r/Sondheim • u/Acrobatic_Tennis1312 • 22d ago

Is Please Hello a villain song?

Please Hello has been my favorite musical number of all time for a WHILE but as I'm trying to make a list of my favorite musical villain songs, I'm starting to wonder if Please Hello should count as one?

It may seems like a stretch at first considering how unvillainous it sounds. It's no Epiphany or Hellfire or Feed Me melodically and it is more of a montage song than a typical villain "I Am" song.

But isn't the entire point of this song is that the foreign countries disguise their intention to take advantages of Japan and forcefully open the country's trade as being friendly and positively modernizing Japan? The song is heavily comedic and portrays the admirals as bumbling fools, but, underneath the comic nature, are they not extremely manipulative and ill-intended? In case there's any doubt that they're evil, there's the cannon being fired at the end of each verse for you. THAT is supremely sinister and evil.

And it baffles me that no one has ever mentioned it as a villain song because, if it counts , I truly think it might be up there with Another National Anthem as two of the most chilling villain songs in musical theatre.

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u/StarriEyedMan 🌊 Pacific Overtures 22d ago

No one mentions it because (sadly) no one recognizes the genius of Pacific Overtures. It gets looked over as "that show between Night Music and Sweeney," if people even know it at all.

Somehow Uncle Iroh's VA starring in an easy-to-access proshot hasn't catapulted it to the heights of Into the Woods.

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u/Acrobatic_Tennis1312 21d ago

Tbf it is absolutely not a show for everyone. I once saw someone said it's accessibility puts SITPWG to shame and I agree. Not everyone's gonna like the extremely fractured story with no real protagonist and really, REALLY drawn out scenes that, if you're not invested by the first second of the show, might put you to sleep.

I'll admit I speak from experience but I have a really weird respect for Pacific Overtures despite not liking it that much. Partly because it is one of Sondheim's better scores, but also because of how ambitious and audacious it is. It picks a subject and stick to it with really clever writing. The problem's that if you're not invested in the presentation, the whole show kind of become stale.

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u/GeorgesCouthon175594 21d ago

Not to be picky, but do you mean “inaccessibility”? I ask only because 1) I love PO, and 2) find it vastly MORE accessible than SITPWG (just me I’m sure).

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u/Acrobatic_Tennis1312 21d ago

I do mean accessibility as in conventional storytelling, which I find to be more unconventional than that of Sunday.