SONG BREAKDOWN


Stephen Sondheim, in an excerpt from his book Look, I Made a Hat, offers an analysis of one song from Into the Woods:


I GUESS THIS IS GOODBYE JACK


I guess this is goodbye, old pal. You’ve been a perfect friend. I hate to see us part, old pal. Someday I’ll buy you back. I’ll see you soon again. I hope that when I do, It won’t be on a plate.


This is the only song I’ve ever written that has no rhyme at all. It’s so brief that it hardly qualifies as a song, but it’s a continuation of the fragmentary approach that I had developed with Lapine for the “Day Off” sequence in Sunday in the Park with George. It seemed fitting that innocent, empty-headed Jack be so dimwitted that he couldn’t even rhyme. But it’s not so easy to make nonrhymes work when the music rhymes – that is, when the music has square and matching rhythms, as this ditty deliberately does. Just as the vowel sounds must match exactly in a good rhyme, so must they bear no resemblance to each other in a nonrhyming pattern. If “I’ll see you soon again” were the fourth line, the approximate rhyme of “friend” and “again” would make for a sloppily imperfect rhyme. The word “back,” however, is so shockingly different to the ear from “friend” that it emphasizes Jack’s mindlessness. (When the word “again” does appear, it doesn’t land on a phrase of matching music, so it feels fresh.) Not only are the vowel sounds from different realms, so are the consonants (soft in the first, hard in the second). The same principle applies to “again,” “do” and “plate” and ratchets up the laugh at the image (which, incidentally, was Lapine’s). Subtle as it may seem, the lack of rhyme makes Jack all the more appealing.•


INTO THE WOODS UPSTAGE GUIDE 17


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