For me, however, if there is one single
song that reveals Tony’s utterly romantic sensibility and his total acceptance
of his youthful faith and vigor, it is in the driving rhythms and lovely
melodic passages when the very air does truly seem to hum in Bernstein’s amazing
score of “Something’s Coming.” I can’t imagine a song that more clearly
encompasses the feelings of a young man on the brink of adulthood. Bernstein
and Sondheim (both probably closeted gay men at the time) gave their character
a valentine in this song that presents his utter sexual and social desires,
marrying them to his total belief in life. The tragedy of the rest of the
musical is based on this foundation, that a young man of such utter belief in
the future should never see it come to be. Yes, the “something” does indeed “come,”
but, sadly it delivers with it all the failures of the world in which he and we
live. Despite his desires, there is no easy way out; death sadly stalks him
from his first open pleas of possibility:
Could
be!
Who
knows?
There's
something due any day;
I
will know right away,
Soon
as it shows.
It
may come cannonballing down through the sky,
Gleam
in its eye,
Bright
as a rose!
Who
knows?
It's
only just out of reach,
Down
the block, on a beach,
Under
a tree.
I
got a feeling there's a miracle due,
Gonna
come true,
Coming
to me!
Could
it be? Yes, it could.
Something's
coming, something good,
If
I can wait!
Something's
coming, I don't know what it is,
But
it is
Gonna
be great!
With
a click, with a shock,
Phone'll
jingle, door'll knock,
Open
the latch!
Something's
coming, don't know when, but it's soon;
Catch
the moon,
One-handed
catch!
Around
the corner,
Or
whistling down the river,
Come
on, deliver
To
me!
Will
it be? Yes, it will.
Maybe
just by holding still,
It'll
be there!
I
quote so many lyrics just to give a sense of the shift of sentiment from
possibility to absolute commitment that Sondheim’s lyrics convey. From just the
possibility of “who knows,” Tony quickly shifts to a total insistence upon the
shock of the new that is waiting “Around the corner,” knowing that it will be “a
shock” in which the “Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock.” And suddenly he moves to
the view that it will be “soon,” “whistling down the river.” No song shifts as
quickly as its incessant repeating 2/4 rhythms. Completely altering writer
Arthur Laurent’s original conceptions of the piece, Bernstein and Sondheim
recreated the character through this beautiful song: as he wrote to Laurents:
I missed you all terribly yesterday. We wrote a
new song for Tony ["Something’s Coming"] that’s a killer, and it just
wasn’t the same not playing it first for you. It’s really going to save his
character – a driving 2/4 in the great tradition – but it gives to Tony – so
that he doesn’t emerge as just a euphoric dreamer.
Everyone with even a half-way good voice
has sung this song (including me in high school; I also sang “Tonight’).
Strangely few can achieve its vocal demands, the constant shifts from the everyday
wonderment to the heights of its dreamlike possibilities. The wonderful
performer, Larry Kert, for example, is marvelous in its dreaming tenor
tonalities, but a bit too prosaic in its earlier driving rhythms. Judy Garland’s
waving dream-like reading is not truly revealing. And certainly, Streisand’s
soaring soprano does great justice to the highlights, but seems to lustfully Franny
Brice-like for its earlier stanzas. It’s a young man’s song, and on the
television show Glee Darren Criss almost
gets it right, despite his inability to pause between stanzas, hitting each new
idea just a bit too soon to even allow his mind (and ours) to assimilate the
shifts of the imagination.
I just listened again—for what must be the
100th time—before writing this, to Richard Beymer’s version from the
movie (the song was dubbed by James Howard Bryant), and I believe that one of the many
reasons that the film (Jerome Robbins’ choreography is perhaps the major
reason) that this was the best representation of this musical, and perhaps is
one of the best musical productions ever made on film, was Beymer’s
performance and Bryant's singing. Beymer's true beauty and Bryant's easy transformations from the
early driving possibilities to the absolute wonderment of the later parts of
the song, are just perfect. Beymer, I must admit, is an acquaintance, who used
to attend my poetry salons, and now lives in my home-state of Iowa, with whom I
again recently corresponded. But that has little to do with my great admiration
of his performance. And Bryant simply gets this marvelous song “right,” where so many
others struggled with its marvels. He sings the out the incessant drive fluidly
transitioning into the dreamy possibilities without effort. He is both driven
and an utter believer who quite brilliantly matches the two. I was just such a
youth.
Finally, I feel I chose correctly in
including this song from West Side Story
when tears welled-up in my eyes as I listened to dozens of renditions. Even the
worst of them were delightful. This might truly be the great gem in a glittering
setting of marvelous musical jewels.
Los Angeles,
December 21, 2017
