Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim

…my fondness for the word “hat,” which the British critic Michael Ratcliffe pointed out in his program note at London’s Royal National Theatre, when Sunday in the Park with George was produced there in 1990. From “You could say, ‘Hey, here’s your hat’” in Gypsy to “Does anyone still wear a hat?” in Company, through “Hats off” in Follies and “It’s called a bowler hat” in Pacific Overtures, I seem to be attached to it as an image. Surely some future graduate student in Musical Theater, looking for an obscure subject to write about, will seize on “The Use of Headgear in Sondheim’s lyrics” and conjure up insightful theories for my persistent attraction to the word, but I can save him the trouble: it’s the jaunty tone and the ease in rhyming that attract me — two sound reasons.