Like It Was Question

[GlindatheGood22]

This is one of my favorite Sondheim ballads, but one lyric I just never understood.

We were nice.
Kids and cities and trees were nice.

The second line always just seemed like a filler line to me. I was wondering if anyone had any insight as to its significance, because it's not like Sondheim to just throw a line into a song without it having deeper meaning.

[ChairinMain]

It speaks of Mary's nostalgia and longing to go back to a time when she was happy. She's saying "everything was better then, even the things that didn't directly effect me." She's depressed and wants to go back.

[followspot]

Well yes, that's what the entire song is about, ChairinMain. But why kids and cities and trees? Why would those particular images enter her mind? Trees aren't nice anymore? Kids? Cities used to be nice?

[GavestonPS]

Does she mean "little kids" or kids such as Frank, Charlie and herself? If the latter, then "kids" is a restatement of "we" in the previous line.

The "city" is where those "kids" lived and New Yorkers tend to romanticize trees, because they have few, at least relative to people in other places. A backyard tree is like the Holy Grail in Manhattan. Or it was when I lived there.

What's more puzzling to me is the near rhyme of we were/trees were. Sondheim usually tries to avoid such things.

[MusicalBoy]

Speaking of Merrily and foliage, would anyone care to tackle the meaning of the many references to 'The Countryside' (gliding through the countryside, see the pretty countryside) in 'Merrily we roll along'?

[wonderfulwizard11]

I've always taken this line to be a sort of generic reference to when things, in a general sense, were better. Sort of how people often tend to romanticize the past, that's what I think Sondheim does with this particular lyric. In Mary's memory, everything was nice, even the cities and trees, even though it is clear that this is not true.

I suppose it could be filler, as it is somewhat non-specific, but I think it works.

[DeNada]

It's not meaningful in a "deep" sense, it's just standard stuff you gripe about when you're older. "Kids these days", or "the city never used to be so crowded", or "I remember when all this was trees".

Again, the countryside is stuff you see when you're "rolling along" on a road trip.

Sondheim is a great lyricist, but not everything is massively significant.

[GavestonPS]

I think large cities are very exciting when you are young, but can tend to be wearing when you are older. Look at how many of us romanticize New York before the Giuliani makeover, even though we know NYC in the 70s was filthy and crime-ridden. Look how many people eventually move out to the suburbs or rural Connecticut.

When I was 23, all those "rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks" were colorful and exciting. Or "nice", if you prefer.

As for Mary, who knows? Maybe "kids were nice" when she still planned to have some of her own, but now that she's spent her life pining for Frank instead, she simply sees them as pains in the ass belonging to other people.

(ETA I think Sondheim is too great a lyricist to simply throw in nouns for no reason. But that doesn't mean every word is worthy of a doctoral dissertation. Maybe he just thought those were the things Mary would romanticize in her memory of the past.)

[MusicalBoy]

Not to rain on anybody's thesis, but there's also the possibility that she's sloshed :)

[GlindatheGood22]

^ I think that's far more likely in the earlier version of the show, when Like It Was took place in a restaurant. In the most recent production it was in the TV studio, and Celia Keenan Bolger certainly didn't play very drunk. As a matter of fact, the only part where her alcoholism held any weight was the opening scene.

[jv92]

I don't think "we were" and "trees were" are supposed to rhyme. In fact, I don't think there are ANY rhymes in the song. You know, you don't have to use rhymes. There's a song in PAINT YOUR WAGON called "I Talk to the Trees" that doesn't and that goes back to 1951.

[best12bars]

You're leaving an important word off the end of that lyric ...

We were nice,
Kids and cities and trees were nice. Everything.

She's picking random things to illustrate her bigger point that EVERYTHING was nice back then.

Even trees. Even kids. Even cities.

The world around them was a nicer place. And nothing is like that anymore.

[followspot]

Trees were nicer in the past? Cool! Gonna look into that.

[wonderfulwizard11]

In the current incarnation Mary is not written to be drunk, but she does have a drink before the start of the song and downs the rest at the end. So it could possibly be played that she's drunk, although I think that would take away from the poignancy of the moment.

[PalJoey]

It's not random or filler at all.

She's waxing nostalgically about the slower, kinder, gentler times of the Eisenhower 1950s and the pre-1963 Kennedy 1960s, when children were indeed "nicer" (because they were taught to be polite and respectful) and cities were absolutely "nicer" (because women still wore hats and men wore suits and ties, even on the streets and even on the subways).

And as for the trees? Well, it's a little bit of the exaggeration to prove her point--but it's also a little bit true: The trees could be said to have have been "nicer" before they became "dusty" and their barks became "battered" (as Gaveston quotes).

So, no, not filler, and no, not random. No, not at all.


Sondheim is a great lyricist, but not everything is massively significant.

Perhaps not massively, but everything is significant to some degree.