So, you’ve spent your whole life learning to sing, three months learning the notes to your favorite cabaret song and six months perfecting your technique on that song, or maybe you’ve been learning to sing for a week, you know? most notes, and your technique is shaky at best. Either way, you’re guaranteed to have a successful performance if you know all the words to your song and know exactly what they mean.
It is one thing to know the definition of a word; in fact, you as a singer are expected to look up all the words that are not clear to you in a dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary is my personal favorite. But it’s another thing to know the colloquial meanings of words, including metaphorical figures of speech, cultural references, and all the different shades of innuendo.
It is extremely common for songs, both of the musical theater and the popular variety, to contain phrases in which the words used do not fit a textbook definition. For example, on the Cole Porter classic “You’re the Top,” the singers repeatedly refer to each other as “The Top.” It may seem simple enough not to take this literally, but few singers take the extra step to truly consider what it means to be “The Top.” With a little research, you may discover that few people in history have used the phrase in that way; rather it’s a clever rearrangement of the phrase “You’re the best” or “This is the best.” The phrase “You’re the best” has family connotations as well as connotations of being the best at something specific, which pulls us in two directions at once, allowing us to create more specificity for our character. We now know that these characters have a family relationship, and each one is seen as the best at something specific.
Porter makes many unique references throughout the song, to places like the Louvre museum and characters like Mickey Mouse. Using the logic laid out above, we can understand that each specific reference is an example of how the character in question is the best at something specific. For example, when Porter says, “You’re the best… you’re the Louvre,” he’s really saying, “You’re the most elegant and artistically relevant thing I’ve ever seen.” When he says, “You’re Mickey Mouse,” he’s really saying, “I’ve never met anyone as fun and free-spirited as you are.”
This is just the beginning of the type of text work that is necessary to discover a musical theater song. Each word must be dissected to enter the mind of the writer. Only then can you really fulfill his intention.
