Tonight

"Tonight" is perhaps the most efficiently structured love duet in the American musical theater repertoire — it does in four minutes what other shows spend a full act building toward. The melody is immediately memorable without being simple, Bernstein's signature Latin-inflected harmonic language giving it an urgency that pure romanticism couldn't achieve. On the original cast recording, the voices of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence have a quality of almost painful earnestness; these are not performers projecting emotion but two people seeming to actually discover, in real time, that they have found something unprecedented in each other. The fire escape setting that the song was written for creates a sense of elevation — both literal and emotional — as if falling in love lifts you above the street-level conflict that will eventually consume you. What the orchestration knows that the characters don't is that the anticipation in the phrase "tonight" is the most alive these people will ever feel; the future the word promises will not materialize the way they imagine. There is dramatic irony baked into the music itself, a sweetness that the informed listener experiences as heartbreak in slow motion. Reach for this when you want to remember what it felt like to believe completely in a moment before knowing how it ends.