SEND OUT THE CLOWNS

My first introduction to a suffragette as a young boy was watching Glynis Johns as Mrs Banks in Walt Disney's 'Mary Poppins' (1964). There was something about that inimitable husky voice of hers and those real life 'Disney eyes' that persuaded me instantly (without having the remotest concept of votes for women or otherwise) that she was fighting a good cause.

Years later, I heard her iconic rendition of 'Send In The Clowns' from Stephen Sondheim's 'A Little Night Music' and was instantly caught between a nostalgic memory of familiarity from my childhood past and a new, more sophisticated sense of Mrs Banks who had now transformed into Desiree Armfeldt, a once famous actress desperately holding onto the illusion of her fame and her youth by touring provincial theatres across Sweden in the year 1900.

The song itself deals with the regret of missed opportunities in both love and life and the pathos and tragicomedy of our human dramas as we face the possibility of not getting the happy ending we'd hoped for in our youth. Sondheim wrote the song specifically for Johns and she delivers it with all the appropriate emotional confusion required, as well as expressing, with her own characteristic husky inflections, the inherent sadness of both the lyrics and melody that hang nervously on the brink of a polite, emotional breakdown.

Isn't it rich
Isn't it clear
Losing my timing this late
In my career
Where are the clowns
There ought to be clowns
Well, maybe next year

Sometimes a song belongs to a performer in a way that's definitive and it's then up to everyone else to try and match it forever more. Many have tried since Johns first sung the song for its Broadway premiere and recorded it for the studio recording of the same production but few have gotten close to capturing that same, elusive magic that she brought to it.

I guess that‘s what happens when Mrs Banks gets the blues.

Rest In Peace, Glynis Johns - 1923-2024