Underrated Sondheim Songs- Page 3

#50re: Underrated Sondheim Songs

"Uptown Downtown"- Maybe PalJoey can enlighten us on why the hell it was cut from Follies and replaced by the wonderful, but inferior, "Lucy and Jessie"?"

I can't remember if this is from Chapin's indispensible book about the creation of FOllies or somewhere else, but basically it's cuz of Michael Bennett. He's notorious for getting "stuck" and then demanding new material, Uptown/DOwntown was a number he wasn't satisfied with choreographically (even though Sondheim said it gave him a better visual with the dancers facing back or forward) and he also felt the material had been around a lot before he started work on the show, so he asked for a new song and suddenly was no longer stuck. I'm so glad Papermill recorded it with the full Boston orchestration.