That's a good connection to make. Perkins's performance of the song, especially perhaps later in that PBS Best of Broadway special, has a tortured quality beyond even Garland's memorably intense version. And I have wondered, and probably others have as well, whether part of the reason for Perkins dropping out of Company was because he saw that people might perceive it as having a gay subtext. It could also be, as implied in Zadan, that Perkins saw it as a role that would leave a performer frustrated, the center of the show but surrounded by more colorfully and openly explosive, comic and neurotic characters.
It's also interesting that they cast Jones, whose rather reedy and tense tenor-like sound is much more like Perkins's singing than it is like Kert's much more relaxed- and open-sounding high baritone. And George Chakiris's singing is more like that of Perkins and Jones than Kert, while the London replacement for the last two months or so of the run was Eric Flynn, a baritone (probably best known to ATCers as Fredrik on the JAY A Little Night Music and perhaps as Frank Butler on the London revival cast Annie Get Your Gun with Suzi Quatro, the latter a recording I would recommend only for its curiosity value due to depressingly small-scaled orchestrations and Quatro not being up to the role vocally). |
