I've read the responses below, and I gotta say that I think there's been a bit of straining to make sense of a lyric choice that I think was more a matter of convenience or perhaps a small degree of desperation than anything else. It wouldn't surprise me if Hammerstein struggled over it and finally gave up. I don't think that he intended some distinction there. "Take" is on a climactic note in a climactic phrase. Does it make sense that Hammerstein intended it to mean anything like the suggestions below? Are those somehow worse than to steal money? I don't think so, and I don't think Hammerstein intended it that way.
I wonder if this was a section of the number where Rodgers wrote the music in advance, and that was the climactic phrase, and so Hammerstein had to figure out something that would work. If "steal" had been where "take" is, he would have had to come up with a suitable rhyme for it. And to make "steal" the word on that climactic note is something he would have tried to avoid as most singers don't like to sing an E vowel on a high or sustained note, notwithstanding Alfred Drake's preference for that vowel, which I mentioned here recently.
Even if Rodgers did not write the music in advance there — and in Musical Stages, he does say that Hammerstein wrote the whole lyric and then gave it to him — Hammerstein was musical enough to realize the power of a final section in which each phrase builds on the preceding one for a climactic effect.
And I do think "take" works in context as somehow sounding more desperate than steal, even though it makes no logical sense. But Billy isn't all that strong on logic, is he? |
