In Look, I Made A Hat, Sondheim prefaces the lyrics of “Everybody Loves Louis” with two brief stage directions:
George begins to exit, crossing paths with Dot and Louis. He gives Dot a hasty tip of the hat and makes a speedy exit.
and
Dot looks at the departing figure of George.
“That’s the thing about Louis,” Dot will soon sing, “Louis always is there.” However, it is abundantly clear from the outset of this number that George is equally—if not more—present in Dot’s mind, despite his physical absence.
This is easy enough to grasp from the lyrics alone, even on a first listen. Although we hear the name Louis an impressive 31 times during this number, what Dot says is almost entirely directed towards the absent George. And George’s own name appears 16 times—not a bad tally for a number ostensibly all about his former lover’s new partner.
We learn a lot about what Dot thinks of Louis in a short space of time. As she catalogs his various qualities, we cannot help but feel that her words serve not so much to celebrate as they do to persuade. Dot is attempting to justify Louis. To whom? we might ask. To George? Or to herself? Plenty of compliments spill forth, to be sure, and perfectly sincere ones too: Louis is described as kind, loveable, popular, pleasant, fair, and generous. But there is something muted, subdued, even lukewarm about the affekt of these words in this context.
We hear too of Louis’s minor flaws and shortcomings. “Hardly anything worth objection,” sings Dot, and we might well wonder whether faint criticism is even more damning than faint praise. We learn that he “isn’t the smartest,” that his “thoughts are not hard to follow,” and that he “drinks a bit” and “blinks a bit.” It’s not quite “you’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice”—but it’s close.
And Dot’s description of Louis is, of course, as much a portrait of “not-George” as it is of the baker himself: “Louis makes a connection”; “Louis’s really an artist”; “Louis sells what he makes”; “Everybody gets along with him.” Lyrically, then, George feels almost as present in this number’s faster-paced “Louis” sections as he does in the passages more explicitly directed towards him. But might this also be true musically?
Two elements of Sondheim’s score point to George’s continuing hold over Dot. The first of these involves the embedding of a familiar melodic fragment within the peppy vamp of this number’s “Louis” sections. We have heard the four-note motif in question before, in the section of Sunday’s opening number that begins with “Your eyes, George.” There, we hear the notes first at “I love your eyes” (mm. 78-9; see below), and then at “But most of all” (mm. 88-9)—and so much of that rhapsodic passage is built out of the thirds and fifths contained within that melodic cell. Underneath, we hear (at first) two chords oscillating back and forth; each pair is like a musical sigh, and we will hear them again and again throughout Sunday.
Dot returns to the same melodic figure as “Everybody Loves Louis” begins: “Where did you go, George?” she sings, underpinned by that same harmonic sigh. Once again, this motif (and all that grows from it melodically) appears when Dot is consumed by thoughts of George. It is therefore very interesting indeed that Sondheim embeds that same figure in the “Everybody Loves Louis” vamp:
And isn’t it fitting? Sondheim folds George into Louis’s soundworld like seeds into dough. We should note too that the “Louis” sections of this number, with their near-constant I-V (i.e. simple, predictable) bass motion, are set in A major, as opposed to the C♯ major of the more lyrical “George” sections (Sondheim’s key signature for these sections is actually F♯ major, but we hear them entirely as being in C♯). And this brings us to the second feature of Sondheim’s score that is worth closer inspection.
C♮ is a note that does not belong in the key of A major. It does, however, belong in C♯ major, enharmonically respelled as a B♯. It is the ti (a drink with jam and bread) of that key. And I think C♮, or B♯, has a strong claim to being the most important note in “Everybody Loves Louis.” Each of this number’s three A-major sections begins under a sustained vocal B♯, that note which “belongs” in George’s key but doesn’t in Louis’s. Musically, it is as if Dot’s thoughts of George are bleeding into her present relationship, like berries into batter. Here’s the first of those moments (the other is the brilliant “I mean like dough, George”):
The same pitch persists as a chromatic inflection throughout the A-major accompaniment. In and of itself, this is not particularly unusual, but the role of the C♮ in this vamp is more than merely decorative. More than once, it comes into direct conflict with a C♯ in the vocal melody. Have a look at the word “and” here, for instance:
It is also with a melodic C♮/B♯ that each of the first two “Louis” sections comes to an abrupt halt (“Louis bakes from the heart” and “That’s the thing that you feel”). It is as if thoughts of George stop Dot mid-flow, interrupting her train of thought—and we can all relate to that, can’t we?
And where, you might wonder, do we find the longest passage in the whole number without a single C♮/B♯? Well, have a look at the five measures that precede Dot’s final line. “Louis it is!” she exclaims, after licking the pastry he has just handed her. Perhaps its flavor gives Dot a few seconds’ reprieve from thoughts of George.
“I know what my decision is,” declares Cinderella, standing on the steps of the palace, “which is not to decide.” Dot cannot do likewise. She chooses, and her world is shaken. Sondheim invites us inside Dot’s mind at that critical juncture, at that moment of choosing—and we find that “Everybody Loves Louis” was about George all along.