A Little Priest

There is something almost unbearably witty about this duet, a waltz that shouldn't work but is absolutely devastating in its elegance. The music is lush and lilting, a Victorian parlor melody that Sondheim weaponizes as the vehicle for the most macabre comedy in American musical theater. Two voices — one sardonic and worldly, one increasingly gleeful — trade verses with the precision of a comedic tennis match, the rhythm propelling each punchline forward with perfect timing. Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett is the beating heart of this number, her voice carrying a mercantile cheerfulness that makes the horror land harder than any explicit shock could. The genius is tonal whiplash: the music is so lovely, so charming, that the content registers almost as a joke before the full weight hits. It belongs to a tradition of using theatrical form against itself — the musical number as a way of making audiences complicit in something they should recoil from. This is a song for anyone who loves the dark intelligence of theater at its most daring.