The Worst Pies in London

From the very first frantic, comedic entrance, this number operates at a pitch of barely controlled hysteria. The piano clatters and lurches, accompanying a woman who is simultaneously performing hospitality and confessing to criminality, her narration tumbling forward with the momentum of someone who cannot stop talking long enough to realize what she's admitting. Mrs. Lovett's voice here is all vaudeville brass — nasal, brash, bubbling with a kind of cheerful self-pity that makes the grotesque genuinely funny. The orchestration is period-flavored, Victorian parlor music twisted slightly wrong, a barrel-organ quality to the accompaniment that underscores the transactional seediness of the setting. Lyrically the song is a masterwork of compression: an entire character revealed through complaint, a world of poverty and desperation sketched through the specific misery of bad ingredients. The humor lands because the singer commits completely — there is no winking at the audience, no distance from the awfulness being described. It belongs to the tradition of British music hall, of survival dressed up as comedy. Play it when you need something that makes you laugh even though it probably shouldn't — the kitchen at two in the morning, cooking something from whatever's left in the cupboard.