Typed Letter Signed - "I have a special fondness for ‘Someone In A Tree’"

Typed letter signed from the important composer and lyricist. One page, 5.75 x 7.75 inches (14.6 x 19.7 cm). Personal letterhead, February 27, 1986, in part: “I don’t really have a ‘favorite’ song, but I have a special fondness for ‘Someone In A Tree.’ I have no favorite singer of ‘Send In The Clowns,’ and have heard very few of them. I have many tapes of me performing my works, but the only commercially released ones are A Stephen Sondheim Evening and Sondheim-A Musical Tribute.” In very fine condition.


The 1976 musical Pacific Overtures, in which ‘Someone In A Tree' appears, was short-lived, running a mere 193 performances. The show is an artful telling of the Westernization of Japan, through a dramatization of Commodore Perry's 1853 naval expedition to Japan, and employing conventions of Kabuki Theatre, the pentatonic scale (a reasonable facsimile of), haiku, and other conventions of the traditional Japanese culture. The song is a sort of study of history and how it is perceived initially and interpreted over time. In the prologue to this song, Sondheim's "Reciter" notes that there is no Japanese documentary record of what transpired when Perry first met with the Shogun's representatives on the beach at Kanagawa.  But an old man claims that he had been there, as a boy, watching the event from a tree; and as a warrior says that he had been hidden under the floorboards of the pavilion to protect the samurai.  As each presents his version of the events, it becomes clear that neither of them had any idea what was going on at the time.  The song provides a humorous but insightful view of the difficulties of giving, and making sense of, oral history. (23088)

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